What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
maxread.substack.com
maxread.substack.com
But the most interesting scammer said: "for my safety, can I send you a 6-digit number, and you confirm it, so I know the listing is not fake?" I say yes, unsure what the scam was going to be, but sure it was a scam. Moments later I got an SMS from Google Voice asking me to verify my phone number. Mofo tried to steal my number, presumably to use it to scam other people. I was pissed and impressed.
Certainly made me think about how password reset emails are worded!
Clearly they do this to get a decent follower count initially for their spam bots, but my word is anyone who follows John Doe actually going to believe a scam video that is clearly not John Doe coming from John Doe's account claiming to be him? There has to be more effective angles.
It might be instead that your friends re-used a password that was leaked/stolen from somewhere else; anyone with a non-trivial number of online accounts using the same email will be listed in multiple leaks on aggregators like https://haveibeenpwned.com/.
> They were not trying to steal your number. They were using your number to back a new google voice account
I interpreted "steal my number" as "sign up using my number".
Perhaps the more accurate wording would be "impersonate me".
Either way, thanks for clarifying.
I did cross-post to Facebook Marketplace :)
Something on the lines of "you or someone tried to create a new Google voice number. Please enter this code xyz on the form to proceed".
Everyone mostly went to "authentication apps" now but those still show what are you confirming.
Not sure why it is not a common practice.
My favorite part is when the guy uses the scammers real name and she panics.
The sticking point, for me, is that I have to merge the call every time. Ugh. I want it to prompt me whether I want to blackhole a call like the Pixel Google Assistant, but instead of politely screening just torment the asshole.
For a service like that, I could imagine paying substantially more, possibly even for a premium service where the call would get transferred to a human tormentor.
> Block reason: Access from your Country was disabled by the administrator.
They eventually caught me when I didn't give the same fake SSN twice.
I always try to come up with a plausible accident that slowly descends into something, well, not so plausible.
My recent favourite has been admitting that I'd had an accident because my dog was driving my car at the time (he was begging me to, and I didn't want him growling all the way home, and he'd been such a good boy the whole trip so he deserved it).
Another is where I talk about an accident and a neck injury I'd received, until finally explaining that I'd been decapitated in the accident, and that it was causing problems with work, and how excited I was to finally get some compensation.
[0] https://youtube.com/c/KitbogaShow
Since there was no obvious scam, I've been wondering what the motivation for these was, and actually started worrying about whether someone might be trying to compromise my phone via some yet-undisclosed SMS exploit - why else would there be a systematic effort to get me to spend time exchanging a few pointless messages around the "wrong number" pretext that otherwise went nowhere?
I tried calling the senders by phone and found they were all Google Voice numbers, which eliminated the possibility that some actual rich guy had innocuously ended up with a number similar to mine.
I asked a few friends and no one else was experiencing the same thing. Glad to hear it's not just me.
Essentially reverse engineering the spam model by brute force.
If they are doing this at scale they can experiment with # of conversations, length, and other variables to see what is needed to bypass spam blockers with high probability.
I wish we still lived in a time when being scammed or spammed wasn't so prevalent, but we don't and I'm not doing anything that might tip off either of those groups that my number is ripe for the picking.
Nobody dials numbers any more.
I also had an answering machine, and eventually, I got a long diatribe from the irate person whose number had been linked to mine who was very upset about the situation. They explained the phone company had accidently linked the numbers somehow. They were very upset because their friends couldn't reach them and because I had been call blocking them.
So, I listened to the message, thought a moment and then added them to my call block list.
Seems an odd coincidence for it to be fwd to her number of all people.
It's good to have a few numbers memorized. What happens if your phone dies, and you need to call someone? If you don't know any phone numbers, you have an problem.
I dial a few of my contacts by number, just to set them in memory.
Calling a business though? A colleague had a problem where their number was 1 digit off from some delivery number (maybe pizza?) and got calls all the time.
