41–50 of 326 posts
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 n…
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 but…
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.
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…
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…
Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and the cryptocurrency ecosystem is not bereft of imitation.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you not encounter Amish people where you live?
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/
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.
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 n…
I don't want one company to be the arbiter of all communications everywhere. Phone numbers work fine.
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.
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 n…
I don't want one company to be the arbiter of all communications everywhere. Phone numbers work fine.
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 but…
"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…
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…
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.
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…
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.
I'm having trouble parsing your intent here...