Whenever seemingly intelligent people get taken in by what’s so obviously a con, there’s an urge to dismiss them, to laugh at their utter foolishness. But it would be far better to understand what went awry, because in some ways we all get taken, by ideologies or belief systems or lies we want to be true.

Niall Rice, an Internet consultant troubled by anxiety and addiction, got “sucked in” and cleaned out by psychics who promised him something they couldn’t possibly deliver. How could a smart, successful person so completely lack a filter to prevent grifters from exploiting him? Is there something he failed to learn despite learning so many other things? Why did his emotional problems supersede intellect at key moments? Are some people just wired to be more prone to such scams?

The opening of Michael Wilson’s fascinating New York Times article about a man who wanted, too much, to believe:

He sat in a Denny’s restaurant, drinking coffee between cigarette breaks after a long and sleepless night, answering question after question.

He knew none of it made sense: He was a successful and well-traveled professional, with close to seven figures in the bank, and plans for much more. And then he gave it all away, more than $718,000, in chunks at a time, to two Manhattan psychics.

They vowed to reunite him with the woman he loved. Even after it was discovered that she was dead. There was the 80-mile bridge made of gold, the reincarnation portal.

“I just got sucked in,” the man, Niall Rice, said in a telephone interview last week from Los Angeles. “That’s what people don’t understand. ‘How can you fall for it?’”

There was even, between payments to one of the psychics for a time machine to cleanse the past, a brief romance.

“It’s embarrassing now,” he said.•