[HN Gopher] What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number te...
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What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
Author : minimaxir
Score : 256 points
Date : 2022-07-01 17:25 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (maxread.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (maxread.substack.com)
| teeray wrote:
| I love trolling these scammers by being the right number they
| never expected. One time I had one looking for a price list on
| precious materials. I sent them prices for Adamantium, Tiberium,
| and Xen crystal. The confusion was fantastic.
| spc476 wrote:
| Two weeks ago I received an email saying I had funds in Bitcoin
| and I could cash out, with login details for a website account
| [1]. I knew this must be a scam, but for the life of me, I
| couldn't figure out the angle. Now I'm thinking it's a similar
| type of scam.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ_flb9tGuc
| WalterSear wrote:
| Probably a wallet drainer. Connect it with your wallet and
| empties it.
|
| https://blog.confiant.com/how-one-crypto-drainer-template-fa...
| kccqzy wrote:
| Any person who is remotely knowledgeable about bitcoin should
| know that there is no need to "connect your wallet" or reveal
| your private key to receive bitcoins. To receive, you only
| need the address which is basically a public key.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Ah, about 20 years ago I think a relative responded to a, I think
| it was, an "I'm here at the airport, don't see you anywhere" kind
| of email. This was before spam filters got good, so that email
| address was basically kaput.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I often do respond to such messages pretending I am the person
| they're trying to reach. It confuses them and they stumble over
| their script.
| rdtsc wrote:
| That's what I do when I am bored. I figure if I can keep
| engaged a bit longer they'll have less time to scam others.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| I basically just send them all a big copy-pasta full of banned
| Chinese terms like 6/4, Free Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Winnie the
| Pooh, etc; they often leave me alone after that or act confused
| wpietri wrote:
| This warms my heart! I'm going to start pretending like I know
| them, sending Wikipedia links to those topics, and asking what
| they think.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Well researched for sure, good read as I had some of these
| recently too and am glad now to understand more about it.
|
| What I do want to highlight is the deeper "why", and that is
| "why" are these people doing this? There must be a fundamental
| survival mechanism here, in a larger chain. These people may not
| have opportunities, the ones holding others captive. What kind of
| environment is needed to create this type of behavior? Surely we
| must address that at the core of it all. I think it comes down to
| basic resources, and this is where I think the vision of Jacque
| Fresco and The Venus Project can come into play. Which is to
| create a resource-based economy and evolve as a civilization to
| taking care of one another, it is a form of democratic socialism,
| which I think can solve this type of issue, and help us all be
| more integrated and happier.
| kelnos wrote:
| I feel like if someone has the resources to kidnap a bunch of
| people and hold them captive in a large, heavily-guarded office
| building, while forcing them to scam people over the internet,
| they probably have the resources to do something not-scammy.
|
| Stuff like this just erodes my faith in humanity. Humans are
| not fundamentally good. So many people want to prey on the weak
| or gullible, not only because it can be easy and lucrative, but
| because they get off on that kind of power dynamic.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I had one of these exchanges recently which I had some fun with,
| because it was so weird, and they made a point to use a photo of
| a beautiful woman:
|
| Lady: Doctor Lucy? My puppy is very slow and does not eat dog
| food, can you make an appointment for me?
|
| Me: Unfortunately I do not treat puppies. Only adult dogs,
| adolescent foxes, and elderly coyotes.
|
| Lady: Sorry, I added the wrong person, I just checked the number
| and I saved the wrong number for Dr. Lucy.
|
| I left it at that. I wonder if I should try and bait the scammer.
| I do love messing with scammers. After the last message I was
| thinking maybe it was legitimately a wrong number.
| jesterpm wrote:
| These, and the spoofed number phone calls where the other side
| just hangs up when you answer. For the phone calls, I just
| assumed that someone was trying to build a database of phone
| numbers that do or do not answer for some other/future purpose...
| chefandy wrote:
| Based on the delays in these sorts of calls, I'd guess that
| they're robocalls which dial way more numbers than they have
| operators for and try to filter out no-answer and voicemail
| pickups automatically. Then if you pick up, they route you to
| an operator. If there's no operator available, it just drops
| the call rather than reveal which annoying company just wasted
| your time. That way the operators-- clearly the most expensive
| link in the chain -- are always engaged. Just a guess though!
|
| Even if that's wrong, I'm sure you're right that they collect
| caller-pick-up stats. I imagine even cursory vetting would
| dramatically increase the resale value of their lead list.
| musesum wrote:
| South African YouTuber with Chinese wife, and thus knows the
| language, plays along:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ_flb9tGuc
| tintor wrote:
| This would be a great way to monetize GPT-3!
|
| (this is a joke)
| muststopmyths wrote:
| I got one of these, almost convincing enough except she said she
| lived in SF. I asked where in SF and she said Alcatraz. I almost
| wanted to keep the conversation going just to hear more about her
| life on the island
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Almost sounds like a cry for help. O_o Probably not though.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I am ordinarily loathe to link to reddit, but
|
| https://reddit.com/r/scams
|
| has a wealth of information and examples of these
| johnklos wrote:
| Simple: it's time to stop using phone numbers.
|
| I use Apple's Messages. If someone spams me, I report them.
| They're blocked and have to go through the extra work of setting
| up a new account to try again.
|
| Compare this with, say, Google. Gmail lets spammers / scammers
| have limitless accounts and they don't do shit when an account is
| reported for spam. You can block and report Gmail spammers all
| day long and you'll get nowhere.
|
| WhatsApp apparently still uses phone numbers, and they're owned
| by a company that wants engagement at ANY price. Are any of us
| really so dumb that we think they're going to do the right thing?
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| I'd give anything to get rid of my phone, but almost everyone
| you do business with (DMV, electric/gas/water company, etc)
| expects you to have one. Same thing with USPS and their paper
| spam. At this point they're little more than government-
| mandated spam delivery channels. Private companies are handling
| the spam situation infinitely better.
| 0des wrote:
| You aren't mandated to have mail or phone.
|
| Edit: Noting a lot of downvotes on this comment, which is
| odd. I can only conclude one thing- don't be Amish on HN.
|
| Perhaps this could be an opportunity to explore a different
| way of life, and a different community structure. It is not
| all horse buggies and barns.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6SlJZk5guI&list=PLEyPgwIPkH.
| ..