Someone else erroneously has their number (different area code) in the google info for another business, same problem and took a while to fix.
(I’d probably just ignore it, though.)
"Hey dude, Are you good? Do you still live in X?"
Turns out it was an old friend that I hadn't heard from in a few years!
> Hi Dr. Jack! My cat is very slow and does not eat cat food. Can you make an appointment for me?
> Sorry, you have the wrong number
> Sorry, I just checked, I entered a wrong number, please don't mind. hope I did not disturb you.
> Best of luck with your cat!
> thank you for understanding. You are a kind person. where do you come from.
And then I just moved on with my day, because as nice as that sounded I wasn't looking for a conversation.
The contact profile image is of a young, attractive Asian woman, I think at a restaurant. No reverse image results on Tineye or Google.
[Edit: I’ve had this number for over 20 years (not “nearly 20”) and now I feel old.]
I got
"Hello are you Mr.Jack? My aunt recommended you to me,saying that the found the shop I wantend."
Burmese phone number.
I had a photo of an Asian lady holding a Starbucks cup at a restaurant. Maybe an office, actually? The photo was reversed, as the lettering on the cup was backwards.
“Mike, this is my new number. Let's play golf tomorrow and talk about working together?” (My name isn’t Mike.)
“Hello, how's Kevin doing?” (My name isn’t Kevin and I doubt they're talking about anyone I know whose name is Kevin.)
The thing that always seems so weird to me is, if I’m on some list, why are there so few messages? Is this some group that keeps their list of numbers to themselves and is very disciplined with how often it sends out scam attempts?
This was followed by the text "hi, is this Grèg frm Sañta Barbara?.? It is Jennifer."
Clearly some sort of scam is afoot, but I don't know what it is. And virtually no effort has been made to be at all convincing, given the diacritics.
The profile picture was the smiling face of an Asian girl. I didn’t bother to respond.
It may have been a totally wrong number or the start of a scam. I decided not to engage and haven't heard back. Considering how mad they came across in the initial message, I can only assume silence means it was a scam.
http://didoune.fr/blog/2012/03/08/les-croque-escrocs-et-la-c...
I had created this persona which was just too good to be true: A bank manager who was getting ready to run off with his mistress, and trying to secure a future for themselves with a quick payout. This fake persona was a total maniac.
At the end, the scammers were super pissed. Sending angry emails, fighting amongst themselves. Eventually convinced them to admit to being scammers. I look back fondly on the experience.
It's a bit dated now, but 419eater[0] is a public forum that did the same. If you enjoyed your own, I expect you'll like this too.
I did the same a few times myself, but got bored after a while. I never did get anyone to send a photo of themselves with underwear on their head (as others on 419eater did), but it was amusing for a while.
Sure it's possible. Although GP said[0] it was a private forum.
419eater.com is, and has been for many years, an open forum.
Perhaps GP could clarify?
My private forum is long dead, and to be completely honest, I think the 419eaters did a much better job. That is subjective, but for sure they invested a lot more time in it.
I would post my exploits publicly, lightly anonymized, but I was in my 20's when I did it. I look back at it, and feel like the sort of long-con thinking and sheer sneakiness and meanness of how I reversed the con back at them is just not a good look. I wouldn't do it again now.
Maybe some folks understand what I mean by that? I don't want to be a shady dude, even in pursuit of some weird form of justice.
So I convinced him that I was the manager of a Red Lobster restaurant and it was an old lobster tank that we were selling. I told him to show up during business hours and tell the manager he’s there to pick up the lobster tank.
The next day I got some ‘on my way’ texts and then soon after a bunch of swearing at me.
Good times.
I ask just on the off-chance that you got a seeming-real email from the real PayPal, and I'd like to know what to look for if so.
It's hard to turn a profit by reselling an expensive aquarium tank that's probably pretty unique and they don't come up for sale frequently.
I suspect you fleeced a real buyer
They all come with differently styled legit emails, which blend right in to the fake spam emails also claiming to be from paypal.
