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What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

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Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#81

Post by stepanhruda »

jerf wrote: post #28
ctoth wrote: post #23

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…

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.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#82

Post by zdragnar »

ntoskrnl wrote: post #36
0des wrote: post #25

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/

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.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#83

Post by tigerBL00D »

tester756 wrote: post #78
wpietri wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In Russia you can hack foregin countries too :)

The problem with Russia is not the law, but lack of willingness to cooperate.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#84

Post by zdragnar »

0des wrote: post #66
criddell wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Just imagine, every drifter, nomad and homeless person were required to set up a mailbox. It's just silly.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#86

Post by ntoskrnl »

0des wrote: post #45
ntoskrnl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

> 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.

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.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#87

Post by Spooky23 »

LegitShady wrote: post #31
Animats wrote: post #7

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.

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.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#88

Post by angst_ridden »

oldstrangers wrote: post #85

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.

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!!"

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#89

Post by rglullis »

eropple wrote: post #39
idiotsecant wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want one company to be the arbiter of all communications everywhere. Phone numbers work fine.

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 reaso…

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".

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#90

Post by rglullis »

kube-system wrote: post #34
xmprt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

For Snapchat/LinkedIn/Instagram: just close your account and put email filters?
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