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Comment by rjkennedy98 | Hacker News Reader

I had the same response from Google when my mom got hacked and she paid off hackers $6000 in Google Play cards. Why does Google allow people to be scammed via their gift cards when they could easily fix this by putting in basic checks? Crickets.

Its easy to say 'my mom should know better', but like most users in the world she is not technical. She grew up on a farm, how is she supposed to understand this stuff. It should be on these companies that make enormous profits to protect all users. This includes users who are not technical.

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> She grew up on a farm, how is she supposed to understand this stuff.

I'm sure it wasn't your intention but that's quite insulting. Just because someone didn't grow up with technology doesn't mean they can't learn and understand it. Farmers especially since they're very DIY and resourceful.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to use "she didn't grew up with complicated electronics" as an argument for why it's hard to learn using it.

You cannot expect people who aren't used to certain things, to pick up those skills as easily as people who do have prior experience.

It's part of the authoritarian bend.

"She needs to be protected. She's not a real adult like I am. I, as a real adult, will decide for those who I consider aren't real adults."

It's dripping with patronizing authoritarianism. And they just don't see it.

I will say, people who have IQs below 80-70 are in a terrible place. Our modern world assumes the ability to understand concepts at a certain level. Some people at some IQ levels just will never be able to do so. How to classify such people and what to do about it is something we need to recon with as a society.

But a discussion of a CEO who is lazy and can't be bothered to engage in minimum cyber security (the FA) that even clerks are required to do and thus got hacked... is probably not the place.

> "She needs to be protected. She's not a real adult like I am. I, as a real adult, will decide for those who I consider aren't real adults."

I don't see the similarity between that, and what was actually say. It seems you are making assumptions and taking it way out of context.

I grew up on a farm. We lived in a barn at first. I know this stuff.

I hope you helped your mom set up 2FA after that.

Would basic checks would you recommend that Google on top of offering a robust 2FA solution?

Here are few things they could do:

* ensure that where they sell gift cards there are store limits on how many gift cards can be bought.

* track the usage of the card to make it more difficult for criminals to use them.

* put a day delay on the card or make the user register to make it more difficult for the user to immediately sell the card off to criminals

Google is very aware that their gift cards are used in massive fraud schemes of millions of dollars that target the most vulnerable (the elderly). It is similar how there is a huge fraud scheme build on Nest products. That they allow it to happen (as it is of no cost to them) is incredibly irresponsible and in opinion even criminal.

When I called Google, their response was that on the back on the cards there is warning in small print that if you give the scratch off key, the money is unrecoverable. As if someone being told that their entire life will come down crashing around them if they don't send the money is going to read the small print on a gift card!

Google is probably the company in the world that is the best at tracking users and cyber security. There is no reason why they couldn't prevent these use cases if they put effort in.

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