I do want to hear why FOTS thinks he is not smart, especially after saying that we cant tell how smart people are. See Jim knows who he is, what he is doing, how to do it, what he wants and how to get what he wants. I have always respected him for that, despite his problems.
The TLDR is: I don't find it impressive to win at a game that nobody else is playing but you. That is, in its essence, what scamming does. You find the vulnerable people, the not so aware, the less intelligent or the old and you take advantage of them. It doesn't take much to trick them.
I can say from personal experience as I have had, unfortunately, some involvement with jims "business dealings" and I was not very impressed with his social engineering skills nor his articulation—although I will give the latter a pass bc English is not his first language. His scams revolve around a few basic concepts that are quite easy to pick up on yourself.
To call someone intelligent, I think, they should have to exhibit a strong possession of multiple types of intelligences. Jim doesn't display that. A great example is his complete failure at trading cryptocurrency that he attains from his scams. He always loses it all and trades with leverage, so he shafts himself. He doesn't learn his lesson, repeating the same mistakes and then hides the extent of his failures like every other bad trader does. He displays a lack of ability to learn and a dominance of emotion in his decision making while trading. I've literally watched him do it before in real time.
