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Comment by nickdothutton | Hacker News Reader

Haven’t tested but I’d just like to commend anyone doing something to spoil the success rate of scammers who prey upon the old, the gullible, and the just plain too busy to check properly.

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People who think they're too busy need to make time in proportion to the money involved. I read a news story about someone scammed out of the price of a home because they were on holiday and too busy to be suspicious that the realtor suddenly emailed to ask them to send the money to a different account.

Where am based (Singapore), last year in 2024 alone people lost over $1.1 Billion dollars. Some of the cases are so extreme where the bank is trying to tell the person that they are getting scammed but they wont even believe the bank officers. Manipulation is the key here

They also prey on the lonely. The big new thing in scamming is "pig butchering". Make friends with someone online, gradually persuade them you're a genius crypto trader, get them depositing funds to a "crypto trading platform", number goes up, get them depositing more funds... then pull the rug.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QhMqoTNSl8

I remember when I was young in the early 2000s, the internet was a place you could make friends. These pig butchering scammers are working to wreck what little social fabric the internet has left.

That's not a new thing at all. Most successful scams have been around for centuries in one form or another. They just get renamed/brought back up when new technology gets involved.

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