I can totally imagine confusion occurring.
Fortunately, that's not really what these language models can do. They can easily be trained to mimic you. They can be trained to mimic what normal people reply to you with. But there's no way to train the transformer-based high-probability-next-word AIs to be superhumanly good at fooling you into doing something, on the grounds of lack of training data, and probable inability to represent such a complex topic in their internal representation. And the humans doing this stuff are experiencing enough success that they probably have no desire to go chasing the super hard targets, with the wherewithal and motivation to chase them down and sue them (or... you know... worse, legal systems aren't a bound on everyone) even potentially across international lines.
You'll know when AI does get to that point, because suddenly the internet will be an amazingly interesting place with all sorts of amazingly good arguments you can't hardly resist. I imagine few of us experience that sort of internet. (If you do, uh, watch out.)
The conversations of all those human scammers would be prefect training data for this. You even know exactly what conversations led to payouts. Assuming you can get all your data in one place, of course.
GPT-3 may even gamely try to do exactly that with the correct prompt! But it'll fail. The result won't be cognitively dangerous to anyone with a grip on reality, it'll be risible.
Relevant XKCD[0].
And they do this by intentionally making basic mistakes or other easy to spot errors so the clever people will just see themselves out and by the time their funnel gets to an actual human scammer, they have a highly probable sucker.
'By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.’
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Ultimately if you're in the business of spamming people on the other side of the world in the hope that 0.001% of them will ultimately send a money transfer worth a month's wages in local currency, your time probably isn't so valuable you can't afford to deal with everyone that replies
It doesn't affect the average user and it presents very nominal hoops for the high volume user to step through while erecting substantial barriers to criminals.
That's kinda the best you can do
It’s a surprisingly even mixture of content, sender-related metadata, other message-related metadata, and unattributable (e.g. SH_HBL_EMAILS, ME_VADESCAM). Most of the time, any two of those four would be enough to reach the spam threshold of 5. Regularly, any one of at least three of them.
I should note that what I’m calling “sender-related metadata” is not penalising unknowns: it’s only penalising known-bads. Thus, it’s not really about sender reputation as a whole, but rather established bad sender reputation. The only form of penalising of unknowns that I’m aware of with Fastmail is when the sender is on a domain name registered in the last I think 72 hours.
When it comes to the more tailored things (oh, you somehow managed to spend two hours looking at my site, particularly liking my Rust FizzBuzz article, and wonder if I wouldn’t mind sharing a link to your Python guide, and you keep pestering me?), it’s only content, with everything else neutral. (In the specific example I cited there, the first message got BAYES_00, the second got BAYES_50, and the third BAYES_99 + BAYES_999 perhaps due to me manually marking the previous ones as spam but probably also from introducing the term “guest post” which I imagine my Bayes filter regards dimly.)
(I like the fact that I can inspect Fastmail’s spam filtering to quite some degree, and you can talk to their support about it as well and get more detail when desired. The big ones like Gmail are just completely opaque, with people poking and prodding at the edges to try to understand its caprice. Disclosure: I worked for Fastmail for a few years.)
And if they need to train their own model, you can get a lot of slaves and poor wannabes for the price of one competent NLP engineer, and the slaves and poor wannabes are less likely to decide they're the brains of the outfit and cut you out of the loop.
An interesting twist will be to pull the voices of your friends off social media videos and impersonate them to you.
That sounds just like the "binary option" business which used to be run out of Israel. The Times of Israel blew that apart with "The Wolves of Tel Aviv" investigation series.[1] The binary option companies would hire new immigrants to Israel and put them in a call center to cold call and sell binary options sold by fake brokerages. The companies wanted people who spoke a foreign language so they could sell in that language. Scamming people outside Israel was legal in Israel at the time.
When, after years of scams, the State of Israel finally made that illegal, some of the binary options scammers moved into crypto. (Others moved to Bulgaria, where binary options were legal until a crackdown in 2021.) But the pattern is the same. Cold-contact, make friends, get people to invest in a fake brokerage, provide fake statements showing a win, refuse withdrawals.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels...
