The root of the problem has something to do with the scammer.
High-trust societies are self-regulating scammers paradises. Filled with people citing Occam's Razor, and affinity fraud. Even worse, for minorities the procedures never get dropped, but they're still expected (pressured) to drop procedures to fit in, so they end up highly unequal societies.
Technically, we can read the banks' financial reports, the executives' background checks, the video recordings of their gold reserves... to decide which banks are less likely to run away with your money. But no one wants to live in such a place.
It's like the blockchain people trying to push blockchain for inventory management.
It’s particularly striking when I visit my parents’ house. I’m a millennial and I don’t even know my neighbors names and my parents, who are boomers, routinely talk, text and visit their neighbors. Their neighborhood (at least among the old people) feels like a community. Mine does not.
High trust communities need a lot of time to develop and a lot of annoying gossip and reputation stuff that can feel nosy. My grandparents were always keenly aware of "but what are they going to say?!", what will they think of the mother if this or that (if the child uses swear words, if people peek through the window and see a messy room, if there is weed in the garden, if a guest is not stuffed full with food, if the curtains are still closed at 7 am, indicating that they are lazy and sleeping in etc). They were always worried about optics and reputation. They were in turn always evaluating how everyone else lived and behaved, who helped and who didn't, who lives neatly and orderly, or who doesn't cook for his (edit: her) husband properly, or which man is a drunkard or gambler, who shows up to church and who doesn't etc. This is suffocating but necessary for the kind of reputation that prevents antisocial behavior.
Of course that's the other extreme, but the point is, you need 10+ years of living together and interacting, helping out in renovations, knowing the families, regularly sharing dinner etc to get it going. People move too often nowadays for this to be viable. And of course having to stay put has disadvantages for efficiency and adaptability, there's a reason why people are moving around.
At least they were forward-looking on social issues.
I myself have almost fallen for a well crafted phishing attack, the only reason I never ended up putting in my card details was that I was technical enough to know that a generic URL with no query params can't possibly have my tracking code pre-filled on a page I've never been to before. Had the scammers just made me enter my own tracking code, or if I didn't know what a query param is, I 100% would've fallen for it.
My point is that no one is immune to a momentary lapse in judgement or just plain bad luck. You can be an expert, extremely intelligent, whatever, all it takes is 5 minutes of weakness to get you, whether that's because you slept bad, had something else on your mind, weren't being diligent enough (it's impossible to be diligent 24/7 after all) or any other myriad list of reasons.
It's easy to put the blame on the victims here, but with generative AI the line between reality and fabrication is getting thinner and thinner. I'm a massive AI skeptic (just check my comments here), but I'm 100% positive that sooner or later we'll hit a stage where it's quite literally impossible to discern an AI fabrication from a real event unless you witnessed it in person yourself. You won't be able to trust images, or audio or even videos of your loved ones unless you basically see them send it to you, and even then there's no guarantee the final footage isn't doctored by the phone in some way.
So sure, people need to smarten up a bit, but we also need to start thinking about these problematic issues with AI sooner rather than later, cause things are only going to get worse, and fast.
Exactly! In my example for myself, I really was expecting a package, and I was expecting to be paying some extra duties/fees, so the phishing site asking me to enter card details didn't strike me as odd. The website itself looked exactly like how the real one looks, there were no grammatical errors or anything else that would tip you off that you're not looking at a legitimate page. The URL, in hindsight was a bit sketchy, but honestly I've received official legitimate communiques from various large companies from very weird URLs before so even then I didn't question the URL too hard, as it wasn't typosquatting or using the Turkish l instead of the regular l or anything like that, just something like dhl-express.com (I can't remember exactly what the URL was). It even had a proper header navbar that they carefully copied from the real thing.
Literally the only thing that tipped me off that it was a scam was that it prefilled the tracking code for me, but the link I had received had no query param as I mentioned and I've never visited the page before (so the tracking code wouldn't be persisted in localStorage or a cookie). I can very, very easily imagine someone less technical falling for it, and hell depending on circumstances I probably would've fallen for it if I was tired after a long day of work or something like that.