Scammers Steal $1T a Year – Mostly from Americans | Hacker News Reader

Scammers Steal $1T a Year – Mostly from Americans

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107 pointsvinni290 comments

I struggled to find the source the fact that $1T is lost to scammers. From the FBI internet crime report in 2023 Americans lost about 12.5 Billion dollars [0]. That is far from 1T$.

Another source reports cost if cybercrime is reported to reach 9.5T$ in 2024 but again no source provided for that number [1]

[0] https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2023_IC3Report.pdf#...

[1] https://www.esentire.com/resources/library/2023-official-cyb...

It kinda just depends on the agenda, one source says it’s nothing, another says it’s a trillion, and that huge gap usually means someone’s trying to push something, like tougher laws or justify some policy shift. Half the time it feels like the facts don’t even matter, just the story they wanna sell.

Half is being generous. Too much damn policy takes the form: I want policy action X for reason A, but people would be pissed if I said that's why, so I worked backwards to fabricate problem B which I will pretend to be deeply passionate about and plausibly has solution X.

It's god damn maddening. At least one side effect of the new GOP is they're partially dropping the pretense of needing B so we can at least not talk past one another sometimes.

It's a pretty ridiculous number, total US GDP is only $27T. That would mean scams are ~1% of the US economy, which is non-sensical.

Wouldn’t $1T be close to 4% of US GDP?

Yes, but it says "mostly from Americans", so I cut it in half, then halved again just to be conservative. The argument holds at 2% and 4% as well as it does at 1%.

the fundamental reality is that money itself is a construct, and all of the values attached to goods a services are arbitrary, so there is no basis to diferentiate beween scams, and entertainment

it's all pay per view, and any dissastisfaction could fall under buyers remorse gambling is perfectly legal....as long as it gets taxed I have never had any account with apple, yet a charge to my credit card from apple appeared , I disputed it, but my bank refused to stop payment, and instead issued me a "credit", rather than go after apple, where as, anyone like me doing the same, would be a "scammer" and be prosecuted this impossible breach of law therefor is absolute proof of the complete falsity of our financial system. some are designated "scammers" others are empowered to take and I am personaly happy to live with that, and do what I can to protect my own tiny patch, from the marauding grabbers and muckers

This. That number just doesn't make sense. Nations get regime changed over far smaller slights.

My elderly mother has been scammed twice (that I know of). She fell for one of those "Your computer has been hacked" popup windows a few years ago. Which led to her buying a "protection" service that installed malware on her machine. Every couple of months she'd have an "issue" and have to shell out more money to fix it. She's been using computers since the 80's (Apple ][e) but still is utterly clueless on how to operate a computer. I had her take her computer to a computer shop to have the OS re-installed but he somehow kinda botched it. Fortunately I was able to later re-install Windows myself and she hasn't had an issue since. I've strongly warned her about scammers and now when she doesn't respond to an obvious scammer email she's pleased with herself. Old people really do become children again.

At least now they can ask ChatGPT if an idea makes sense.

Get them their fish oil, fish, eggs, and B vitamins.

You took her computer to a "computer shop" and yet she's the one that's clueless?

“Had her take her computer” - presumably GP didn’t do it themselves. Easily understandable if they don’t live nearby.

Folks, if you still have grandparents and you love them please give them a call. Let them hear your voice and know where you are. Scammers are targeting the elderly because they are lonely. With social media all they need are a few public posts to feed them plausible details. And absence of seeing or talking to you means anyone can call and say they are you. I’ve read transcripts and listened to the call recordings as evidence. It’s quite clear most elderly have no idea what their adult grandchildren sound like. But one day they are going to get a call from a Cabo jail and naturally want to help.

> She's been using computers since the 80's (Apple ][e) but still is utterly clueless on how to operate a computer.

On it's surface, this is what it looks like, but in reality what's happening is that your mother learned what she needed to learn to do her job and the things she's interested in doing. Now, unfortunately, that is no longer enough. Now you need to have a decent understanding of how things work so you can know when to call bullshit.

What separates all of us from the general public is we're not content to just learn what's required to do our jobs - we must learn how the thing works.

I was at dinner many years ago with some friends, and one of them had invited an opinion piece writer from the New York Times and she and I got into - what she felt - was a slightly heated back and forth, but I was actually just stating the reality of the new paradigm in which we live, which is this:

The days of learning everything you'll need to learn to operate in the world in high school and college are over. They've been over. You're going to have to continually learn new skills, all the time, if you expect to maintain your job and position in the modern world. If you're not willing to do that, you will no longer be promoted and if you continue to maintain that perspective, you'll eventually be fired for someone that will dedicate hours after work to keeping abreast of all the changes.

