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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

You could trick me into believing I was taking with Elon, but not my son.

And yet there have been several recent studies that show the younger someone is, the more likely they are to be scammed online.

> In 2021, Gen Xers, Millennials, and Gen Z young adults (ages 18-59) were 34% more likely than older adults (ages 60 and over) to report losing money to fraud,[1] and some types of fraud stood out. Younger adults reported losses to online shopping fraud – which often started with an ad on social media – far more often than any other fraud type, and most said they simply did not get the items they ordered.[2] Younger adults were over four times more likely than older adults to report a loss on an investment scam.[3] Most of these were bogus cryptocurrency investment opportunities.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spo...

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i fell victim to such scam this year (first time i got scammed over 40 years). Key factor was that i got link to scam shop not from social ad but from my wife :) she got it from insta ad. So basically my wife scammed me :)

> And yet there have been several recent studies that show the younger someone is, the more likely they are to be scammed online.

I think you are misreading the post. Pretty sure they meant

you could trick me into believing I was talking with Elon, but you could not trick me into believing I was talking with my son

To which I agree personally, though I don't know how universal this is.

Older people are less likely to invest in high risk, high yield.

Older people are less likely to have their entire personas and private lives fully documented on social media.

Younger people really should consider this point.

Personally, I don't use streaming video outside of work and there are no videos of me on youtube or any social media to train a model on even if someone wanted to.

My mother in her 70s doesn't even have a debit card. She thinks the idea is ridiculous and insecure. She writes paper checks and that is it. To put her account number on an electronic device would be completely unthinkable.

While the average older person might be more easily confused by social engineering the attack surface for an electronic scam is so tiny compared to the average younger person.

Only one photo is needed. I've not looked deep into this specific project, but speaking as an early developer of likeness transfer trained algorithms, only one image is needed, and it can even be a crude sketch - but if one's true likeness is captured by an image it can be recreated in full 3D. The catch is an individual's specific facial expressions, such as the real individual has a slightly lopsided smile, or they have smile dimples, or simply their characteristic at rest facial positions are absent, so they don't look like themselves to those that know them.

She writes paper checks and that is it.

As my accountant says: "For every person in your neighborhood committing check fraud, there are ten-thousand people around the world trying to steal your money online."

> She writes paper checks and that is it. To put her account number on an electronic device would be completely unthinkable.

But she's handing a plaintext copy of her account number to everyone she pays with a check..

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