I think it’s pretty simple. To many people, $3,750 is a huge amount of money. It’s easily several months salary.
I think a lot of people would be relatively unaware of how illegal a given thing is and would instead see the amount of money being offered as representative of the risk. Too much and they would get suspicious.
Even at effective minimum wage of 11.80 an hour[1], that’s only 2 months of salary. That’s not life altering in any way and wouldn’t be worth prison time to people in general. People have to have been tricked about the risks or were coerced.
People on minimum wage don’t get a chance to build savings are probably living month to month. Though it’s not an earth shattering of money it is meaningful to a lot of people.