She said that was, "inhumane" and "unrealistic". I told her it didn't matter what she thought it was, because this is the reality of Corporate America, and it's even more true in technology companies, and the absolute gospel in Big Tech. She got a little huffy, but frankly I don't give a fuck when people get huffy over hearing how the world actually works, because 1) I'm not causing it and 2) no one can stop it, or even slow it down. The best you can do is adapt or choose to lay down and die. And I'm not gonna fuckin' lay down and die.

Apparently, neither is your Mom, since she's learning how to discern bullshit scammer emails from legitimate communications, so I say, good on her, and I hope she keeps on keeping on!

I'm not going to read the "article" because it is a transcript and looks a bit rambly and I don't expect it to be talking about anything interesting. But just going to the headline here; consider the base rate. North America has huge per-capita wealth (by a bit of a margin over most other large players). It is expected that scammers would target them and make the most profit there.

But why less Europeans? A language barrier for some countries? More regulations about robocalls etc? GDPR and better privacy so our data isn't as easy to exploit?

Europeans have less money than Americans. Even if there are no differences in law or practice scammers are still going to make more money off the wealthier people.

I suppose in some sense we could jot that down as more regulations leading to less scamming.

This Global Anti-Scam Alliance website [1] says Americans, Danes and Swiss have the highest average scam amount, at $3520, $3067 and $2980.

But it also says Pakistan lost 4.2% of GDP to scams, vs 0.2% for Italy, Netherlands and France.

It looks like I'd need to register to see more details statistics.

[1] https://www.gasa.org/post/global-state-of-scams-report-2024-...

Wealth sitting inside pension funds?

Looking at the amounts still lost and reported that is not the problem. There is plenty to go around directly available.

My best guess is English proficiency. While most people here speak it, they will never talk to a "bank" employee in English. Which is probably why the Microsoft scam does work as people expect some non native language there.

Language proficiency seems like a significant factor. India and Nigeria have the second and third largest number of English speakers by absolute population, I don't think it's a coincidence that both countries are also notorious for their scammers.

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

Considering unemployment and population

Europe somehow is often a bit lagging behind the US - in good and in bad - the obesity pandemic is also just really starting to show here as well.

Scammers upped their game here also in the last few years and especially months.

No week in the local news without a love/crypto/elderly scam going into the 10s to 100 thousands.

Especially in the last few months, in my social circle, scammers really increased in density and quality - fake email accounts, AI calls, real people "you opened a crypto account with us" and "it's your niece Mary" calls.

The fragmentation of Europe might really help here - no one in their right mind will pick up on a call from another state anymore (or some people, even an unknown phone numbers are off limits, for that matter).

The biggest annoyance is "private" numbers, which are not private anyway just invisible. Some companies still use them, but most are scammers. Really annoying if you have to unblock private numbers because some company does not want to pay for masking their internal numbers with the general number.

All three of those plus more, but language barrier might be the biggest reason. Most Europeans speak English, but most scams are only plausible in your native language or the national language of your country. Europe is a patchwork of different languages. English has a much bigger "market" of victims for international scammers, many of them might already know some English before their career

Also, generally known network of payment methods, banks and brands to phish via?

The bigger factor is the market for scammers. There are millions of Indian, Nigerian, and carribean scammers.

I'm living in Finland, and my Finnish language skills are .. not great .. but even I can spot spam messages easily.

There are some appalling auto-translated spammy/scammy SMS and WhatsApp messages being sent, and it would be incredibly hard to take them seriously due to their poor language.

I think more Americans manage their own pension funds. Also worse consumer protection?

There are few scammers that speak Lithuanian unlike English where there are a billion speakers. Language barrier for less common languages is a huge factor.

Language, unified market, cost of making calls or sending sms, payment networks.

I'm sure there are scammers targetting Europe, but the US is a better market, because you get more people with one language, voice calls and sms are nearly free, and the dominant payment networks have a global footprint.

For Europe, you need a different language per country (more or less), calling cellphones and sending sms can be expensive (depends on the country), and victims may have country specific payment networks that may be hard to integrate from outside the area (lots of direct bank payments, which isn't easy to integrate with).

>I'm not going to read the "article" because it is a transcript and looks a bit rambly and I don't expect it to be talking about anything interesting.

So just like a scam, eh?

It’s not only that IMO. Americans are uniquely targetable because of the way “legal” scams operate here with impunity and are not distinguishable from these illegal scams.

Medicare Advantage for example.

Not that there aren't massive downsides, but I do wonder where the spend side of this $1T goes. If it's shifted out of the USA then its being spent somewhere else.

