Scammers unleash flood of online gaming sites
krebsonsecurity.com
krebsonsecurity.com
This is called "advance fee" scam. It is hundreds of years old.
Also, do you think anyone cares that this site has less crypto propaganda.
> An advance-fee scam is a form of fraud and is a common scam. The scam works by promising the victim a large sum of money in return for a small upfront payment, which the fraudster claims will be used to obtain the large sum.
I have encountered it many times during my life, long before crypto was a thing.
But how does one get scammed over and over, having seen it before and knowing what the playbook looks like?
Don’t you usually pay for things before you receive them when shopping legitimately?
He sent a $1,000 check as "collateral" to some online "bank" to get a $10,000 "loan". I explained to him that this isn't how any of this works and he just paused and said, "Huh, so should put a stop payment on the second check?" He had sent them another $1,000 as some sort of second round of collateral for the loan or some other nonsense.
And I've known dumber people than him.
Tech experts things that everybody not as knowledgeable as them are "stupid". The reality is that everybody has blind spots and fall for a scam. Maybe, you will not fall for this one because you are an expert on technology but you may be victim of some other form of scam.
To call victims "idiots" is an attitude that solves nothing. We should make sure that people gets better on-line safety education with good trustful sources starting on school. This will be too late for some people that grow in a different time and may have problems identifying this type of on-line scams, but it is not for younger generations.
I assume that the "people who fall for this stuff" are "people like me". Even the best among us are only statistically less likely to get snookered, not immune.
The technology behind the scenes and UI design are all well made.
Actually gamifying is as predatory as gambling so what's your point again?
Ok look. If you put poison in food, it ceases to be food. It’s just poison at that point. Calling it food or even poisoned food is only an attempt to besmirch the good name of food. Food is always good for you. Any food that’s not good for you by definition isn’t food and no one can mistake it for food and any attempt at calling it food is just dishonest. Even having a discussion about food safety is nothing but a slippery slope to ban food they don’t like. Food is good.
Tell that to the government of Canada.
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-197.ht...
Words can have different meanings in different contexts.
This quote does not read like something I'd expect from a 17 year old.
Gambling is a dangerous addiction for some people. I don't think victim blaming is an effective response.
I think you nailed it. I made a comment about the new "religion" of games in the current youth in another discussion a while back. It really seems to me that there is an incredibly strong illogical loyalty to game companies in the current youth. So much that they ignore bad actors assuming that they must be just another game company, even after they get scammed. I'm guessing it has something to do with zero real value nature of loot box and skin gambling that is prevalent.
When I had cancer and I was in the hospital getting chemo I fell for a scam for the first time. It was an instagram ad for a cool steampunk looking keyboard with a price that was too good to be true. It was almost christmas, and I had felt guilty for not shopping, but my brain fog made it difficult to reason about. I ordered it and forgot all about it until it was too late to challenge. It was only $60, but it made it very clear to me how easy it would be to fall for something like this for a significant part of the population.
And that threshold will move over time, and as you say, depending on conditions. Even our personal defenses should not be predicated on being perfect all the time, and that's completely impractical at a societal level. And I worry about AI making it practical to target more people directly at scale and raise the sophistication on their end over the next 10-20 years.
Today I think I can say with a straight face that I'm quite sophisticated against this sort of scam. But the day will come, unless something gets me earlier, when my children will have to take my email account away if they want to inherit anything. Old age makes fools of us all. And who knows if something will get me earlier some other way. Unfortunately, invincible confidence in the here and now won't protect me.
At a guess, mostly people who for various reasons aren't allowed to gamble on more 'legit' sites, either because of their age or other local laws and jurisdictions. If you 'need' to gamble and are forbidden to gamble legally, then you will find a way to gamble illegally. Just look at the 'offline' world, before sports gambling became basically legal, lots of people would place bets with very shady operations.