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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

The latest Mark robber Youtube vid on this had a fair bit of info on these operations. I was surprised how organized and "professionalized" the operations are. KPIs and all that corporate jazz.

I struggle to comprehend the mindset though. Who goes to work knowing they'll spend their entire day ruining lives? I get survival, but wow.

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> Who goes to work knowing they'll spend their entire day ruining lives?

We've got folks producing drugs at scale, anyone who works for the tobacco industry, the liquor industry, the arms industry, we've got the oil industry. There are so many industries that are more or less directly murdering people every day and making life for everyone around them measurably worse. These folks sleep just fine, because they fundamentally just don't care about you: They care about the people around them. That's more or less normal, too. Caring about everyone is something you have to be taught.

> We've got folks producing drugs at scale, anyone who works for the tobacco industry, the liquor industry, the arms industry, we've got the oil industry. There are so many industries that are more or less directly murdering people every day and making life for everyone around them measurably worse.

That's a really, really simplistic take. Except for maybe the current-day tobacco industry, for every story you might have about how one of those industries is doing harm, someone else has one about how they're doing good, and you're both probably right.

1. Liquor: helping people have a good time. Have you heard how Prohibition went?

2. Arms: protecting the community from its enemies. Have you heard about a country called Ukraine?

3. Oil: literally enabling modern society to function. Even with today's electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines; advanced countries would collapse without a steady supply of it.

etc.

I'm sure you and most other people can rationalise what you do quite well. That doesn't change anything about the harm you do, only about how well you sleep.

> I'm sure you and most other people can rationalise what you do quite well. That doesn't change anything about the harm you do, only about how well you sleep.

Except what I listed weren't "rationalizations," they're actual truths.

It's easy to make anything look harmful by listing the pros and cons, then throwing out the list of pros.

We're just going to have to agree to disagree I think. I don't think what you listed are genuine pros, just things that such people say to make themselves sound good. The only one where you may have a point is the oil industry - and while that is a pro, it's just as much of a con (given the enormous impact plastics have had on the environment).

> Who goes to work knowing they'll spend their entire day ruining lives?

I mean this applies to way more than just scammers like this. See: Wells Fargo opening accounts in customer's names or a whole litany of other examples of companies ruining people's lives. Cognitive dissonance, "I'm just doing my job", "If I wasn't doing this someone else would be", etc...

Or even AT&T. Compensation in their retention department at the moment starts with a bonus amount, and subtracts from it for any number of normal things that happen during the course of their business day, such as a customer who talks to them cancelling. Imagine how hard it is to get an agent to press that button if it costs them $100 off their own paycheck to do it.

"Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make" - Lord Farquaad

I've actually asked scammers ("Amazon" or "Apple" representatives who are calling me to help me with a "problem" with my account) this question:

"So, tell me, do you go home to your Mom and say "Hey, I robbed 6 people today! Aren't you proud?"

It usually doesn't go well.

I did once spend a month arguing with a repeated spam callers who rotated their voip numbers around the globe about just how I knew it was a scam, it also didn’t go well… But they did eventually stop calling! So I’ll count that as a small victory.

I figure that wouldn't do anything, so when I have the energy to even pick up the phone for these assholes, I usually just fuck with them. My favorite is the scam about renewing your car's warranty, because I don't own a car and never have. So I get them on the line and say, "Oh, no, my warranty is about to expire? Which car are you calling about?" And they pause, confused. "Well, I have two cars, which one is about to expire?" They always respond with, "The most recent purchase, sir." And then I go, "Well, I bought them at around the same time many years ago, I don't remember exactly which one was more recent. If you're calling about the warranty, surely you know the make and model, right?" That's about when they hang up.

One time I got a scam call trying to make me freak out by saying someone bought a $1,000 iPhone on my Amazon account and I needed to work with them to take care of the fraud. I just said, "Oh, no, I bought that! There's no fraud, nothing to worry about!" There was a very long (and amusing) pause, and then the click of disconnection.

> So I get them on the line and say, "Oh, no, my warranty is about to expire? Which car are you calling about?" And they pause, confused.

I'm surprised by that. Every piece of car warranty junk mail I've ever gotten had the exact, correct make and model of my car. I'm pretty sure there must be some database that sells that info at scale.

Even if there's such a database, I'd be surprised if I'm in it, considering that like I said, I've never owned a car :D

I believe they’re told that they’re just scamming rich people or something like that so that they don’t feel remorse

This. But it also reminds me of the Milgram experiment.

Someone will always be willing to do the job and most of the time obey instructions against their conscience.

Like all pop psychology, I would not give any weight to those experiments.

https://www.psypost.org/2019/11/unpublished-data-from-stanle...

They are also told that those victims deserved it. They are decedents of colonizers. Colonizers looted scammers’ country, so now they are just trying to recover lost wealth.

When exactly did America colonize India?

They don’t use proper logic to justify their actions.

They are talking about the call centres

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

"Just doing my job"

Yeah just like people working for Facebook, gambling companies, building systems to help oppressive regimes, etc. it is hard to understand that how people are able to do evil things without remorse.

I don't think it's that hard to understand. Also I'm sure there's some subset of people who think what you do in life is evil.

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