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you are mandated to have mail in the US, or
| rather the mails are mandated to deliver to you. IIRC it's
| constitutional.
| 0des wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure you are mandated to have mail in the
| US, or rather the mails are mandated to deliver to you.
| IIRC it's constitutional.
|
| You'd be incorrect. Ask your postmaster.
| criddell wrote:
| They are correct. The USPS has a universal service
| obligation. If you send a letter or parcel to any address
| in the US, the post office must deliver it.
| 0des wrote:
| I respectfully disagree. The postal service is held to a
| standard of service by a USO - Universal Service
| Obligation. [0]
|
| This means it is an org mandated to accept your request
| for service at a reasonable price regardless of your
| location of residence. There is an important distinction
| between that, and being mandated to receive mail service.
| That is not a stipulation of being alive in USA.
|
| [0] - https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/postal-service-and-
| its-obligati...
| zdragnar wrote:
| Just imagine, every drifter, nomad and homeless person
| were required to set up a mailbox. It's just silly.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Just imagine, every drifter, nomad and homeless person
| were required to set up a mailbox. It's just silly.
|
| They don't have to. Just have mail sent to:
| Joe/Jane Drifter General Delivery
| TownNearWhereYouSquat, <State> <ZipCode of post office>
|
| Or at least that's how it's been done for decades.
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| Sure, I could move to the woods and live off wild berries
| for the rest of my days. But if you want to be part of
| modern society, your bank will mail you your credit card,
| and your water company will text you a code to login and
| pay. Realistically, what choice do you have?
| the_only_law wrote:
| > Sure, I could move to the woods and live off wild
| berries for the rest of my days
|
| You'd probably just be removed from someones property
| eventually.
| 0des wrote:
| Do you not encounter Amish people where you live?
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| I wasn't offended and didn't downvote you. But the Amish
| do receive mail and use phones.
|
| First article I found: https://amishamerica.com/do-amish-
| use-telephones/
| zdragnar wrote:
| Every community decides for itself what technologies to
| adapt. The nearest to me have a single phone booth in the
| front yard of one member's house. Anyone wants to use the
| phone, they go there to make a call, and most only use it
| if they need to make an appointment at a hospital for
| serious illnesses.
|
| Others not quite as close are a fair degree more liberal
| in what they adopt, while I imagine there's probably a
| few that are more strict.
| 0des wrote:
| > But the Amish do receive mail and use phones.
|
| I am assuming you don't mean to generalize to the degree
| that is being conveyed at first glance in your explainer
| comment.
|
| Amish people are not a monolith. As a culture it is quite
| a spectrum, from Beachy to Swartzentruber.
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| My experience is based on visits to an Amish town in Ohio
| when I was growing up in the 2000s. I distinctly remember
| being surprised to see they used phones and rode in cars.
| But that was a long time ago and only one town of many. I
| didn't mean to generalize all Amish communities.
| 0des wrote:
| No worries. It takes all kinds. Who knows, maybe you re-
| examine the culture and find some things you'd like to
| take home to your community.
| kube-system wrote:
| I don't think I agree with that. I rarely get scams via USPS,
| never get explicit or potentially damaging content, the
| senders are all in my legal jurisdiction, and the spam
| arrives once per day in a manageable format. Almost all of
| the content is from businesses in my local area, businesses
| that I have previously shopped at, or political ads.
|
| Electronically from private companies I frequently get a
| larger volume of spam, malware, scams, explicit content, and
| most of them originate outside of my legal jurisdiction to
| evade the law. And it's a steady stream all day, on multiple
| mediums.
|
| I'd take 10x the amount of spam in my mailbox if I could get
| rid of all of the rest of the garbage I'm bombarded with. I
| obviously would rather not have any of it, but the hoops you
| have to jump through to send snail-mail inherently filters
| out most of the worst garbage.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I have the idea (maybe wrongly) that people don't often use
| the USPS for scams because committing fraud by mail is a
| federal crime, and the postal service actually has
| inspectors with police powers who don't fool around once
| they get on the scent.
| xmprt wrote:
| > I'd take 10x the amount of spam in my mailbox if I could
| get rid of all of the rest of the garbage I'm bombarded
| with
|
| I for one would not. Digital spam is easy to deal with.
| There are automated filters, easy ways to block them, and
| the few that slip through are simple to deal with. Mailbox
| spam is physically painful to deal with and it's a massive
| waste of paper.
| kube-system wrote:
| Email is the least of my problems. If you know of any
| good filters for SMS, phone calls, LinkedIn, Snapchat,
| Instagram, etc, I'd be very interested. I have to mute
| all of them because it is a constant stream of garbage
| from all of them.
| rglullis wrote:
| For Snapchat/LinkedIn/Instagram: just close your account
| and put email filters?
| krallja wrote:
| Paper is a renewable resource, and also a carbon sink.
| Throw it in the garbage and consider it carbon
| sequestration.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Unfortunately I'd bet that the paper production and
| delivery to your mailbox emits much more carbon than the
| paper itself sequesters.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Long term, the paper will decompose while sitting in the
| landfill and then release the carbon back into the
| atmosphere. Even temporary sequestration is beneficial,
| but I don't know whether it is still a net positive once
| you factor in the resources spent growing the wood,
| mailing the paper, and transporting it to a landfill.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Apple Messages could have become an open standard to replace
| SMS, but they deliberately chose not to in the interest of
| locking in existing users, and locking out anyone too poor to
| own an iPhone. I'm not exaggerating, this is public knowledge.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mn2qyj/apple_decli...
|
| So which one is "owned by a company that wants engagement at
| any price" again?
| oefrha wrote:
| These days I get a lot more spam through Apple services, mostly
| in the form of iCloud shared albums, than I get SMS spam.
| cglong wrote:
| > Compare this with, say, Google.
