Magnetic Beliefs
I've never heard it described this way, but it's useful to think of beliefs as having a kind of bi-polar magnetism to people. Approach it from one side and it repels. The other attracts. Trying to push someone off a belief is almost impossible. When someone changes a belief on their own, it repels them.
Scams operate on this principle. Most people are rightly suspicious of get rich quick schemes, but the smarter the scammer, the better a job they do of cloaking the scam into something that looks reasonable and un-scamlike. Once people believe, the hook is set because very few people are gonna change their beliefs exogenously.
FTX is the example du jour. Most folks are rightly skeptical of fast-talking crypto-bros, but when they come off as intelligent and get a toe-hold, people will give them money. Sometimes, scammers are pretty sophisticated: