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Comment by jmcgough | Hacker News Reader

The live scammers targeting kids are pretty vile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYTPI57GLac

Seems like it's just a game of whack-a-mole, nothing is really being done to stop scammers from making new accounts and continuing their scams.

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The only defense is parenting. And no, I'm not one of those childless people who tells parents to parent better.

Its not the only defence, important and necessary, but also I think educating children about these risks in school is important (my kids' school does okay at this), and government regulation and criminalising such activity is useful too.

"Parenting" is a nebulous concept and at least to me, it also includes pushing for better laws for children. Nobody would think it's reasonable to allow stores to sell cigarettes to children and tell parents "if you don't like it, just don't let your kids smoke".

Nicotine is probably the worst example possible to argue that laws prevent children from using and becoming addicted to something.

There's also heroine and fentanyl, both are regulated by the law.

Heroin is illegal for people of all ages, and those laws don't work either.

Fair enough. Alcohol is regulated for children.

Laws don't have to be enforced perfectly to be effective in most cases.

Why is it the worst example? Sure, the laws don't 100% prevent children from smoking, but certainly they have an effect. I'm not using it as an example of a perfectly effective law, I'm using it to make the point that it wouldn't be reasonable to say "parenting is the only defense against smoking" and scrap the law.

It's a bad example because the last 5+ years in UK/US have seen an epidemic of child vaping and nicotine addiction when it was illegal for them to have it, while the Tobacco companies fight tooth and nail against regulation on fruity flavours and bright colours.

I don't want to scrap laws. In Britain we're 20 years ahead of the US on this (see Gambling Act 2005). Gambling laws are written by the gambling industry so no parent should think that the law will do anything to help their child.

So, in summary, the laws against nicotine are useless, which is why tobacco companies are fighting against introducing new laws?

And the UK is 20 years ahead of the US in regulation, by having introduced a law against gambling that's useless?

Okay...

This is the other side of the coin when it comes to the push for ID verification.

Another way is to simply disallow certain ways to make money. It doesn't have to be complicated and it shouldn't be controversial.

There are really only two businesses in the modern economy, fraud and gambling. Some are both.

Porn?

gambling (intermittent dopamine hit)

Don't forget addiction.

A lot of it is straight up sponsored by card makers too

Can you back this claim up? I don't think they need to do this. After all, WotC was doing pretty well way before these videos became widespread.

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