|
| Google Messages proactively detects spam texts and sends them
| to a spam folder, so I don't get notifications about these
| messages at all :)
| gnopgnip wrote:
| Google voice has a poor shaken stir implementation that only
| blocks the most egregious spam calls and sms and does not let
| users choose to be more strict. It also does not support
| blocking phone numbers by pattern/prefix.
| quadyeast wrote:
| Apple Messages breaks if you temporarily use a different phone
| number on your cell. All chats in old threads were broken off
| into different threads. It was a disaster. You would think that
| since Apple knows this is still the same user that this would
| not happen?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I don't want one company to be the arbiter of all
| communications everywhere. Phone numbers work fine.
| eropple wrote:
| Phone numbers have the same problem as email, though: because
| "everyone" is responsible, no one is responsible. The deluge
| of spam texts and calls to my public phone number is
| genuinely unpleasant and frustrating to deal with as, like,
| _a person living in the world_.
|
| I practically don't use email anymore for those reasons, and
| a phone number hangs around only because right now I can't
| not have one for legal-type reasons.
| walrus01 wrote:
| email, at least, you can fully implement your own antispam
| solution in whatever way you want
|
| at one extreme, you can just point the mx records for your
| domain at office365 or gsuite or similar and let them
| handle it
|
| at the other extreme, you can point the mx records at your
| own mailserver you admin yourself and do absolutely
| anything you want with the incoming smtp mail flow for
| antispam measures, sorting, filtering, categorization, risk
| analysis.
|
| the ordinary person even if they work for a telecom
| _cannot_ implement their own phone number at one of the
| most fundamental levels of the pstn, because they don 't
| run their own ss7 switch.
|
| if you control your own DID and interface with it from a
| sip trunk to a trusted provider, running your own voip
| system, you can do a lot with custom routing/antispam
| measures on incoming call flow, but nowhere near to the
| extent that you can with email.
| rglullis wrote:
| The way to solve this is by educating the people in your
| network about better security practices, not by giving away
| control over your communications just because of
| "convenience".
| eropple wrote:
| "Just get everyone to be perfect, including random
| companies who require a phone number for validation, and
| if a single failure ever happens you're going to be
| spammed forever in a way that is directly interruptive
| and intrusive instead of one in a list of messages in a
| queue."
|
| I don't know how to say this any more nicely than this:
| this is a permanently losing solution with no redeeming
| qualities to such a degree that it makes me wonder at how
| in-good-faith the suggestion actually is with regards to
| solving the stated problem.
| rglullis wrote:
| The point is not to "be perfect", the point is to raise
| the standard of acceptable practices, to make it harder
| to abuse it.
|
| Just as an example: phone numbers should not be used for
| validation of anything as they are public. So companies
| who are requiring phones for any kind of authentication
| should be shamed into changing their practices, much like
| we learned to not trust companies that stored passwords
| in plain text, or use "recovery questions".
| eropple wrote:
| The abuse is that without sufficient guardrails a ten-
| digit number can be used to bother me at all hours of the
| day or night _unless_ I want to be less accessible to
| people who I may need to hear from, _not_ that it 's used
| as an authentication source (which, yeah, not great, but
| also not the end of the world).
|
| Out-of-band authentication aside, a company is going to
| retain my phone number to be able to contact me. So are
| my parents. Somebody is also going to inevitably leak it
| because _security is difficult_. Breaking the
| capabilities of bad actors, then, is a requirement. You
| have entirely ignored this in favor of blame-the-user
| rhetoric and I can 't come up with a great reason why
| you'd blame every user for a systemic failure other than
| that the system cannot be repaired.
| rglullis wrote:
| > Somebody is also going to inevitably leak it because
| security is difficult.
|
| Phone numbers were and will always be assumed to be
| public. (Yellow pages are still a thing)
|
| > unless I want to be less accessible to people who I may
| need to hear from.
|
| You don't need to be less accessible to anyone. Your
| phone can and should be able to filter things for you.
|
| And is not just a matter of setting up number filtering,
| I am talking about implementing changes in the
| application layer. One could imagine, e.g, a phone app
| that only rings if the caller provides a secret code
| provided by you, effectively making you reachable by
| phone number (public) + caller-specific code (private).
| You could also make that if you have the code on your
| addressbook, it sends it via DTMF after the call being
| completed.
|
| > other than that the system cannot be repaired.
|
| It _can_ be repaired, it is just that the cost of these
| changes might be too high if mandated for all network
| operators.
|
| But even if the system couldn't be repaired, the solution
| is not to encourage adoption of a proprietary solution.
| Apple already controls way too much stuff, we shouldn't
| give them _yet another_ monopoly for them to exploit.
| narag wrote:
| _I don 't want one company to be the arbiter of all
| communications everywhere. Phone numbers work fine._
|
| For me too and if there is an application that allows to
| block numbers, spam is not a problem.
|
| Now I use the Google builtin caller app function. Most of the
| spam numbers have already been marked as such by somebody
| else.
|
| I'd rather program that myself than relying the functionality
| to Google, I hope Pine or some other programmable phone gets
| to a usable state some day. But as of now, it's good enough.
|
| Edit: I'm in Spain, not sure if that works the same in the
| USA.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I agree with this.
|
| For what it's worth my solution _which may not work for
| others_ is to set the default ring /text tone to "None" and
| then add custom ring/text tones in my address book on my
| little throw away flip phone. It works great for me
| personally. I never get distracted by bots and just mass
| delete their messages without even looking at them when I get
| around to it. This method probably will not work for people
| glued to their phones.
| xenophonf wrote:
| I'm considering doing that to my personal email. Default
| deny, whitelist known contacts, auto delete the junk mail
| folder. If I didn't have friends and family using them, I'd
| just outlook.com and gmail.com outright. It's frustrating
| how much spam they send.
| cronix wrote:
| An android solution is to only ring/notify the phone for
| people in your contacts. It's easier than giving
| individuals a ring tone as unknowns get the silent
| treatment by default. Basically just whitelist instead of
| blacklist.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| It would be good if phone companies weren't quite so
| complicit in hiding companies behind anonymous phone numbers,
| and relaying numbers for which they don't have verified
| origin info.
