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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

Not OP, but personally, I subscribe to a different economic theory: by engaging a scammer I am diverting their resources towards me and away from someone else.

It’s not a perfect rationale and I see what you mean but, for me, it would be like confronting a thug on the street when one has good reason to believe they are victimizing someone else out of sight. Would I lose more by confronting them than they stand to gain, or should I just confront them no matter what?

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And the solution to that is that the scammers are actually kidnapped and enslaved people. So all you end up doing is getting some poor kidnapped slave beaten for missing their quota.

What, you think the crime lords in charge of these scams actually do the grunt work? That's what kidnapping is for.

And if this ends up being endemic and all the slaves are beaten for missing their quotas and no one is making any money then they'll be forced to move onto something else, because the crime lords are in it for money no other reason

Depends on where you live. It's very well known that Ukrainian scammers who work every Russian-speaking country* are part of large companies, work in downtown $CITY in plain view of SBU that is supposed to be suppressing them, and make good money from their work. If they messaged rather than called, I would be very happy to adapt this project and use it against the fuckers.

* including mine (not Russia) -- incessant daily calls to every person I know.

Which one? We're curious now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territ...

They've mentioned before that it's Kazakhstan.

"I'm curious, but not enough to investigate on my own!"

I'm curious, but it did not occur to me to go to the user's profile, and check other posts on unrelated stories.

Or they are scammers in Nigeria, Senegal or India for whom it is their dream job (nothing against these countries, it is just z dad fact of life that the scams, at least for France, come mostly from there)

The same applies to any antiscam measures. Maybe blame the crime lords rather than those trying to reduce the number of victims.

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