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Comment by sendfoods | Hacker News Reader

My god...I haven't really thought about scamming at all, I was "just" worried about manipulation of media and politics. New nightmare unlocked.

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All of these advances in technology have made the internet much less trustworthy. I wonder if we'll eventually hit a threshold where nothing is done virtually anymore because you can't trust it.

I think the work being done in the opposite direction is going to make it so the Internet can be used for high trust actions too.

E.g. in the EU we have ID cards and passports with biometric information and NFC, and there was a beta of a phone app by the French government where it would read your photo from the ID card/passport, and compare with a video selfie. That way you get fully local and secure identification allowing you to do stuff online that would otherwise require you to show up in person to a government office.

That 'video selfie' is untrustworthy, which was sort of the point.

It's taken by the app directly, so it's somewhat hard to pass fake 3D video input to it.

Only if hardware is completely locked down.

Scammers are well incentivized to find bypasses and feeding an alternative video stream into an app on a device that you control physically isn't all that hard for a determined person. I can think of three ways to do this right off the bat and if I think about it a little longer I'll probably find some more. I sincerely hope that that is not the last line of defense.

The open internet will be a dark forest, beautiful, but populated by metal-brains. Meat-brains will retreat inside trusted spaces below or above the empty forest.

https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

"Okay, let me just video call you because I also need to show you something" and then the scammer hung up and was to never be seen again.

FYI, there's the following trick I read here some time ago:

The scammer starts a video call with the person they want to impersonate and record it. When that person takes the call, the scammer doesn't say anything. This creates a 5-10 seconds video of the person looking at the camera waiting for the scammer to say something, until they get fed up and hung up.

The scammer then calls the victim. They offer a video call as verification straight away, and they play that short video.

How is a 5-10 second video of someone either not saying anything, or saying, "Hello, who is it?" over and over convincing at all?

I imagine they say something like, "I couldn't see or here you. Did you see me?" through the other channel, and because modern tech messes up enough, it'll be believable to a lot of people. Especially the most gullible.

HN gets so caught up in logic. Has no one watched interviews of scammed people? Huge numbers of them report that they were suspicious it was a scam but they were so worried for a loved one they sent the money anyway because it was worth the risk to them just in case. Anything that helps push scams in the even slightly plailusible direction will make scams more successful.

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