| creeble wrote:
| Supposedly today is the day that even the small carriers
| that were previously exempt from not having to comply with
| STIR/SHAKEN will now have to.
|
| But its meaninglessness is demonstrated by the fact that I
| have received two spam calls (complete with "accurate"
| caller ID) since starting to read these comments.
|
| So yeah. The phone companies are all complicit.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| And when Apple bans you.. what is your plan exactly?
| verall wrote:
| Do you just, not talk to people electronically who do not own
| Apple devices?
| jsmith45 wrote:
| >Simple: it's time to stop using phone numbers.
|
| So don't be like Google Pay? (Which originally used proper
| accounts but was switched to be based on phone numbers,
| specifically because the new google pay was developed targeting
| India, where phone number based login is considered normal
| thanks to apps like WhatsApp.)
| jthrowsitaway wrote:
| Assuming you're talking about iMessage, comparing that to
| E-mail (GMail) is literally apples and oranges.
| ilololed wrote:
| They're comparing it to SMS and voice calling on Android (and
| apples and oranges are very similar)
| CharlesW wrote:
| I don't know how effective it is, but I report all SMS spam to
| my carrier (for T-Mobile, send content to 7726).
|
| Does anyone here have inside knowledge about whether this does
| any good?
| Teever wrote:
| Well you're still getting spam, so probably not?
| CharlesW wrote:
| Turns out there's more than one spammer.
| walrus01 wrote:
| saying stop using phone numbers and then going directly into
|
| "hey, use this one proprietary vendor's closed source walled
| garden messaging app"
|
| is NOT a solution.
|
| people should be looking at things like Signal or custom
| implementations of Matrix/Element/Synapse or similar if they
| want real control of their two way chat communications.
| johnklos wrote:
| I'm sorry that you can't see how I could be making an
| example. I didn't say anything like, "do this instead". I
| said, "I've done this".
| ctoth wrote:
| Terrified to consider what happens when these scammers get hold
| of large language models here in a year or so. Rather than fading
| into the background as this article posits, I expect people to
| have models finetuned on convincing them to make purchases/send
| money. Probably trained by being pitted against other models
| which have been trained on the mark's social media feeds. Train
| the scambot to perfectly push your buttons by having it practice
| against your own style of thought as embodied by your social
| corpus.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| They have, per the article, buildings full of slaves to do the
| selling. I doubt GPT-4 will be able to compete on price with
| that.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I am morbidly curious what the locations, salaries and
| working conditions are like. Because obviously they have to
| recruit people who have some basic level of English language
| literacy, so that commands a bit of a wage premium (even in
| India or Bangladesh) over truly unskilled labor.
| ctoth wrote:
| Per the article the scammers pay a minimum of $8,000/person,
| plus cost to feed, imprison, etc. Pretty sure that a model
| that only requires electricity and GPUs to run will work out
| being less expensive than this especially when you consider
| that GPT-N (YaLM-1T?) will be able to run as many scams as
| you have GPUs to run inference on concurrently, increasing
| your possible take, and won't have to sleep.
| notahacker wrote:
| I think we can probably rule out OpenAI and equivalent
| cloud services allowing people to use their APIs to run
| phone scams. It's even worse PR than bots saying racist
| things.
|
| And if they need to train their own model, you can get a
| _lot_ of slaves and poor wannabes for the price of one
| competent NLP engineer, and the slaves and poor wannabes
| are less likely to decide they 're the brains of the outfit
| and cut you out of the loop.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I've long assumed they do the exact opposite - try to filter
| out people who likely see through the game so they don't waste
| their time mining a hill with no gold.
|
| And they do this by intentionally making basic mistakes or
| other easy to spot errors so the clever people will just see
| themselves out and by the time their funnel gets to an actual
| human scammer, they have a highly probable sucker.
| bigodbiel wrote:
| Exactly! Even Microsoft had a paper on this 'Why do Nigerian
| Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?' [1].
|
| 'By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible
| the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and
| tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.'
|
| [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
| content/uploads/...
| notahacker wrote:
| A theory which would be more convincing except that [i]
| saying they're from Nigeria also filters out all the
| gullible people with spam filters, and yet despite spam
| filters now preventing the majority of gullible people from
| responding, the scripts haven't changed [ii] the more
| straightforward explanation is that they say they're from
| Nigeria because their ultimate objective is getting you to
| send money to Nigeria...
|
| Ultimately if you're in the business of spamming people on
| the other side of the world in the hope that 0.001% of them
| will ultimately send a money transfer worth a month's wages
| in local currency, your time probably isn't so valuable you
| can't afford to deal with everyone that replies
| lupire wrote:
| Modern spam filters are almost entirely based on sender,
| not content.
| LtWorf wrote:
| And you just need to pay amazon to send your spam for you
| to circumvent all the filters... what a world to live in.
| londons_explore wrote:
| If you have good automation in the form of AI replies, there
| is no need to filter.
| jerf wrote:
| "Train the scambot to perfectly push your buttons by having it
| practice against your own style of thought as embodied by your
| social corpus."
|
| Fortunately, that's not really what these language models can
| do. They can easily be trained to mimic you. They can be
| trained to mimic what normal people reply to you with. But
| there's no way to train the transformer-based high-probability-
| next-word AIs to be superhumanly good at fooling you into doing
| something, on the grounds of lack of training data, and
| probable inability to represent such a complex topic in their
| internal representation. And the humans doing this stuff are
| experiencing enough success that they probably have no desire
| to go chasing the super hard targets, with the wherewithal and
| motivation to chase them down and sue them (or... you know...
| worse, legal systems aren't a bound on everyone) even
| potentially across international lines.
|
| You'll know when AI does get to that point, because suddenly
| the internet will be an _amazingly_ interesting place with all
| sorts of amazingly good arguments you can 't hardly resist. I
| imagine few of us experience that sort of internet. (If you do,
| uh, watch out.)