The thing to look for here is who's behind the fake brokerages. It takes work to crank up a fake brokerage. In the binary option scams, it turned out that one company, SpotOption [1] was providing most of the software and expertise. They offered scam brokerages as a service. That's what needs to be tracked down.
I'm having trouble parsing your intent here...
Having been on the internet a long time, I have seen a lot of people on forums, this one included, do the how-dumb-are-they routine about scams. I suspect a notable fraction of those people have gotten taken in the meantime. Look at how much of the cryptocurrency space, for example, plays on people's wanting to be seen as smart, superior, and technically savvy. That motivation drives a lot of learning and technical exploration, but it also makes people vulnerable.
Even with old people, people don’t realize how many sales and scam calls they get. My mom literally get 30-40 calls a day. Odds are, eventually you’re going to crack.
My head just exploded here. I think I need to go lie down. Please nobody tell the Florida legislature about this.
The investigative reporter who broke the story, Simona Weinglass, frequently reports on how the Israeli financial scam industry has grown and changed. "Another 2 leading Israeli blockchain pioneers named as suspects in vast crypto scam"[3] A former Celsius CFO was one of them. Celsius, of course, denied there was a problem. That story was back in in March, three months before the Celsius collapse.
Somewhere, behind this new wrong-number/fake broker thing, there is probably an organized criminal enterprise.
[1] https://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Israeli-minist...
[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/why-binary-options-ban-is-only...
[3] https://www.timesofisrael.com/another-2-leading-israeli-bloc...
> “What part of the Middle West?”
> “San Francisco.”
I use Apple's Messages. If someone spams me, I report them. They're blocked and have to go through the extra work of setting up a new account to try again.
Compare this with, say, Google. Gmail lets spammers / scammers have limitless accounts and they don't do shit when an account is reported for spam. You can block and report Gmail spammers all day long and you'll get nowhere.
WhatsApp apparently still uses phone numbers, and they're owned by a company that wants engagement at ANY price. Are any of us really so dumb that we think they're going to do the right thing?
Edit: Noting a lot of downvotes on this comment, which is odd. I can only conclude one thing- don't be Amish on HN.
Perhaps this could be an opportunity to explore a different way of life, and a different community structure. It is not all horse buggies and barns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6SlJZk5guI&list=PLEyPgwIPkH...
You'd probably just be removed from someones property eventually.
First article I found: https://amishamerica.com/do-amish-use-telephones/
I am assuming you don't mean to generalize to the degree that is being conveyed at first glance in your explainer comment.
Amish people are not a monolith. As a culture it is quite a spectrum, from Beachy to Swartzentruber.
Others not quite as close are a fair degree more liberal in what they adopt, while I imagine there's probably a few that are more strict.
You'd be incorrect. Ask your postmaster.
This means it is an org mandated to accept your request for service at a reasonable price regardless of your location of residence. There is an important distinction between that, and being mandated to receive mail service. That is not a stipulation of being alive in USA.
[0] - https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/postal-service-and-its-obligati...
They don't have to. Just have mail sent to:
Joe/Jane Drifter
General Delivery
TownNearWhereYouSquat, <State> <ZipCode of post office>
Electronically from private companies I frequently get a larger volume of spam, malware, scams, explicit content, and most of them originate outside of my legal jurisdiction to evade the law. And it's a steady stream all day, on multiple mediums.
I'd take 10x the amount of spam in my mailbox if I could get rid of all of the rest of the garbage I'm bombarded with. I obviously would rather not have any of it, but the hoops you have to jump through to send snail-mail inherently filters out most of the worst garbage.
I for one would not. Digital spam is easy to deal with. There are automated filters, easy ways to block them, and the few that slip through are simple to deal with. Mailbox spam is physically painful to deal with and it's a massive waste of paper.
