Man, 83, tricked by scammers, gets 21 years to life for killing Uber driver
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
- It’s strange that we still haven’t setup any sort of authenticated form of communication with official parties. Email/phone call scams have been around for a long time. They’re very easy to fall prey to. There’s no reason our phones shouldn’t be able to inform us that a certain number is officially from the IRS, Cops, Verizon, etc.
- This is a form of Swatting. Delivery companies, and also the police, etc need to do better in ensuring the people demanding services are where they’re demanding the service and/or the person who lives there is aware and genuinely needs to be visited. - We need a bit of a broken windows policing for online/digital scams. The reason they are blowing up is there is hardly a risk of being caught. And the cost/benefit analysis probably suggests that th police really shouldn’t be involved in most of the individual cases or expend too many resources. However, this blows up the number of cases so the aggregate cost does indeed grow too high. So there needs to be an effort to prosecute and expend resources even on low level cases so the criminals get the message that they’re not gonna get away with it.
Everything else is band aids on a broken one.
If you want "mechanics", that would be an increased focus on community, with positive community best-behavior incentives (reputation, pride in work, solidarity, rewarding good behavior) and negative ones (shame, ostracism, punishing bad actors), social cohesion, and an emphasis on duty and morality, while reducing cynicism, and selfish individualism. This includes the appropriate role models and media/entertainment landscape.
Considering that the scammers in this instance haven't been identified, there's a good possibility that the phone scammers belong to an out-group (e.g. infamous Indian/Nigerian scammers) of the victim's society. In fact, it seems to me that trusting more (because the in-group are honest) without appropriate safeguards preventing out-group members from impersonating in-group members exacerbates the problem. So I do not really see the connection between your solution and the problem.
Because this would add compliance and regulatory overhead which the Telco industry has lobbied against, and activist organizations like the EFF will screetch muh liberties while taking donations from those very companies, and HNers will dutifully complain about the descent into authoritarianism.
Additionally, a large portion of smaller essentially fly-by-night VoIP vendors and MSPs have an incentive to not ask questions about who is purchasing their services despite attempts at regulation by the FCC [0].
[0] - https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-24-1235A1.pdf
If you sell numbers to Indian scammers, then you take the hit for all the scams, because why are you selling phone numbers to scammers?
My alarm company had me come up with challenge and response words. Yet when they call they want me to say my word first. Like how do I know they are who they say they are? Caller ID can easily be spoofed.
So so much for that idea...
If they call, you say you word, then they can't authenticate themselves to you, it seems like you must then change your word.
For active man-in-the-middle, I don't think this protocol is designed to protect against that.
My brother (a lawyer!) wanted to sue the person whose name is on the check! I had to convince him not to bother; that the person's account that the check was deposited to was probably some other victom who was tricked into giving the bank login information away and his account was being unwittingly used to launder checks. The scammer was most likely overseas, but pays U.S. Post Office employees to steal envelopes that likely contain checks and send images (See https://www.justice.gov/usao-ct/pr/former-postal-employee-se... for example)
The bank reversed the check but we had to get a notarized statement from my mom, and it was a hassle for a 92 year old.
As far as this case goes, guns should only be used in self-defense when there's an immediate danger. Not punitively. This guy's life wasn't immediately being threatened and he deserves to have the book thrown at him.
*Punitive* use of force.
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Batman usually doesn't do too badly. Not only is it fiction but they're often against fiction level villains who are 'hardened' criminals in literal senses. Even then the violence tends to stop at the point where actual resistance stops. (They get tied up and delivered to the cops with maybe the black eye used in the initial apprehension.)
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Contrast this with what we see repeatedly on TV when poorly trained and poorly supervised law enforcement officers beat down or outright murder someone until they're not just not resisting anymore but are outright _unable_ to resist at all. Such excessive use of force in a professional context should also be a crime that is punished with congruent weight for the breach trust in a public official absent extenuating circumstances ('I had an emotional reaction' leading directly to deadly force should not be such a circumstance).
I do recall a highly unfortunate case of someone from WA state who was on some combination of super drugs such that there didn't appear to be a reasonable application of force to result in a successful outcome. More and better tools might help. Maybe net launchers and methods of incapacitating someone at a bit of a distance for mutual safety?
Jesus, it's almost like Kaczynski was onto something.
I had agreed when I read your comment before I read the article. But after reading the article it feels like this is missing the mark. We're bumping up against the equivalent of gang stalking / stochastic terrorism here - someone being harassed through digital channels and put in a mental state where they're fearing for their life in the physical world.
A similar case of the phenomenon happened in NY a while back [0] with someone being killed for driving up to the wrong house at night, with the shooter presumably having been pumped full of general fearmongering by mass media. But the stark difference in that case it was the shooter's own media diet creating insular paranoia whereas here it was personally-targeted digital communications making the shooter feel threatened by the person ostensibly acting as an agent of those threatening him.
This is a tragic situation for sure, but falling back to applying fundamentalist judgement to emergent behavior is a mistake.
But what does "100% responsible for its use" even mean, modulo mens rea? If instead of an Uber courier, this had been someone knowingly working for a local gang who acted physically threatening, we would be viewing the shooting as a lot more justified, right?
I'd say that the shooter's perception was halfway to this, despite how we can Monday morning quarterback that the shooter should have perceived the human being they were aiming at was cowering and backing away. Human perception is terribly biased towards confirming what we think we should see.
Taking a step back, I'm not trying to excuse the shooter here, especially in any kind of fully-exonerating manner. But rather I'd like to avoid the situation being wrapped up and tied off in a neat little bag of "personal responsibility" where an 83 year-old gets "21 years" [0], and we ignore the more fundamental issues that created such a tragic situation in the first place.
