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A victim of any kind of a swindle is a sucker because there simply isn't any honest excuse for being swindled.
And most of us have been suckers at one time or another because we are all gullible to some extent. Many practical jokes are based on the gullibility of the average person. Racetrack touts thrive on the universal desire to "make a little easy money on a sure thing." It's the sucker blood in all of us that makes the slot machines so profitable to their owners.
Some swindles are based on such human failings as the little larceny most of us can find buried under our respectable veneer when quick, golden profits are the lure. Many a normally honest person has fallen for the money-making machine, one of the crudest of all swindles; or the old racetrack gag in which the sucker is led to believe he is getting the results of a race over a special wire a few minutes ahead of the innocent bookmaker with whom he then places a big bet on what he has been convinced is a sure thing. But of all the scores of the schemes to separate a sucker from his money the stock swindle is the most dangerous to the average person's pocketbook - it is the one he is the most likely to fall for.
There are several reasons why this is so. In the first place we are a nation of speculators. All around us are men who have made fortunes in one form or another of speculation and to the average person stocks are the most available form of speculation.
Second, it is the eminently respectable form of speculation. People who might be morally opposed to the betting on the outcome of a horse race or on some other form of out-and-out gambling have no moral scruples about gambling away their life savings on some wildcat speculation,
The most dangerous aspect of the stock-swindling racket is its ability to operate in the open as a respectable and honest business. Federal regulation of security sales and blue-sky laws in most of the states have hampered the crooks considerably, but the swindler can still line his pockets with a gullible public's gold before the authorities are able to step in.
Excerpt from
"How and When to Buy and Sell Securities"
by Todd Wright, 1940
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