Personally I find it emotionally painful and depressing to deal with. It sucks to be physically confronted with the reality that my personal contact information is being passed around like a bitch in prison.
Apparently, mail fraud[0] (via USPS) and wire fraud[1] (electronic communications) are both Federal felonies punishable by a fine and up to 20 years imprisonment.
Perhaps the difference would be FBI investigating instead of the postal inspectors?
More detail here[2].
N.B.: IANAL
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1341
How many letters do you have to send before you find someone stupid enough to believe that they have to pay the IRS via gift card and that the IRS return address is in Russia? If anyone has tried, they went bankrupt on postage.
I practically don't use email anymore for those reasons, and a phone number hangs around only because right now I can't not have one for legal-type reasons.
at one extreme, you can just point the mx records for your domain at office365 or gsuite or similar and let them handle it
at the other extreme, you can point the mx records at your own mailserver you admin yourself and do absolutely anything you want with the incoming smtp mail flow for antispam measures, sorting, filtering, categorization, risk analysis.
the ordinary person even if they work for a telecom cannot implement their own phone number at one of the most fundamental levels of the pstn, because they don't run their own ss7 switch.
if you control your own DID and interface with it from a sip trunk to a trusted provider, running your own voip system, you can do a lot with custom routing/antispam measures on incoming call flow, but nowhere near to the extent that you can with email.
I don't know how to say this any more nicely than this: this is a permanently losing solution with no redeeming qualities to such a degree that it makes me wonder at how in-good-faith the suggestion actually is with regards to solving the stated problem.
Just as an example: phone numbers should not be used for validation of anything as they are public. So companies who are requiring phones for any kind of authentication should be shamed into changing their practices, much like we learned to not trust companies that stored passwords in plain text, or use "recovery questions".
Out-of-band authentication aside, a company is going to retain my phone number to be able to contact me. So are my parents. Somebody is also going to inevitably leak it because security is difficult. Breaking the capabilities of bad actors, then, is a requirement. You have entirely ignored this in favor of blame-the-user rhetoric and I can't come up with a great reason why you'd blame every user for a systemic failure other than that the system cannot be repaired.
Phone numbers were and will always be assumed to be public. (Yellow pages are still a thing)
> unless I want to be less accessible to people who I may need to hear from.
You don't need to be less accessible to anyone. Your phone can and should be able to filter things for you.
And is not just a matter of setting up number filtering, I am talking about implementing changes in the application layer. One could imagine, e.g, a phone app that only rings if the caller provides a secret code provided by you, effectively making you reachable by phone number (public) + caller-specific code (private). You could also make that if you have the code on your addressbook, it sends it via DTMF after the call being completed.
> other than that the system cannot be repaired.
It can be repaired, it is just that the cost of these changes might be too high if mandated for all network operators.
But even if the system couldn't be repaired, the solution is not to encourage adoption of a proprietary solution. Apple already controls way too much stuff, we shouldn't give them yet another monopoly for them to exploit.
For what it's worth my solution which may not work for others is to set the default ring/text tone to "None" and then add custom ring/text tones in my address book on my little throw away flip phone. It works great for me personally. I never get distracted by bots and just mass delete their messages without even looking at them when I get around to it. This method probably will not work for people glued to their phones.
But its meaninglessness is demonstrated by the fact that I have received two spam calls (complete with "accurate" caller ID) since starting to read these comments.
So yeah. The phone companies are all complicit.
For me too and if there is an application that allows to block numbers, spam is not a problem.
Now I use the Google builtin caller app antispam function. Most of the spam numbers have already been marked as such by somebody else. Even if that didn't exist I could just block the number after the fact and no more calls or SMSs.
I'd rather program that myself than relying the functionality to Google, I hope Pine or some other programmable phone gets to a usable state some day. But as of now, it's good enough.
Edit: I'm in Spain, not sure if that works the same in the USA.
