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Comment by brohee | Hacker News Reader

A bit of a missed opportunity with the war in Ukraine. He could have expressed pro-Ukraine sentiment and the (most likely Russian) scammer could have echoed them back and possibly be caught in a FSB dragnet.

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It was probably a Chinese slave in a Myanmar boiler room.

Romance scammers and “pig butchering” scams are usually run by Asian gangs. Nasty folks.

The “good” news, however, is that AI is likely to make a big impact, here, and reduce the need to kidnap poor folks.

Ha, with AI scammer traps (e.g [1]), it'll be AI lying to other AI, trillions of CPU cycles wasted accomplishing nothing other than speeding up the destruction of the planet.

I suppose one can then declare the mission accomplished: zero scammers left on the planet.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV_SdCfZ-0s

> trillions of CPU cycles wasted accomplishing nothing other than speeding up the destruction of the planet.

Also known as "advertising".

> Ha, with AI scammer traps (e.g [1]), it'll be AI lying to other AI, trillions of CPU cycles wasted accomplishing nothing other than speeding up the destruction of the planet.

Reminds me of a small part of Neal Stephenson's "Anathem".

Or maybe a bit of Peter Watts' Rifters trilogy.

The fact that the scammer was in Russia was pretty credible. It'd be pretty odd for a scammer in Myanmar to alter the metadata to appear as to be from Russia and not from Kazakhstan as the "woman" claimed to be.

Good point.

Man, not even slaves are needed for scams anymore. Sad to see job losses even there... /s

Its also important to get the maximum engagement from the scammer. Text produced is work and time. This is the only thing you can cost them, so its time to engage chatgpt and have them stuck in a telenovella.

Modern lawyers use preproduced text blocks for their letters. I would like to believe, that scammers do the same. Probably they even have figured out what phrases are the most effective for good engagement.

Their early emails are often boilerplate, but once you get them out of their opening book, they have to write their own emails. I've often seen in advance fee scams, after the first few emails, there's a sudden decrease in the quality of the text, that's how you know they're writing their own emails

The article might have been updated, but it addresses your point now. This particular scam used emails consisting of one persinalized paragraph + a few slightly randomized paragraphs straight from the playbook.

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