Rather it's the surveillance industry's digital intermediation that makes it possible for the victim to be both perceived as an aggressive threat, while ultimately just being a regular peaceful person doing basic job after basic job (while shouldering an extreme amount of long-tail risk!)
(Also there should probably be some age limit at which there starts to be a recurring competence examination for firearms, like there should be for driving, or having signature authority on a bank account for that matter. But uh, good luck with that!)
[0] IRS life expectancy is 9 years, outside of prison.
You can't just say that the people actually doing the thing (whatever that thing may be) are in the right because they are doing their jobs otherwise they become a black hole for infinite liability. You need to accept that the dead person was wrong to be there collecting that package at which point is becomes a question of who dispatched them (obviously not themselves in this case) on what grounds and under what circumstances, etc, etc and how did it lead to this failure.
Think about this like an industrial ancient, not some heartstring grabbing rage bait. There will always be crazy old men. Sure, send him to prison or whatever but how can the chain of events that lead to this particular crazy old man killing someone under these circumstances be broken. Uber needs to tighten their shit up, so does the phone system, etc, etc.
This guy didn’t just shoot the delivery person whom they were afraid of.
He didn’t let her drive away even after she was clearly scared, explained she was simply an Uber driver, showed no evidence of weaponry and just wanted to drive away.
There’s a reason he wasn’t just convicted of killing the Uber driver but also of kidnapping.
edit: pic from car right before he fires first shot
https://atlantablackstar.com/2026/02/03/ohio-83-year-old-man...
But to just leave it at that is to be an enabler of the scammers, there's a lot more that went into teeing up this situation that ought to be prevented.
What if he'd just have fallen for the scam instead of shooting anyone? That's still not an acceptable outcome.
The amount of people being wraponized into doing terrible things for others is insane.
This is kind of a gun story but not really IMO.
This is kind of like a story like the people who SWAT others and sometimes people die and sometimes they are held accountable.
If someone is committed to presenting a false narrative for a long time they can manipulate people into doing things. That's not new, but it's certainly more accessible than ever and nobody is ready for it =(
Really is mind boggling when you look at it as "fractional evil". Some hypothetical clerk may make 99 "could go either way" decisions one way or the other to little ill effect and 1/100 or maybe 1/1000 of the time their decisions costs someone tens of thousands of dollars for no good reason for it could have gone either way.
How much of society's wealth is lost to such endeavors?
One wonders how much "evil" exists only because there exists some amount of legitimate activity it can be mixed among to dilute it enough that nobody cares.
This story is headline news because it’s rare. The man shouldn’t have had a gun. That’s where a confused elderly man went from deserving sympathy to contempt.
When the elderly man called them out, the scammers responded with threats and this apparently triggered the elderly man into (unfortunate) action.
Have you heard about the Epstein files? Was that a failure of multiculturalism?
Not only that, some people from western cultures are also preying on poor women in 3rd world countries with sex tourism.
Western cultures are supporting the rape of resources and corruption in poor countries around the world.
Capitalism, as practiced in western cultures, is in many ways a sad scam that leads to a lot misery for a lot of people.
These are just a few examples to show: all cultures have bad in them. No culture is good
PS: The west - is no longer important though, the middle east is going to blow itself up, the far-east is where the futuri is at.
That doesnt sound objective to me at all.
It is partly also due to all the guns and the shooting-obsessed culture, folks. The way people are quick to use guns is not normal. I was shocked by the recent ICE shootings.
And the fact the woman was of an ethnicity most associate with crime didn't help either, I daresay. The man probably had his biases confirmed and resorted to deadly violence without much tought.
I feel like I’m missing something here. What ethnicity? And why do “most” associate it with crime?
The phone number is dead, and the only last need for it is scammers and companies that want to record you but you not record them.
You can’t sent a Fedwire with only account number [1]. And this woman wasn’t shot because of wires, the man was told to hand over hard cash.
Voice telephone, at least before TTS and LLM, also gives the humans a fighting chance at discerning emotion and lies.
Like it or not, the PSTN is still king in many regards. I find myself using telephone for contact more often than ever.
For example, medical offices, despite demanding all our contact info, will use all at their disposal to remind us of appointments, bills, test results, etc. Voice telephone is probably still the best way to negotiate and schedule an appointment, and if you really need to speak to a specific nurse about those labs, it's not going to be email.
You know all those Chat Buddy LLMs that corps have put on their websites as front-line CSR? They are usually worthless, because once you glitch out and need unique care or something, the chat LLM or the human chat CSR is disempowered and unable to help. I can't count how many times I thought I'd use the website or chat for convenience (or after-hours) and they wasted 30+ minutes of my time before admitting I must use a voice telephone number for contact for that particular issue. Even with Waymo, or my e-Bank with no branches: calling via voice is the only way to connect the two parties who are empowered to work issues and solve problems.
In fact it is even more pervasive, as there is more WFH and the mobile phone is ubiquitous. Your contact in a company may have an extension and a cell number. They may not be at their "desk" but picking up the kids, so they're on their cell, and hands-free, they're using voice. So the PSTN is still the primary channel within the company, as well as with the outside world. Sure, set up a Zoom call, or a Google Meet. It's not for everyone. Requires software infrastructure, advance consent and planning. Won't replace PSTN.
PSTN is like IPv4. While there are plenty of new modes of communication, the PSTN is still universal, rather mandatory, and indispensable, so I do not see PSTN-voice going away, but the telecom standards are still developing, such as STIR/SHAKEN, to combat the fraud and spam.