Why are registered businesses not verifiable? Or at least banks and government departments? Why can't phones hold an ID in their cloud profiles so switching numbers let's your friends auto-uodate to you?
We could be doing so much better (with the goal of making it practical to whitelist only operate).
Does anyone here have inside knowledge about whether this does any good?
Google Messages proactively detects spam texts and sends them to a spam folder, so I don't get notifications about these messages at all :)
https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mn2qyj/apple_decli...
So which one is "owned by a company that wants engagement at any price" again?
"hey, use this one proprietary vendor's closed source walled garden messaging app"
is NOT a solution.
people should be looking at things like Signal or custom implementations of Matrix/Element/Synapse or similar if they want real control of their two way chat communications.
So don't be like Google Pay? (Which originally used proper accounts but was switched to be based on phone numbers, specifically because the new google pay was developed targeting India, where phone number based login is considered normal thanks to apps like WhatsApp.)
They claimed to be a banker (following the exact format from the exmaples in the blog) and I genuinely thought that they were a real person but even after I told them that they are texting the wrong number they kept forcing the conversation so I blocked them. A couple of months later they texted from another number but a different name but they continued the conversation from where we last left off.
Crazy reading the article now. I would have been devastated if I fell for it. I am usually very good at spotting scams.
They befriend lonely people (usually men) and slowly draw them into a crypto scam. It's a long con, takes a few months.
Lady: Doctor Lucy? My puppy is very slow and does not eat dog food, can you make an appointment for me?
Me: Unfortunately I do not treat puppies. Only adult dogs, adolescent foxes, and elderly coyotes.
Lady: Sorry, I added the wrong person, I just checked the number and I saved the wrong number for Dr. Lucy.
I left it at that. I wonder if I should try and bait the scammer. I do love messing with scammers. After the last message I was thinking maybe it was legitimately a wrong number.
I got added to some whatsapp group investment scam once, when there was multiple scammers targeting me it was easier to do because they all didn't want to give up on me. Then they seemed to invite "big brother" so I guess was some leader who had much better English, and he was trying to prove the legitimacy of the platform. Went for about a week and a bit from memory. I sent them pictures of my daily walks and asked how much better it would be if was so rich I didn't have to walk at all!
Even if that’s wrong, I’m sure you’re right that they collect caller-pick-up stats. I imagine even cursory vetting would dramatically increase the resale value of their lead list.
Like the ones in this story, none of them ever had links or asked me for anything. I never interacted with them. They were kind of interesting at first but after a while I blocked the emails.
I can only guess that this kind of long game scam is what was happening.
The effort is higher (multiple accounts needed), but for some high-value targets might be an alternative to other scams.
Does this kind of scam exist yet? Can I file a patent, and sue scammers applying it?
Are you kidding me? Of course it does! Inviting a victim into a group chat where everyone (all scammer-controlled accounts) is allegedly making good money from some get-rich-quick scheme has been a tried-and-true scam tactic for ages. Might be as old as group chats. FOMO is powerful.
There are even improved versions that involve multiple groups. E.g. you first join an entry level group, and after you invest a certain amount (they’ll make sure you’re rewarded for that initial investment), you’re promoted into an inner circle group for which the best opportunities are reserved. Of course, that’s where they drain your bank account.
has a wealth of information and examples of these
In my experience and in the other descriptions I've read, it is always a woman business owner from Asia, acts somewhat friendly and flirty, will talk about life with you in a very superficial way for a while in order to build a relationship. After a while they hit you with... a crypto scam or something? Like teaching you how to trade bitcoin but using some shady weird exchange that makes off with your money when you fund your account.
https://myclevertrust.com/post/34/2021-07-06-sha-zhu-pan-the...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/na8oax/asian_guygirl...
Now - can someone answer why I get 10 calls a day with no one on the other end? Either I pick-up and it's empty and the call ends a few seconds later, or they leave a 7 second voicemail of nothing.
