I got one giving condolences for someone I don't know. Seriously, WTF.
What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
311–320 of 326 posts
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
And you just need to pay amazon to send your spam for you to circumvent all the filters… what a world to live in.
That's fine, the point is to assign a cost and a liability paper trail to people who send, say, 100,000 emails. It doesn't affect the average user and it presents very nominal hoops for the high volume user to step through while erecting substantial barriers to criminals. That's kinda the best you can do
The various companies that spam me to offer their services and correctly remove me from their mailing list still had no right to put me in their mailing list from the beginning.
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Fortunately? Somebody already did the training for them! https://github.com/yandex/YaLM-100B
Good luck to a non-engineer trying to set that up to hold structured conversations around parting people with their money
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an outrageous untruth.
my original statement was intended to be a joke but it is based on actual precendent. so here's my sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_slavery#:~:text=... . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_views_on_slavery TLDR: perfectly fine to keep non jews as slaves. Now in the interest in fairness, I want to emphasize that every culture has some shitbird crap like this going on and unlike everyone else, you…
Slavery in the Hebrew Bible was limited; for example they were freed in 7 years or less. It was more like indentured servitude. The American slave trade was not justified by the Hebrew Bible. Of course, when Christians culturally appropriated it, they changed it.
The Wikipedia page you linked to explains this.
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really need a message like that? If you didn’t try to sign in But you get a notification, it’s pretty freaking clear what’s going on. Alternatively if you just signed up a new account you should probably expect a message like that
Clear to whom? Have you ever worked with the average user?
It doesn’t matter how many notifications you give the average user if that’s your argument
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#316For 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 a…
I went through a phase where I was getting 4 or 5 phone calls per day, mostly companies doing strange surveys. I used to amuse myself by using a d20 and googling for top 20 manufacturers in different fields. What car do I drive? Pick from a list of phone manufacturers and so on. Spent the whole time sounding interested, friendly, and only occasionally pointing out I need to find my dice. The calls started drying up pretty quickly.
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#317I've got an idea how to improve the scams. Instead of trying to communicate with the victim directly, create a group chat of fake accounts, with the victim added. The fake accounts can share information, and because this is information is shared between subjects obviously trusting eachother, the victim is very likely to believe it. The effort is higher (multiple accounts needed), but for some high-value targets might…
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
In case you haven't seen it, someone automated this: https://jollyrogertelephone.com/
Blocked in Brazil for some reason.
I wonder if these countries have some technical difference in their billing systems— like you could merge them into the call from a toll number and reverse charge them or something.
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, pl…
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…
My spam horror show started after responding to a text similar to these. It was poised as a woman trying to connect with her daughter. I responded, and since then have had a deluge of spam and crap messages.
Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
my original statement was intended to be a joke but it is based on actual precendent. so here's my sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_slavery#:~:text=... . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_views_on_slavery TLDR: perfectly fine to keep non jews as slaves. Now in the interest in fairness, I want to emphasize that every culture has some shitbird crap like this going on and unlike everyone else, you…
Slavery in the Hebrew Bible was limited; for example they were freed in 7 years or less. It was more like indentured servitude. The American slave trade was not justified by the Hebrew Bible. Of course, when Christians culturally appropriated it, they changed it. The Wikipedia page you linked to explains this.
my point was a clarification of a joke made.
Op said his mind was blown by the idea that they'd be ok with scamming people from outside the country but not other Israelis which I then drew a comparison to slavery which had a similar restriction. that was the joke.
besides, 7 years of slavery is still slavery.