It doesn't have to be fair, but that is one of the reasons that corruption can be so difficult to deal with, because financially stressed individuals are highly vulnerable. Corruption isn't turning into some cartoon villain, but rather it's exactly that sort of "look the other way" for a couple bucks, repeated many times, which allows them to operate within known and mapped corrupt organizations. It's just one more reason that charity has been a cornerstone of western civilization, because people are a lot harder to corrupt if they can count on their communities to help them in the event everything else goes wrong.