Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

This one's been linked to a few times before but it's not really compelling enough to beat the alternate hypothesis: slavish copying from people who are lazy, greedy and not particularly inventive, and also usually ultimately need a reason for their mark to specify Nigeria as the destination country for their money transfer.

Same goes for the Nigerian scammers who go off piste by pretending to be a little old Scottish lady with an expensive item to sell via PayPal but ruin their probably much higher hit rate by using their obviously Nigerian male personal email address for correspondence and not writing English in the manner of a little old Scottish lady. Being able to scam people by actually acknowledging their Nigerian origin is as much down to lacking the ability to pretend to be non-Nigerian as selecting for a more gullible audience (It's not like sending initial carbon-copy responses asking for deposits/money-transfer fees or bribes is especially time consuming, or like there isn't a huge number of somewhat-less-naive people willing and able to send a competent scammer a "deposit" for an imaginary good or service if they have access to accounts on reputable online payment systems)

There's a danger in attributing to counter-intuitive interpetation of statistics what can adequately be explained by ignorance and impotence.

This came up via the HN story on "$80k/month App Store Scam"[0].

If the person is intelligent enough to get past the App store approval process and everything that's required to build and publish an app, it counters the slavish-copying hypothesis. Instead,

1. It acts as a sieve that filters in gullible persons. Someone like yourself wouldn't give it a second thought and move on. The $99/week subscription is only seen once the gullible person has downloaded the app and passed the gullibility-filter.

Interestingly HN's own terse commenting interface, lack of humour and strict voting policies serve to filter in only on-topic discussions and ends up setting a very different tone from say, r/programming. The sieve effect is very noticeable in the tone, the crowd and the commentary itself between the two communities.

2. Letting only gullible people in is not enough. This strategy also keeps the smart/adversarial users far at bay. If an intelligible user were to somehow get in the door, that wouldn't bode well for the $99/week subscription scam -- things would escalate. It would jeopardise the entire scam and that's just what happened with the medium.com post. The guy notices the $99/week subscription within the app requiring only a fingerprint scan to activate. His blog post will get the app shut down. It will provoke QA improvements within Apple and it will rally the community at large to highlight further problematic apps.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14526156

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Does't apply, I think. In this case, both hypotheses are attributing the scams to malice.

In a narrower sense, you're choosing between interpreting a phenomenon (obvious red flags in scams such as Nigerian emails) as being either calculated malice, or malicious in intent but bumbling in implementation. Hanlon's razor still seems to apply.

As another commenter noted, I believe the more appropriate razor is Occam's, since this is not a question of malicious vs. non-malicious, but a question of the complexity of the malicious methods used by the attacker, but we can agree to disagree.

I would say the more appropriate razor for this one would be Occam's.

I think a lot about the inverse Hanlon's razor, which is "if you want to do something malicious, make sure you can get away with attributing it to stupidity".

Or if your most stupid con act works on a particular set of people, you have struck gold. This is very deliberate on their part. They are not looking for someone possessing any iota of critical thinking skills (the IRS scammers in contrast look for the most easily "scared" demoraphic). They are phishing a different kind of fish.

To misquote Clarke, "sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity".

Damn, that's fantastic. I'm using that from now on.

I wanted to propose the name "Clarke-Hanlon Theorem" for this, but apparently it's already known as Grey's Law: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HanlonsRazor

Edit: Actually it's not, the Grey's Law is the opposite of what eponeponepon wrote...

Why do people love linking to this page in lieu of an actual argument?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clich%C3%A9#Thought-terminatin...

You're probably familiar with code reuse.

This is conversation reuse. A particular point or observation occurs so frequently that it is documented and described in a common place, and then invoked when needed.

To expand on paulddraper's argument, I felt reusing that conversation spares you and I from my non native english while making my point clearer than I could by myself. I would however be happy to expand on my view if you have more relevant remarks than a meta argument on the form of my response.

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