I've never seen a decent write up of how the crooks invest the money, where they accept losses (muling?) and how they re-invest.

See "I go chop your dollar". Scammers also buy a lot of stolen luxury vehicles in 3rd world countries. The CBC did an investigation where they they to a Nigerian car dealership and everything was stolen, usually from Canada or the US.

Here is a very good podcast on the topic: Scam, Inc.

https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc

Some highlights

- There are estimated to be 500,000 people working globally as scammers

- It is mostly Chinese Triad led industry

- It is geopolitical: for the government of China it is ok, even desirable, that Americans get scammed

- $1T figure must be too high, as criminal experts estimate the whole global industry to be $200B - $500B

The scamming industry in Brazil seems to have grown a lot since the pandemic. I get calls almost daily.

Three types of scam are really common lately:

  1- You get an SMS pretending to be from the Post Office saying that you have to pay tax for your packet to get through customs;
  2- You get a call from someone saying they're from your bank and they need you to confirm that you bought something expensive like a TV;
  3- Someone says they're your lawyer and you need to pay them to get your settlement (this one is nasty, because they look up people who have something going on in the justice system).

We need a federal police in charge of tracking down and stamping out scams. They attack our elderly, and otherwise vulnerable. They steal money from the people who can least afford it and fund various violent, illegal and nefarious organizations.

We have an FBI, they're just busy chasing Russian and Chinese boogeymen so they dont look too closely at the actual miscreants.

Between scammers, the medical industry, H1Bs showing up just for jobs, these reports from DOGE about the pointless nonprofits, PPP loans, private equity buying up businesses, and landlords, etc

America is just becoming a place to extract.

Certain cities in countries like Nigeria and Morocco have become fraud “Silicon Valleys” where there’s quite literally tens of thousands of people collaborating and sharing best practices on how best to scam Americans and Europeans. This will only get worse with AI.

When I worked for a certain large inbox provider a few years back, I was astonished at the volume of fraud and phishing attempts that actually originate from these countries. And it’s amazing how centralized it is in certain cities.

Most people have no idea that a significant portion of the local economy in places like Lagos is driven by internet fraud, and due to local corruption it’s nearly impossible to prosecute.

If 100,000 Nigerians were physically pillaging a countries land and stealing physical assets that country historically would immediately go to war. The fact that this doesn’t matter as much since its all digital may need to be re-evaluated now that our financial lives are almost entirely digital. Western countries are going to have to finally put their foot down at some point.

It is good to hear that it is coming from countries which has been played by the Western World on the globalization front. Then ripping off those who profited from their low status and relevance on the world market gives it a nice Robin Hood touch.

It's good to hear that scammers are taking your grandparents retirement money as reparations for colonial acts?

Most people dramatically underestimate how widespread their cultural moral system is. Billions of people live in cultures where scamming is perfectly moral.

And most people dramatically underestimate what a death sentence a low trust society is for economic development.

Countries that allow a culture of scamming are all poor because a low trust society will never develop into a first world economy.

Trust and property rights are the basis of all development and investment and human collaboration.

Which is why it’s so depressing to see the U.S. backslide into this so quickly and willfully.

Honestly, I don't think it's been fast. We're just in the final phases. It's been building for decades. Venerating making money over all else and justifying anything as long as it's profitable and you get away with it has been going on for a while. Everyone sees the very wealthy and politically connected getting away with crimes and things that should be crimes, and that culture of money above all spreads.

Corruption starts at the top, but eventually it's everywhere.

For today's whataboutism: billions of people live in cultures where buying the best-priced product and not noticing or ignoring the slave labour or environmental costs in the production chain is perfectly moral.

E.g. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-merchant-iphone-...

There's also a lack of outrage of how our trash gets exported. It's the phone producer or the trash-people's crooked morals, not ours.. ;-)

Why are you repeating what I wrote?

Calling Globalization "colonial acts" is a nice touch, though. Thanks.

Come on, please keep these kind of polemics off HN...

Scammers prey on the most vulnerable, mentally handicapped people, and even their own neighbors.

Ask Nigerians how they feel about the fact they can’t interact with most western institutions or develop economically due to the actions of their worst neighbors.

It may surprise you to learn the largest population of victims of Nigerian scammers are other Nigerians. The dollar figures may not reach $1T (since Nigeria is poor) but it actively inhibits every day life in these countries and leads to the economic deadzone that is a low trust society.

As California learned, decriminalizing theft does not help the poor, in fact it disproportionately affects them the most.

Please re-examine your luxury beliefs.

