Except it’s even worse than that. Because these companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to tweak the levers in people’s brains to get them to pay.

Which is where the whole concept of using real money, to buy fake money (and never in the exact amounts that they charge for items), so you obfuscate the actual cost, especially once people start carrying a balance of fake money due to never being able to get the exact amount of fake money for the item came from.