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Comment by K0balt | Hacker News Reader

I get presented with one or two of these a month. It’s easy to be calloused until you remember that these people are also victims, often in worse ways than you could ever be as one of their targets.

The best thing is just to ignore completely. If you engage at all, you risk worsening their situation by wasting their time, while if you do engage you might be saving someone else at their expense…. It’s lose/lose to engage in any way.

I’ve settled on just saying, hey, I’m sorry that they are in the situation they are in, and I hope they find the strength to make it out someday. That makes it clear that there is nothing to be gained while offering a tiny bit of hope and empathy, which I’m sure is in short supply.

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> If you engage at all, you risk worsening their situation by wasting their time, while if you do engage you might be saving someone else at their expense….

I don't understand what you are arguing for here? That they need to be allowed to scam someone else to avoid worsening their situation?

I'd say wasting their time is the best solution. It avoids giving the bosses info on what approaches works with who and helps makes runnning these sorts of operations uneconomical.

>That they need to be allowed to scam someone else to avoid worsening their situation?

There are two levels of scammers here. One is the low level scammer that is directly interfacing with you. In these situations they are also victims that are being held by violence. Simply put if bad things happen to these people or not the scam will remain as this level is rather cheap.

The bosses will observe from a higher level based on the successful feedback and direct their efforts there, much like a spammer that calculates the return on millions and millions of sent emails.

To catch the bosses we need nation state/global level enforcement against said people. The problem is they quite often pay their local governments handsomely to protect against them.

> the scam will remain as this level is rather cheap.

The less efficient you can make the process, the less you make it attractive to put resources into scaling it. Focus on making them generate the types of proof that aren't as easy to fabricate or at least give them as little information about why their initial approach failed as possible by playing along for a while after you catch on so they can't figure out how they got caught.

The victim you are being manipulated by is judged on their numbers, not on how hard they tried.

While what you are saying is theoretically effective, it assumes that enough people will do this to impact the business model… they won’t. So all you will accomplish is increasing human misery of trafficked slaves or their loved ones, while accomplishing nothing besides feeling a sense of retribution.

This problem requires state-level intervention, but it is mostly getting state level support.

The incentive alignment on this is not going to allow improvement. Perhaps if client nations imposed sanctions on nations that allowed this kind of industry, that could be changed.

> So all you will accomplish is increasing human misery of trafficked slaves or their loved ones, while accomplishing nothing besides feeling a sense of retribution.

You seem to be asserting that we should let them scam someone else. If you think that funding the scammers to protect their vicitm workers is moral then you should do it yourself rather than pawning the costs off on someone less aware who might unintentionally feed the scammers money they can't afford to lose.

I don’t think there’s any good answers here. Wasting their time will push their numbers down which, if they are not deemed productive, will almost certainly result in potentially horrific negative consequences for them or perhaps a loved one.

The kind of people that run criminal organisations generally don’t give credit for trying. It’s strictly numbers.

> The kind of people that run criminal organisations generally don’t give credit for trying. It’s strictly numbers.

Hence my argument that wasting the scammers' resources is the moral choice. If you help the bosses identify bad prospects (even if just yourself), then you make the activity more profitable and incentivize it.

You're arguing for sending money to criminal organizations which will make them more powerful. It's a terrible advice.

Agree that we are allowed to waste time. Sending money to scammers doesn't help anyone it just makes whoever is in charge of the criminal ring more powerful.

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