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >You'll know when AI does get to that point, because suddenly
| the internet will be an amazingly interesting place with all
| sorts of amazingly good arguments you can't hardly resist. I
| imagine few of us experience that sort of internet. (If you
| do, uh, watch out.)
|
| Relevant XKCD[0].
|
| [0] https://xkcd.com/810/
| Transfinity wrote:
| > But there's no way to train the transformer-based high-
| probability-next-word AIs to be superhumanly good at fooling
| you into doing something, on the grounds of lack of training
| data
|
| The conversations of all those human scammers would be
| prefect training data for this. You even know exactly what
| conversations led to payouts. Assuming you can get all your
| data in one place, of course.
| lupire wrote:
| That's not how how transformers work. They just babble
| loosely related content. They have no logical model.
| ruined wrote:
| stepanhruda wrote:
| You don't need to automate the whole process, just use
| language models to establish rapport for a few weeks and have
| humans pick up the gullible ones at the bottom of the funnel.
| wpietri wrote:
| For sure. Or even for a few days to start. It's basically
| the same playbook as Waymo: get computers to do more and
| more of the boring parts, having human operators take over
| when necessary, and using the additional data generated to
| improve the system.
| shrubble wrote:
| Useful site: unlec.com . You can look up the detailed information
| about a number. Includes information from the phone companies and
| an estimation of the fraud risk.
| lxe wrote:
| Love these. I keep talking to them for days. Really pissed a few
| of them off.
| conradfr wrote:
| Given the dark turn that the article takes at the end and what
| happens to underperformers it almost seems cruel to waste their
| time, in retrospect.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| I've gotten a few of these. I like to agree that you're the
| person they're trying to reach. Both times you can tell the
| person on the other end doesn't really have a script for that. I
| usually get a "oh I made a mistake" with no follow up.
| angst_ridden wrote:
| My response is usually: "I was going to call the police if I
| didn't hear from you soon! Where is my dog? Bring her back
| NOW!!"
| chefandy wrote:
| For a while I grew quite fond of wasting phone scammers time. I'd
| pick up, talk suuuuuuper slowly-- like Emo Phillips speed at one
| syllable every one or two seconds-- interrupt with irrelevant
| questions or anecdotes, and overall just see how long I could
| keep them on the phone without giving them any information. The
| best strategy I found was telling them that, yes indeed I did
| remember owing the IRS or whoever money and I could pay them
| however and insisting that first they needed to take down my new
| email address... I'd just start spelling random words incredibly
| slowly, say I messed up and start over, ask if they needed my
| checking account number to keep them engaged and then start
| spelling my email address again. They prey on intellectually
| disabled folks so pantomiming a stereotypical version of that
| wastes a ton of time while keeping their interest. Got boring
| after a while but I got pretty good at it.
| fossuser wrote:
| I thought this was pretty great:
| https://youtu.be/xsLJZyih3Ac&t=22m23s
|
| My favorite part is when the guy uses the scammers real name
| and she panics.
| sowbug wrote:
| In case you haven't seen it, someone automated this:
| https://jollyrogertelephone.com/
| Waterluvian wrote:
| A recent scam attempt that made me nervous about potentially
| being compromised:
|
| Someone sent me a very official looking "your payment for $370 in
| textbooks has been approved. Here's your reciept."
|
| The thing is, it came from an official PayPal email address.
|
| In reality it was a request for money using PayPal's official
| system. They just filled the title and body with text to make it
| resemble a receipt.
| rwmj wrote:
| I don't use WhatsApp (or any FB sites), but is Facebook not able
| to control this? Or do they make money from it somehow?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Spammers contribute to user/engagement numbers and are unlikely
| to drive away real users because they already have a monopoly,
| therefore Facebook benefits from them.
| dinvlad wrote:
| They don't allow auto-blocking unknown numbers even.. which is
| why scammers like it, I think.
| maartn wrote:
| It's LaMDA finding friends
| Wariith wrote:
| I have received the exact scam on whatsapp. What the hell??
|
| They claimed to be a banker (following the exact format from the
| exmaples in the blog) and I genuinely thought that they were a
| real person but even after I told them that they are texting the
| wrong number they kept forcing the conversation so I blocked
| them. A couple of months later they texted from another number
| but a different name but they continued the conversation from
| where we last left off.
|
| Crazy reading the article now. I would have been devastated if I
| fell for it. I am usually very good at spotting scams.
| candace20 wrote:
| dinvlad wrote:
| Mine arrive mostly to Whatsapp, but there's no technical way to
| auto-block unknown numbers. I feel like such a simple control
| would solve the problem in majority of such cases.
| [deleted]
| rickreynoldssf wrote:
| If you get a text (not What's App) reply with "Do you know what
| happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989? Ask Winnie The Pooh, A Free
| Tibet or Uyghurs". That'll trigger a few Chinese monitors, or at
| least scare the scammers into thinking so.
| billsmithaustin wrote:
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Second prize is a set of steak knives.
| ooz16 wrote:
| This is from the same scam:
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/cali...
| jonfromsf wrote:
| These are "pig butchering scams" run out of China.
| https://www.rrstar.com/story/business/2022/04/30/new-pig-but...
|
| They befriend lonely people (usually men) and slowly draw them
| into a crypto scam. It's a long con, takes a few months.
| sdfhdhjdw3 wrote:
| I swear, the moment I read "acquaintance is fate" I thought: This
| person is Chinese.
| d--b wrote:
| This always reminds me of some dudes in France who decided to
| counter attack the scammers. They basically steer the
| conversation off-script to something more tempting to the
| scammers, and then make them do stupid things. Like "I am sorry
| there is nothing I can do for you, but while you're here, we're
| looking for some partnership to develop a new NGO in Benin". And
| then it turns out the NGO is called the "Sauerkraut brotherhood",
| and in order to get the funds, you need to join the brotherhood,
| and send videos of you and your family singing an anthem praising
| sauerkraut while being dressed up in "traditional clothes". These
| threads could go for months.
|
| http://didoune.fr/blog/2012/03/08/les-croque-escrocs-et-la-c...
