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Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

For online friendship to really work, we need to solve the problem of pig-butchering scammers (scammers who "make friends with you" and eventually get you to give them money somehow, e.g. by depositing money in a "crypto trading platform", sending money for a "health crisis", etc.)

This problem will only get worse with conversational AI agents/deepfakes/etc. For every human seeking genuine friendship there might be 100 AI agent scammers.

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Use apps like Snapchat to ensure they are who they say they are (if they refuse to verify via snap or insta's snap feature don't bother with them). If they are not local delete them immediately if they ever ask for money or give a sob story, no matter how long you've been chatting! Protect yourself and don't be a fool as the Internet can be amazing on one side (have many chat buds on Snap and other apps who have verified themselves too and never asked for money) and horrible on the other side(i dont give any others a chance).

>delete them immediately if they ever ask for money or give a sob story, no matter how long you've been chatting!

So your internet friends will delete you immediately in your moment of need? How reassuring.

Yup i will delete them as soon as they ask for money! I don't have friends who are needy in real life past Many years. Those in real life friends who have been needy knew not to ask me too much cause they knew I'd be judgey for their stupid decisions.

What do you mean snap feature? Can you explain?

Snapchat is app where you send live photos directly from your phone's camera. When you snap someone its a non-filtered picture you just took from your phone's camera (its how you look at that present moment) that you send to your contact and they will snap you back or vice versa. Great way to ensure neither are catfishing or are a scammer as scammer always use fake or AI pics.

I assume he means sending images, in real time taken from the built-in snapchat camera.

You cannot "snap" someone without actually snapping a picture. You cannot for example generate some AI image or photoshop something and send it, as it will appear as an attachment, instead of a snap.

Same thing happens IRL too. Not just literal scams but all kinds of ways people take advantage of one another.

Still doesn't change the arithmetic.

Something like half of Cambodia's GDP comes from scams. The internet is key to enabling this.

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