Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand who keeps falling for this stuff. The victims are not all 90 year old grannies suffering from cognitive decline.

View on HN

Large of law numbers. There are a lot of idiots out there. I had a buddy; super nice, super funny guy, late 20's, but financially an idiot.

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.

> There are a lot of idiots out there.

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 everything is predatory towards my wallet until proven otherwise

Eventually they would have collected $20k of collateral for the loan

I've got a coworker who fell for, "You won a free electric drill from Home Depot! Click here and enter your credit card". I discovered his predicament when he was telling me how he managed to get an overseas vendor to agree to reduce a credit card charge he didn't recognize in half. That got me to pull a bit on the thread and the whole story unraveled. What it came down to, apparently, was simple gullibility. He didn't know if the drill prize was legit, but he just didn't think he would be targeted in a scam, so he figured, "Why not? Worst that happens is I don't get my drill."

But all he had to do in this case was dispute the fraudulent charge on his credit card? Credit cards in that sense are a lot safer than anything crypto - you have the opportunity to dispute and reverse the transaction. And it's easy to do as well - it just takes a couple of seconds to login to the credit card website and file the dispute.

It's probably the law of probabilities at play, like with 419 scams. If you cast a sufficiently big net, chances of catching something in it are decent

I'm pretty sure I fell for a phishing scam a couple decades ago — my eBay password was compromised (fortunately there were no significant consequences). Once upon a time I also got tricked by the phone company into ordering stuff I didn't intend to. And while I don't think I've fallen for anything recently and am pretty security focused, it still takes mental energy to avoid all the traps.

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.

If you thought you had won thousands of dollars you would likely be tempted to pay a hundred to get that out.

Well there's the problem, who honestly thinks they won thousands of dollars from an ad?

Sadly, I have a family member who is susceptible to these types of scams. They’ve been duped too many times to count. They’re overly eager to believe they’re exceptional and that good fortune is due them. No amount of explaining has had any impact on their beliefs for the past fifteen years. It’s heart-wrenching.

I can almost understand the replies to this thread where the victim was never exposed to a scam before and didn't know what to look for. It still sounds wild but I guess people are sheltered. My kid was scammed out of some virtual pet in an online game at six years old and learned that whenever someone offers something to you, but requires you to give up something first, it's a scam.

But how does one get scammed over and over, having seen it before and knowing what the playbook looks like?

> whenever someone offers something to you, but requires you to give up something first, it's a scam.

Don’t you usually pay for things before you receive them when shopping legitimately?

I had a girlfriend years ago that was an extreme optimist. She was a very intelligent person, very outgoing and very successful. She believed everyone was good, and no one ever did anything bad. We got into an argument once over this exact same thing - she thought she'd won a new laptop from some sort of popup ad; all she had to do was fill out some sort of form with a bunch of private info. I told her it was an obvious scam, and she got really defensive, telling me that I'm always so cynical and if I expect the worst from people, that's all I'm gonna get. I talked her out of submitting the private info to the form, but yeah, I can totally understand how reasonably intelligent people would fall victim to something like that. There's different motivations, but for my ex-girlfriend, it was her refusal to accept that people can be bad (take advantage of others).

I punched that damn monkey, where's my prize?

EVERYONE KNOWS YOU DON’T PUNCH THE MONKEY!

One would think that the latter group aren't generally holding crypto in the first place.

Im gravitating towards tge 12 year old problem: while theres tons of other demographics, 12 year olds drive a lot of the grift economy. Its easiest to see in gaming with microtransactions and preorders. You can read hundreds of well articulated reasons not to engage these things yet they continue unabated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com