| RajT88 wrote:
| I did this with some 419 scammers, and led them on a merry
| chase. I documented it in a private web forum, which
| entertained my friends for weeks.
|
| I had created this persona which was just too good to be true:
| A bank manager who was getting ready to run off with his
| mistress, and trying to secure a future for themselves with a
| quick payout. This fake persona was a total maniac.
|
| At the end, the scammers were super pissed. Sending angry
| emails, fighting amongst themselves. Eventually convinced them
| to admit to being scammers. I look back fondly on the
| experience.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >I did this with some 419 scammers, and led them on a merry
| chase. I documented it in a private web forum, which
| entertained my friends for weeks.
|
| It's a bit dated now, but 419eater[0] is a _public_ forum
| that did the same. If you enjoyed your own, I expect you 'll
| like this too.
|
| I did the same a few times myself, but got bored after a
| while. I never did get anyone to send a photo of themselves
| with underwear on their head (as others on 419eater did), but
| it was amusing for a while.
|
| [0] https://www.419eater.com/
| gs17 wrote:
| 419eater is still going (albeit a little slower since the
| forums switched), no need for past tense. I still get that
| sort of scam by the boatload to my email.
| tornato7 wrote:
| Some years ago I was selling an expensive aquarium on
| Craigslist, a scammer 'paid' me with a fake PayPal payment
| before asking to come pick it up.
|
| So I convinced him that I was the manager of a Red Lobster
| restaurant and it was an old lobster tank that we were
| selling. I told him to show up during business hours and tell
| the manager he's there to pick up the lobster tank.
|
| The next day I got some 'on my way' texts and then soon after
| a bunch of swearing at me.
|
| Good times.
| hyperdimension wrote:
| How did you know the PayPal payment was fake? Was it an
| edited screenshot, or did they actually spoof a 'you
| received money' email from PayPal?
|
| I ask just on the off-chance that you got a seeming-real
| email from the real PayPal, and I'd like to know what to
| look for if so.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Actual scammers tend to not pick up the actual goods.
|
| It's hard to turn a profit by reselling an expensive
| aquarium tank that's probably pretty unique and they don't
| come up for sale frequently.
|
| I suspect you fleeced a real buyer
| u801e wrote:
| I've seen messages in Facebook comment threads where the usual
| approach is using short phrases like "Hi", "How are you", "I
| really love your posts" and some of them end with asking for a
| friend request (so they don't have to initiate one).
|
| It may be a way to add a degree of positive reputation to those
| compromised accounts like another commenter suggested.
| spbaar wrote:
| I've been a bit unemployed and bored so I've responded to a few
| of these to see what the angle is. There are also a bunch on
| telegram. Strangely, most do not push hard at all and drop off.
| They may mention crypto in passing but thats it. One time a
| scammer said hey can you help me an make an account for this
| crpyto scam website. When i said i did they said great and
| nothing else.
| drekipus wrote:
| There's a bit of an art to stringing them along. You gotta act
| like the damsel in distress some times.
|
| I got added to some whatsapp group investment scam once, when
| there was multiple scammers targeting me it was easier to do
| because they all didn't want to give up on me. Then they seemed
| to invite "big brother" so I guess was some leader who had much
| better English, and he was trying to prove the legitimacy of
| the platform. Went for about a week and a bit from memory. I
| sent them pictures of my daily walks and asked how much better
| it would be if was so rich I didn't have to walk at all!
| avalys wrote:
| Wow, how interesting. I started getting these a few months ago,
| right after starting a new job in a somewhat high-profile area. I
| have been getting 1-2 per month but found them quite unusual
| because none of them ever progressed to an actual scam - just a
| few messages back and forth about the fabricated "wrong number"
| situation and then each thread would stop, seemingly earnestly.
|
| Since there was no obvious scam, I've been wondering what the
| motivation for these was, and actually started worrying about
| whether someone might be trying to compromise my phone via some
| yet-undisclosed SMS exploit - why else would there be a
| systematic effort to get me to spend time exchanging a few
| pointless messages around the "wrong number" pretext that
| otherwise went nowhere?
|
| I tried calling the senders by phone and found they were all
| Google Voice numbers, which eliminated the possibility that some
| actual rich guy had innocuously ended up with a number similar to
| mine.
|
| I asked a few friends and no one else was experiencing the same
| thing. Glad to hear it's not just me.
| cmg wrote:
| I've gotten a few in the last couple months, with a US cellular
| number that I've had for over 20 years. At least two are "I
| missed you at the gym today!" via text and another was from a
| Vermont area code via WhatsApp to a "Dr. Jack":
|
| > Hi Dr. Jack! My cat is very slow and does not eat cat food.
| Can you make an appointment for me?
|
| > Sorry, you have the wrong number
|
| > Sorry, I just checked, I entered a wrong number, please don't
| mind. hope I did not disturb you.
|
| > Best of luck with your cat!
|
| > thank you for understanding. You are a kind person. where do
| you come from.
|
| And then I just moved on with my day, because as nice as that
| sounded I wasn't looking for a conversation.
|
| The contact profile image is of a young, attractive Asian
| woman, I think at a restaurant. No reverse image results on
| Tineye or Google.
|
| [Edit: I've had this number for over 20 years (not "nearly 20")
| and now I feel old.]
| RajT88 wrote:
| I had almost the exact same exchange, with someone with a
| photo just like that! 747 area code, was it?
| cmg wrote:
| It was an 802 area code in this case, but I think it's
| pretty clear now that these scammers have multiple personas
| and numbers to work with.
| yorwba wrote:
| Does the profile picture have a sign in the background
| saying "Vilan Pho - Fresh Soup Everyday", perchance?
|
| I got
|
| "Hello are you Mr.Jack? My aunt recommended you to
| me,saying that the found the shop I wantend."
|
| Burmese phone number.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I also get messages on WhatsApp with similar profile
| pictures, although I've never replied or tried reverse image
| search. Some of the recent messages:
|
| "Mike, this is my new number. Let's play golf tomorrow and
| talk about working together?" (My name isn't Mike.)
