Grifters gotta grift


How much would you pay for this nice hat?

What if I told you Melania Trump wore it? Can I get $200? $500?

To sweeten the deal, let’s toss in a valuable NFT, a receipt for your ownership of a picture of Melania wearing it. Can I get $1000?

How about $250,000?

You know you want it. To poop in.

Comments

  1. says

    The NFT is not environmentally sound.

    […] transacting any tokens across the blockchain, whether an NFT or a Litecoin, sucks up the collective energy feeding into the transaction, no matter the product at hand. One estimate claims that a single NFT trade across the much-used Ethereum blockchain uses enough energy that could power an entire house for several days. And this is all so the buyer can have bragging rights about “owning” an image. […]

    Link

  2. says

    I guess you at least get the hat, something tangible. And probably the only reason for that is because nobody would pay that much for the NFT, which is worthless.

    Still a shitload of money for a used hat…but…rich people.

  3. wzrd1 says

    I’ll bit $0.75 for it. Looks like it’ll fit the jackass I saw in the field down the road.
    Otherwise, I’ve no use for it, as my clay pigeon launcher was misplaced during the move and I’ve not owned a shotgun in over a decade.

  4. moarscienceplz says

    Mike Lindell is gonna have to sell a lot of pillows, which can’t be easy with his tongue lodged so deeply into Tiny Fingers’ rectum.

  5. monkeysea says

    Such a stinky streak of poopish comments,
    I couldn’t help but notice the tail end of the URL of the hat picture:
    . <melaniashat-500×258.png>

    “shatner & shatner” said Alice, darkly…

  6. azpaul3 says

    I gotta admit if I could sell my old hat for a quarter million $$ I’d do it. Of course if I were rich enough to buy this thing I wouldn’t. That would be rather dumb. I’d keep the money, sell my hat and have a cool half million. I could then get fries with my next burger.

  7. birgerjohansson says

    If you want to sell a hat that has belonged to one of the really cool people (Emanuelle Charpentier, Carl Sagan, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Hawking etc ). I would be willing to pay a thousand bucks for it.

  8. says

    How much is her “I Really don’t Care” jacket going for? That would be a perfect memento of the only First Lady to be more tasteless with clothes on than without.

  9. James Fehlinger says

    Well, as a friend of mine would say,
    IYCATYTATL.

    Which stands for:
    If You Can Afford This, Your Taxes Are Too Low

  10. lumipuna says

    “Head of state collection”

    Nice pun there. It’d work better if the actual head of state had some fashion sense*, instead of outsourcing that to a generically attractive trophy wife who obviously hates playing First Lady**.

    *I mean the kind of fashion sense that works to create the kind of upper-class image that’s good for exactly this kind of grift. Trump was only ever good at projecting the image of a regular guy who hates having to wear his ill-fitting suit at work. That worked for him politically, and for selling $40 MAGA hats, but I think you’d need a different kind of image for selling truly expensive apparel to rich people.

    **Note – I don’t mean to say that Melania hates being married to Donald, which is far less evident, despite what some want to imagine. Also, generally I support her choices of both being a trophy wife and not putting much effort in the unpaid PR job of being First Lady. Now, however, the family is apparently trying to cash in her First Lady performance.

  11. AstrySol says

    NFTs are not only good for grifters, they are also good for money laundering and covers for bribery and other corruption.

  12. bcw bcw says

    I’ll give them a discount if they want to trade the hat and NFT for a much more valuable and irreproducible NFT of what’s floating in my toilet right now. Offer good only until the next flush.

    Of course, many people are suggesting that Melania is raising money for her flush the D out of her life program.

  13. raven says

    I don’t quite get the NFTs.

    Suppose there is an image online that you like for some reason.
    For example, a picture of a cat or sunset or whatever.

    What is to stop you from just copying the photo and saving it to your hard drive or a CD disk?
    Technically, you might not “own” the image but in realilty, it won’t make any difference unless you try to sell it online.

  14. Matthew Currie says

    I’m not likely to go to the site (reminded of old Firesign Theater line “don’t go in there, it’s full of bees and spiders”), so perhaps someone who has taken one for the team can clarify. The ad suggests that there are three separate items up for bid. It would appear, for example, that the NFT buys only the digital art “signed” in whatever way digital things are signed, but not necessarily the hat or the paper drawing. I’m wondering what that opening bid amount actually buys.

  15. microraptor says

    raven @24: That’s just part of the grift. NFTs are a means of convincing people that nonsense digital items have value.

  16. blf says

    Akira MacKenzie@27, “I’m surprised the Trumps have[n’t] started their own cryptocurrency yet.”

    Whist teh hair furians are not known to be involved, there is teh trumpcoin, “a cryptocurrency supporting the Trump administration blah blah” (I won’t link to the sites (plural)). Not to be confused with the gold-plated (supposedly) “you know who coin”, which is apparently a real thing with fakes known to be circulating. And as far as I am aware, also not to be confused with the magacoin, which suffered a security meltdown, [T]he people who signed up to the Magacoin Trump cryptocurrency (July 2021), very much a scam piled on top of the cryptocurrency scam, where “the lion’s share of the cryptocurrency so far produced has been allocated to the self-described creator of magacoin, a pro-Trump consultant who owns an LLC associated with the cryptocurrency, and a Super Pac associated with the same consultant” (I don’t know if magacoin still exists or not).

  17. unclefrogy says

    if it is a real offer to bid on that item it would be a way her to get some money independent of dumpster. I would guess that if she decided she did not want to remain his wife she would not get much of anything out of it. I am thinking it is a very safe bet that she had to sign a prenup that was completely in the dumpster’s favor he had been through that before after all and is a cheat in all other business agreements. Talk of how she and he get along is nice fun but she is pretty tied to that rat nest of a family and there is no easy out for her.