It’s like any other business… they want to be talking to qualified leads because they only have so many call center scammers. This is why Kit Boga et. al. are truly doing the lord’s work by wasting that precious time.
It would be good if iMessage could create a "fraud/spam" marking for a message/contact similar to what email has today. WhatsApp seems to have a "report" button. fwiw - I have received more weird texts on iMessage and very little on WhatsApp.
I've also noticed that these scammers may have access to data from other sources as well. I'm moving at the moment and out of the blue receive a call asking me if I have a house to sell. I just said no and cut the call. But there is most likely a massive data gathering operation behind the scenes as well.
And how exactly does this differ from a REAL crypto platform?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/cali...
I've been wondering what the scam was. I've gotten 3 of these so far. I've received actual wrong number texts in the past, so I want to let the person know they got the wrong number and aren't getting ghosted by their friend. But they just keep texting back, which is really weird.
With the first one I didn't know what was going on the person said they just moved to the country, which is plausible, so I didn't want to be a jerk, but when she asked for my name I stopped replying. When the 2nd one came with with the same pattern it was clear there was some kind of scam going on, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it could be, as they weren't asking for anything.
A lot of people are isolated and lonely, not just the elderly. The scammer tries to create a spontaneous meet that seems genuine. If you engage then it’s about quickly developing a relationship and then if that works, asking for money.
I wonder how much of this can be automated these days. This sort of scam usually requires a lot of effort and is more targeted. Since many are claiming ti be targeted now it could be a sign that scammers have been able to automate it with some basic scripts or even AI so it can scale.
Someone messaged me on Reddit a while back pretty randomly after a comment I made mentioned it would be my birthday at some point in the year. It seemed a little too weird, she said we lived 30 minutes from each other. I didn't know if it was a girl or a guy for quite a long time, so there was no relationship talk. We both wrote really long detailed replies, much more than any script would be able to handle. Ended up meeting up with her and it was in fact a real person, but I was very up front with my skepticism very early on in the chat. Even after we met up I said something about how I was half expecting my car to be broken into or something. She ghosted me afterward, lol. Maybe it was a relationship long con, but I didn't look like I was worth conning or I was still too on edge and not engaging enough to make it worth the time she'd have to put in to make me not think she was scamming me. Or I'm just boring, ugly, and weird. Whatever, she basically just complained about work for an hour.
Like the scammer who was persuaded to greet a planeload of passengers debarking from a Helsinki flight, with a big sign that said "I will blow you" in Finnish (https://www.scamorama.com/smurf.html)
The only way to help with this is education - maybe we need a course on online scams that kids need to take to graduate, along with personal finance.
https://blog.confiant.com/how-one-crypto-drainer-template-fa...
To wit: the wallet-drainer billboards that popped up around the NFT NYC and Eth Nyc conferences this year:
https://blog.malwarebytes.com/scams/2022/06/rogue-cryptocurr...
From the article
It may be a way to add a degree of positive reputation to those compromised accounts like another commenter suggested.
Someone sent me a very official looking “your payment for $370 in textbooks has been approved. Here’s your reciept.”
The thing is, it came from an official PayPal email address.
In reality it was a request for money using PayPal’s official system. They just filled the title and body with text to make it resemble a receipt.
Other people get a completely different mix. I wonder how these get determined.
What I do want to highlight is the deeper "why", and that is "why" are these people doing this? There must be a fundamental survival mechanism here, in a larger chain. These people may not have opportunities, the ones holding others captive. What kind of environment is needed to create this type of behavior? Surely we must address that at the core of it all. I think it comes down to basic resources, and this is where I think the vision of Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project can come into play. Which is to create a resource-based economy and evolve as a civilization to taking care of one another, it is a form of democratic socialism, which I think can solve this type of issue, and help us all be more integrated and happier.
Stuff like this just erodes my faith in humanity. Humans are not fundamentally good. So many people want to prey on the weak or gullible, not only because it can be easy and lucrative, but because they get off on that kind of power dynamic.
(this is a joke)