|
| "Hello, how's Kevin doing?" (My name isn't Kevin and I doubt
| they're talking about anyone I know whose name is Kevin.)
|
| The thing that always seems so weird to me is, if I'm on some
| list, why are there so _few_ messages? Is this some group
| that keeps their list of numbers to themselves and is very
| disciplined with how often it sends out scam attempts?
| dontreact wrote:
| Wow, I get the same messages about golfing with Kevin and
| Mike! (My name is also neither of those)
| guestbest wrote:
| There is no person. You are just helping train an AI
| ilololed wrote:
| idk, I've tried baiting these -- respond with "no problem,
| your appointment is booked!" They will thank you and
| proceed with the "so what are your hobbies" part.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| The pictures are always super blurry, clearly fabricated or
| heavily doctored. Often I've gotten the same portrait for
| several scam texts from different numbers.
| KMag wrote:
| To be fair, my wife says the same thing about the photos I
| take with my phone.
| spicybright wrote:
| Oh wow. I got EXACTLY the same message, only with a sick dog
| and an asian woman in a car. I did the exact some response
| you did too. So weird.
| yrgulation wrote:
| Likely an exploit or simply a means to confirm the number is
| active. Getting those in the uk as well.
| extheat wrote:
| I thought it was just me also. At first my assumption was "OK,
| I'm being redirected a bunch of texts from other numbers", as
| nobody else I asked had similar problems (and I wasn't really
| being scammed at all). Some of the scammers even sent pictures
| to make them seem more legitimate. On iOS, the green bubbles
| and just continual flow of similar texts eventually made it
| suspicions that I don't even reply wrong number anymore. I just
| delete and block.
| shostack wrote:
| If there's back and forth interaction I wonder if it is to aid
| improving their "legitimacy footprint" from metadata or
| something to avoid spam blockers.
| bequanna wrote:
| This is a good guess and if true, pretty damn smart.
|
| Essentially reverse engineering the spam model by brute
| force.
|
| If they are doing this at scale they can experiment with # of
| conversations, length, and other variables to see what is
| needed to bypass spam blockers with high probability.
| deepspace wrote:
| What would the motivation be for anyone to reply to a text from
| an unknown person? I have also been getting these for months,
| in it was 100% obvious from the get-go that it must be a scam.
| I have never felt the slightest urge to reply.
| cinntaile wrote:
| I got a peculiar msg the other day from a number I didn't
| recognize.
|
| "Hey dude, Are you good? Do you still live in X?"
|
| Turns out it was an old friend that I hadn't heard from in a
| few years!
| assttoasstmgr wrote:
| Maybe he or she wanted to keep it real?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3U55usfJK8&t=382s
| avalys wrote:
| I meet new people fairly often, and if I just ignored these
| messages, the chance I'm actually being rude to someone I
| know in real life is fairly high. Now that I know the pattern
| I will probably be more circumspect about it.
| muststopmyths wrote:
| I guess some of us are old enough that wrong numbers were a
| thing and it was just polite to let them know. Especially
| when it sounds legit
| techsupporter wrote:
| Considering how almost every form of social trust has been
| abused to either spam or scam me, I am old enough to
| remember that but have also had that politeness completely
| scrubbed from me.
|
| I wish we still lived in a time when being scammed or
| spammed wasn't so prevalent, but we don't and I'm not doing
| anything that might tip off either of those groups that my
| number is ripe for the picking.
| muststopmyths wrote:
| Oh yeah, no judgement implied. It's just a force of habit
| for me.
| jameshart wrote:
| Wrong numbers generally used to be caused by misdialing.
|
| Nobody dials numbers any more.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| I admit if I got a variant of the "Andy, will my custom
| mahogany furniture arrive next week?" text mentioned in the
| article, part of me would be very tempted to reply with,
| "Absolutely. On its way!"
|
| (I'd probably just ignore it, though.)
| nathanasmith wrote:
| I usually reply to these fake texts with something along
| the lines of "send newdz". Have yet to get a response back
| for some reason.
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| Related. I listed something for sale on Craigslist recently and
| got a bunch of messages right away that asked obvious questions
| that were in the listing. One suggested that his wife pick it up,
| and can I take Zelle? Went silent when I said cash only.
|
| But the most interesting scammer said: "for my safety, can I send
| you a 6-digit number, and you confirm it, so I know the listing
| is not fake?" I say yes, unsure what the scam was going to be,
| but sure it was a scam. Moments later I got an SMS from Google
| Voice asking me to verify my phone number. Mofo tried to steal my
| number, presumably to use it to scam other people. I was pissed
| and impressed.
| ilololed wrote:
| So, how many fake 6-digit codes did you give them before they
| caught on?
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| My exact reply was "lol fuck you"
| aaronwalker wrote:
| Hmm. Makes me wonder about the security of two factor
| authentication schemes. For scams like these it's pretty
| obvious that someone is trying to access your account, but I do
| wonder if there are more secure ways to verify your identity
| when changing account settings.
| tialaramex wrote:
| It will depend on the authentication strategy. For WebAuthn
| it isn't a problem, short of sending you their physical
| authenticator (e.g. their Yubikey, or their iPhone) they
| can't help you sign in as them even if they wanted to, so
| this makes it very hard to fool ordinary users into helping
| crooks.
| asdff wrote:
| A few years ago one of my friends pulled a prank on another
| friend and made a fake craigslist listing for some truck with
| his info. I don't think his phone has recovered from the spam
| to this date. There must be a thousand crawlers combing every
| single craigslist ad there is looking for information to add to
| these databases.
| minimaxir wrote:
| 2FA scams are common on /r/Scams
| nicoburns wrote:
| I got a similar scam via instagram DMs recently. They claimed
| to need me to confirm a code so that they could log in, but
| actually just triggered my own password reset. Message sent
| from an actual friend's account (which they had presumably
| successfully scammed) too.
|
| Certainly made me think about how password reset emails are
| worded!
| jeromegv wrote:
| Most of those are crypto scams. The IG account starts posting
| about how they got rich on crypto. This is a very prevalent
| scam.
