Daily Inspiration Quote by Kevin Mitnick

Mitnick’s line lands like a shrug from someone who’s watched the same con work a thousand times. The specifics are almost comically plain: a website, a “bogus product,” a too-good-to-be-true discount, and then the real merchandise gets harvested - your credit card number. That bluntness is the point. He’s not describing a sophisticated hack; he’s describing a human reflex.

The intent is corrective and a little taunting: stop fantasizing about elite, movie-style cyberattacks and look at the boring mechanics of persuasion. “Twenty percent of the normal market prices” isn’t just a statistic, it’s a psychological trigger. It weaponizes bargain culture and the dopamine hit of feeling smarter than the market. Mitnick’s subtext is that modern fraud is a collaboration: criminals supply the bait, consumers supply the urgency, the overconfidence, and the willingness to suspend disbelief.

Context matters because Mitnick speaks with the credibility of a former hacker turned security evangelist - a celebrity whose brand is built on exposing how systems fail. His focus on “some website somewhere” also hints at the internet’s core feature: frictionless scale. A scam doesn’t need legitimacy, only visibility and a payment form. The line reads like a warning against outsourcing judgment to interfaces: if it looks like commerce, we treat it like commerce, even when every signal screams “trap.”

It’s cynicism sharpened into practical advice: the weakest link isn’t the firewall, it’s the part of us that wants the deal to be real.