Affiliates flock to scam gambling machine | Hacker News Reader

Affiliates flock to scam gambling machine

krebsonsecurity.com

110 pointsmikhael30 comments

Mandatory reminder that YC itself has funded and is promoting (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/yotta) a company that not only lost people's "savings" (despite misleading promises of FDIC insurance - which didn't actually cover their predictable failure mode: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/21/synapse-collapse-nearly-109m...) but is now operating an outright gambling scheme that is typically seen in unregulated Eastern-European casinos: https://members.withyotta.com/moonshot/.

YC is a scam mill, always has been. Every now and then one of those scams turns into a real business. It’s an effective model.

This mentality is why I refuse to work in Silicon Valley. You can fool some of the people all of the time.

But with Fake AI - tech has finally found its "waterloo". I wont feel a damn bit sorry for any of these people when it blows.

I didn't know about Yotta, and looked it up …

Adam Moelis told CNBC in June 2024 that 85,000 Yotta customers, with a combined $112 million in deposits, could not access their funds.

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

Eep!

> despite misleading promises of FDIC insurance

I never really understood why people thought this was misleading. FDIC insurance would insure against the underlying bank failing, not Yotta or their fintech partners.

I never saw any marketing material claiming that Yotta (or their fintech partner: Synapse) was a licensed bank.

There seems to be an analogous concept of the Second Law of Thermodynamics - everything in society will tend towards scams if not actively opposed.

This is like a fractal scam, you've got gambling against the house (already a scam) with crypto (so there's no regulators to stop them rigging the games) and then instead of waiting for statistics to take their course they just run away with everyone's money.

Don't forget the final dimension of the scam where they also scam the affiliates by doing a rug-pull. Scam-ception.

Once you realize that many scams are scams against those looking to scam others it all becomes clear.

Then is it ethical to create a scam to scam people who are trying to scam others?

Enroll in my online course, to get the answer to that any many other questions.

That's what the scammers tell themselves; but those trying to scam are often not the smartest of the bunch, so you are taking advantage of them in some way.

Gambling against the house is not in itself a scam as long as the games aren't rigged and the odds and payouts are as advertised. A game with negative EV is not a scam if it's entered into knowingly by a player.

For my money, games where people pay to win worthless digital goods are far more scammy than a fair game of Blackjack in Vegas where you actually might come out up.

The other aspects you mentioned are the scam.

Ironic that crypto gives people the tools for provably fair gambling

Scams definitely seem to be more entropic than honest enterprise.

Without regulation and enforcement many people will give the buyer less and less until they give the buyer nothing and it winds up a scam.

Seems like a recent thing IMO. Social media has caused some people's perception of reality to get so far out of whack that they think being denied Ferrari and a beach house is an act of persecution, and they are willing to go to any lengths go right that wrong.

The optimal strategy in a resource acquisition game with no rules is usually just to kill all the other players. This results in really bad nash equilibria where everyone is dead.

I think about this as entropic decay - the lowest energy state of a social system (Hobbes' state of nature).

Lucky it is possible to create social and economic systems that use cooperation to produce better individual and group utility (dissipative structures). But there is a particular arm of politics that is currently dismantling these to feast on their cores.

Because on average individuals trust each other and a scam usually presents itself as a bit cheaper or a bit better enough that it acts as an attractor.

I initially read the "scam" in the title as a verb. I.e. affiliates are scamming a gambling machine. Which would have been a much happier story IMO.

Any person or site that asks you to send money in order to “verify” yourself is a scam.

Point taken, but USPS asks for $2 for an address change for verification.

You can change your address with USPS with no fee. You just fill out a form and mail it to Postmaster, $your_town. I did it just last year.

The $2 is only if you choose to do it online.

Bonus: Doing it with paper means you don't give your information to the address change web site operator, which sells it on to a million companies.

Those coupons from change of address used to be sooooo good that I’d move from apt 1 to apt 2 (of my single family home) every few years just to get them.

wouldnt it be nice if we techies could come up collectively with a protocol that ran a decentralized set of model virtual machines MVMs as i call it that would track incoming payments to a website and outgoing money from a website and determine a score as to how scammy a given website was and like DNS records, this score would be taken into account to mark those scammy websites all over the world whose DNS records would be filtered out so that genuine users never run into them

Hope that part of the collective action, is coming up with very robust hosting.

It’s likely that these MVMs would become a fairly significant target.

It would be very simple to build such a thing if you could analyze everyone's payments. With total surveillance, you can have total safety! Why would you want privacy when you could have safety instead?

The ironic part is that the government already tracks all payments everywhere in realtime and ingests them into a huge database. They could provide such a threat intelligence feed but that would tip their hand and remind the public that they have precisely zero financial privacy even if they're not suspected of a crime.

I suspect there is some /sarcasm in the parent post, the “techies” have already shipped crypto public ledgers which these scam sites use to steal their victim’s funds. Can it be sufficiently de-anonymised to do this analysis?

have you just described web3 / blockchain ...

Anything with crypto has a scam smell

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