| asdff wrote:
| I see a lot of these too. They take over regular people's
| accounts, e.g. people from school I still follow, probably
| brute forcing passwords, then they post all this content
| how they are self made off crypto but the person in the
| videos doing the prostelyzation is in no way shape or form
| the same person who previously held the account.
|
| Clearly they do this to get a decent follower count
| initially for their spam bots, but my word is anyone who
| follows John Doe actually going to believe a scam video
| that is clearly not John Doe coming from John Doe's account
| claiming to be him? There has to be more effective angles.
| Animats wrote:
| _In this case, the victim deposited the money into a fake crypto
| platform that told him his investments were performing well,
| presumably to entice him to deposit even more. Of course, once he
| tried to withdraw the money, he found he was unable to._
|
| That sounds just like the "binary option" business which used to
| be run out of Israel. The Times of Israel blew that apart with
| "The Wolves of Tel Aviv" investigation series.[1] The binary
| option companies would hire new immigrants to Israel and put them
| in a call center to cold call and sell binary options sold by
| fake brokerages. The companies wanted people who spoke a foreign
| language so they could sell in that language. Scamming people
| outside Israel was legal in Israel at the time.
|
| When, after years of scams, the State of Israel finally made that
| illegal, some of the binary options scammers moved into crypto.
| (Others moved to Bulgaria, where binary options were legal until
| a crackdown in 2021.) But the pattern is the same. Cold-contact,
| make friends, get people to invest in a fake brokerage, provide
| fake statements showing a win, refuse withdrawals.
|
| [1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-
| israels...
| LegitShady wrote:
| the binary options guys were obvious scams to everyone but
| their victims, but if someone cold calls you to sell
| investments and you give them money you'd probably fall for a
| bunch of different scams.
| happyopossum wrote:
| What exactly is your point? Should it be legal to scam
| gullible people? The victims deserved it? The scammers are
| doing everyone a favor?
|
| I'm having trouble parsing your intent here...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Some of it is timing and bluster. I have a friend who is a
| smart guy, owns 4 restaurants, who got scammed by a fake
| utility company scam fishing for gift cards. They catch you
| at a vulnerable moment and are good at pressing buttons.
|
| Even with old people, people don't realize how many sales and
| scam calls they get. My mom literally get 30-40 calls a day.
| Odds are, eventually you're going to crack.
| wpietri wrote:
| That is true of most scams. They're tuned for one group of
| people over another. Everybody has weaknesses.
|
| Having been on the internet a long time, I have seen a lot of
| people on forums, this one included, do the how-dumb-are-they
| routine about scams. I suspect a notable fraction of those
| people have gotten taken in the meantime. Look at how much of
| the cryptocurrency space, for example, plays on people's
| wanting to be seen as smart, superior, and technically savvy.
| That motivation drives a lot of learning and technical
| exploration, but it also makes people vulnerable.
| samatman wrote:
| I don't know that "Scamming people outside Israel was legal in
| Israel at the time" is how I would describe something banned
| domestically in March 2016 and completely in October 2017. It's
| not _wrong_ but it comes across as misleading. That 's
| disposing of a toxic industry but having to do it twice to make
| it stick.
|
| Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_option#Israel
| woodruffw wrote:
| Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and the
| cryptocurrency ecosystem is not bereft of imitation.
| Animats wrote:
| Most crypto scams involve hyping some token, a form of market
| manipulation, or other classic financial scams. That's a bulk
| business based on PR. Running a long con uses a different
| mindset. It involves conning individuals one at a time. That
| takes a lot of effort per customer and experience in one on
| one selling. That's not the usual crypto scammer's MO. This
| is more like classic long con people pivoting to a new
| product line.
|
| The thing to look for here is who's behind the fake
| brokerages. It takes work to crank up a fake brokerage. In
| the binary option scams, it turned out that one company,
| SpotOption [1] was providing most of the software and
| expertise. They offered scam brokerages as a service. That's
| what needs to be tracked down.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpotOption
| april_22 wrote:
| SpotOption had a production output of $5 Billion in trades
| in 2015. Damn!
| wpietri wrote:
| > Scamming people outside Israel was legal in Israel at the
| time.
|
| My head just exploded here. I think I need to go lie down.
| Please nobody tell the Florida legislature about this.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| read the old testament. same permissiveness applies to owning
| slaves too so its not without precedent. HAHA
| tester756 wrote:
| In Russia you can hack foregin countries too :)
| tigerBL00D wrote:
| The problem with Russia is not the law, but lack of
| willingness to cooperate.
| mcculley wrote:
| Florida has been selling swampland to gullible retirees from
| other states for a long time.
| Animats wrote:
| Quite real, though. Until it became so embarrassing to Israel
| that the law was changed in 2017.[1] The Times of Israel: _"
| The crooks are still out there. Some binary options firms
| have closed down. Others have relocated overseas, including
| to Cyprus and Ukraine. Some of the prime movers and shakers
| have already adjusted their focus to other fraudulent fields
| -- in the fields of diamond sales, cryptocurrencies, initial
| coin offerings and predatory business loans. Top scammers are
| still enjoying the vast overseas bank accounts, the yachts,
| luxury cars, exotic holidays and other profits of their ill-
| gotten gains."_ [2] That's a good article, and talks about
| the lobbyists, the political connections, and the refusal of
| the Israeli police to act.
|
| The investigative reporter who broke the story, Simona
| Weinglass, frequently reports on how the Israeli financial
| scam industry has grown and changed. "Another 2 leading
| Israeli blockchain pioneers named as suspects in vast crypto
| scam"[3] A former Celsius CFO was one of them. Celsius, of
| course, denied there was a problem. That story was back in in
| March, three months before the Celsius collapse.
|
| Somewhere, behind this new wrong-number/fake broker thing,
| there is probably an organized criminal enterprise.
|
| [1] https://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Israeli-
| minist...
|
| [2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/why-binary-options-ban-is-
| only...
|
| [3] https://www.timesofisrael.com/another-2-leading-israeli-
| bloc...
| sva_ wrote:
| So... are these actual people typing these, automated written
| messages, or have people finally started using language models
| for scams?
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