> Ask Nigerians how they feel about the fact they can’t interact with most western institutions due to the actions of their worst neighbors.

How about you ask Nigerians how they are besides this topic? You think everything is good in Nigeria if it wouldn't be for that scam-issue?

In fact, you are displaying your own luxury believes here. It seems you think those scammers would have a normal job if they wouldn't be scamming people. Like, they have a choice. Yes, many Nigerians are scammed by other Nigerians. I am aware of that, but if "scamming" wouldn't be possible, those people would do other criminal things to their own people and the reason is that those countries have severe economic problems making it hard for normal people to have a life the way we live here in the beautiful West.

Them scamming their way into the West is as a small payback on the same road as the globalized markets operate. Those scammers rip off Westerners who profit from those same roads and the rip off their Western companies practice in the scammers home countries.

So yeah, I did hear that strategy already. It is an attempt at hacking my radicalized social behavior through the backdoor, while simultaneously diverting attention from those who actually hurt people in those countries: western politicians and companies. You will fail more often now with this strategy since the wave is rolling back and there are not many other strategies of diversion. They were never needed before.

Times change.

Read up on how economic development works.

Ask any of the Asian tiger economies that were formerly victims of colonialism how they economically developed out of poverty.

Developing trusted institutions leads to outside investment. Outside investment leads to growth. Growth leads to not being poor. When nobody will invest in Nigeria because nobody actually trusts they won’t get bamboozled, this is a fundamental chicken and egg problem.

Again, I would strongly suggest re-examining the luxury robinhood narrative you have in your head.

This is your answer? "Read the books on economics"? As if it would be some kind of scientific guideline? Seriously? This is your answer while simultaneously looking at the world RIGHT NOW?

A quick catch up for you: those books didn't work. Economics is not a science. You can not use it to generate predictions. It's single useful outcome is a historical one.

> Ask any of the Asian tiger economies

Why should I? It is obvious that some things work in some countries, while the same things might not work just behind the border. Other things might work for some time before they fall apart again because the ground issues with the system are being ignored or circumvented the way you try to do it here.

Nigeria is a very good example here btw. It is a growing economy. An emerging market. It has plenty of resources and the situation could be better for all Nigerians there. But it isn't. Widespread corruption, and the fact that there is an energy crisis putting brakes on the development show that something is off. The main income for the country comes from oil exports. Within the country, oil products needs to be heavily subsidized. Due to the lack of refineries, the oil products need to be bought back from abroad. So who does profit from this scheme? Surely not the Nigerian majority. Their top 5 export partners are: China (23%), Netherlands and Belgium with each 10% and India and the US with ~6%.

Their main import goods are: Petroleum oils, etc, and Durum wheat.

They are being ripped off. In this case, mainly by China, profiting from the corrupt structures which run Nigeria and the population is forced to scam to make a living and not being able to make a change.

Put away your books and your arrogant westerner attitude. Look at the reality out there. It is happening right now.

You both are correct.

Invade Nigeria?

Jingoist war mongerers have been trying to use hacks with baseless claims about ethnicity of the hackers as casus belli for quite some time now.

Who said that? Can easily inflict pain via sanctions and other means to get the corrupt Nigerian government to meaningfully do something.

Nigeria is not like Russia, they do not have super valuable energy resources nor a scary military they can lord over the rest of the world with.

By allowing this activity it actually hurts Nigeria the most as it prevents the country from ever developing the institutions and international trust necessary for economic development.

My favorite one is the fake US embassy in Ghana: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/28/the-true-story...

[flagged]

Are you talking about ex-presidents?

Trump isn't even receiving a salary: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpomete...

[flagged]

I actually don't believe the NFT sale was primarily intended to be a scam, but the secondary effects of scamming his own fanbase were of course problably welcome. If someone were able to trace all the payments to their sources, it would not surprise me if the primary purpose of the NFT sale involved:

- violation of the emoluments clause. - bribery/quid pro quo (pay me now for the presidential acts I agreed to do, but also people who helped him financially earlier may be early investors who are intended to be beneficiaries of the rugpull). - Trump 2 being more of a shared puppet than we realize.

Considering that for each scam a transaction fee i.e. 1-2% goes back to one of major US bank or card processor, they should re-calculate the scam amount and impact it has, as all the scams here are supposedly digital.

Plus, since all the transactions go through reputed banks why isn't there a decline, it has been happening since a decade now.

* No source for the number. * has "mostly from americans" (also no source) * brought to you by the same people suggesting you should get a second job to forget the stress from the first job.

