Principal Sends $100k of School Funds to Fake Elon Musk | Hacker News Reader

Principal Sends $100k of School Funds to Fake Elon Musk

vice.com

> “I am a very smart lady. Well-educated. I fell for a scam,” said during a meeting of the board and teachers, which was filmed by WESH 2 News. Then she said the Musk impersonator had groomed her, invoking a term that is very popular among Republicans right now. “Grooming is when you talk to somebody and you believe in them and they get you to trust them that this is really real and so I fell for it.”

That's not uncommon, in tech we just call it social engineering. I am a bit surprised a principal has the kind of unilateral access to send that much in funds.

I am a little surprised to see Vice make commentary on politically popular language. A lot of new words have taken hold in the last ten years, I don't think I've ever seen them explain it like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam

Wikipedia only traces this kind of scam back to the late 1700's. I'd bet that it was old back when Rome was still a one-horse town.

> Dr. Jan McGee worked at the Burns Science and Technology Charter school, a STEM charter school ...

- so plausibly the school is a tiny organization, lacking any central administration, Finance Dept., or other controls.

Combined with the "I am a very smart lady..." that you noted - yeah, I smell the stupid old "I have a PhD, so I must always be right" conceit. The article's "toxic work environment" bit might be taken to confirm this.

It would be nice if Vice had called her hard on "grooming". If she can't use that word correctly, she really isn't qualified to be a principal.

I guess I was surprised that they commented on political language reinvention at all. I've seen it happen a lot over the last decade and there seems to be an automatic adoption of the redefinition of words to fit political aims. Personally, I associate grooming with sexual predators and adolescents. If you're an adult, we say you were manipulated, deceived, or that you're dumb. That said, it was close enough that I could infer what she was talking about.

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