One thing I have trouble wrapping my head around is blatant scams being advertised on reputable sites and apps. As I understand sites run ads through advertisement networks, but why are those networks not required to vet the ads that are bought for obvious scams. There should be regulation that requires these networks to vet each ad that is bought. With that in place at least the scams would not follow us everywhere on the web.

Americans are great marks because we are so relentlessly optimistic

And rich and uneducated.

Western societies have higher social trust which enabled them to outcompete the rest of the world. Business moves at the speed of trust. Now that western society has increasing contact with the low trust world it is regressing to the mean.

The regression is not due to “contact with the low trust world.” Globalism isn’t new. The call is coming from inside the house.

Did you account for crypto scammers in your theory ?

Aren't most crypto scammers from developed countries ?

It can be argued that POTUS himself is a crypto scammer.

It helps that marketing that is defined as fraud elsewhere is legal for you ... you get used to it.

From TFA:

"You've probably noticed that online scams are everywhere.

You see them on job recruitment sites, in your text messages,on dating apps and across social media.

And while people are getting better at spotting these scams, scammers are constantly advancing too.

Arguably, the most hurtful,personal and financially damaging of these scams is romance scams"

I am always confused how someone will fall for the scammer with such poor knowledge of your native language. If you look at the reports from the scams it is always so obvious that they are scams just by looking at the way sentences are structured or the way they speak.

I would expect that easier targets for such scammers would be people who don’t use English as their primary language. Not someone living in US.

It is weird that such things are not an immediate red flags to people. Then again, I have a better grasp on English language than last 3 US presidents so I guess you have to lower your expectations.

I thinks that this is also a reason that Musk, with his ramblings, didn’t reach such cult following here.

By explicitly being obviously a scam, scammers can preselect for the most gullible people

Some portion of legit call centres for banks or telcos (as an example) have an accent, especially when support services are outsourced. Means that many are not deterred by an accent or imperfect email phrasing when approached.

In one case of a friend's mother being scammed: she'd complained to her ISP about an issue with their service. Their actual customer support told her to expect a call back later that day. Then some sort of Microsoft support scam out of India happened to call her an hour or two later...

All scams are not created equal.

Here's an article by Cory Doctorow, a great example of an intelligent, tech-savvy person, detailing how he got scammed.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swi...

1 trillion? (x)doubt...

Somewhat related, Western Australia's newest billionaire, Laurence Escalante, got rich by running a sweepstakes betting company that operates only in the US.

https://www.afr.com/companies/games-and-wagering/escalante-r...

The company does not operate its games in Australia, where that kind of gambling is illegal (or rather, there are far more rules before people can enter the draw). Are Americans just easy marks?

For scale, this is a good comparison. His company had net earnings close to the totals by guided scams. These are smartphone-based slot machine games; for some reason called “sweepstakes”.

When an addicted person talks about that, they have the same reservations and shame as a scammed person.

It would be so easy to stop scammers if international transactions were insured and reversible. Governments just don't care at all about stopping scammers.

But a lot of scams don’t require this. The international transaction side isn’t with the victim, it’s with a completely different person happily sending cash over.

Say you run a gift card scam.

Victim buys $100 in gift cards and provides you codes.

You sell the $100 gift cards on a marketplace for $75.

A completely unrelated person buys the gift cards for $75 from you.

That unrelated person is satisfied, they got $100 for $75. They got a deal. You got $75 from a happy customer.

The loser is the person spending $100 in gift cards.

Other scams require you send money to a domestic “mule”, who then sends the money along not realizing it.

Also triangulation fraud:

1. Acquire stolen ccs

2. Set up web shop (or Amazon/eBay account) with attractive deals

3. When an order comes in, purchase the ordered item elsewhere using a stolen CC and have it sent to buyer

The clueless buyer will be the one under investigation for cc fraud.

We’re not talking about all the AI trash people sell for $100/year for what is little more than a system prompt in front of an LLM, are we?!

That number is ridiculously high. I can't read the article because it's paywalled but back on the envelope says thats about $4,000 per adult American per year

A perspective: redistribution finds it's ways.

People with roughly equal wealth would not scam each other's at this level

There are tons of scammers with more money than their victims, they don't stop scamming.

Exactly.

For an easy example of this, look at religious con artists masquerading as faith healers or "health and wealth" preachers and whatnot. They flaunt their affluence while profiting off of the backs of the poor.

Once scammers and other criminals get a taste, they're not going to stop just because they've got more money than their victims.

Ask Nigerians how they feel about economic opportunity living in a low trust society full of scammers.

I hope you’re aware scammers don’t have a moral code (they are most likely to be sociopaths) and do not exclusively target the wealthy.

Often the most likely victim of a scammer is their neighbor.

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