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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?

#321

Post by LegitShady »

happyopossum wrote: post #50
LegitShady wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

thats because you aren't interested in what I said, you're interested in trying to read my mind for intent, which has caused you to apparently assume the worst about me in every possible sense. Who needs to engage with that? not me.

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

#322

Post by jerf »

Transfinity wrote: post #104
jerf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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.

My context is someone who isn't already falling for the scams. It is true that you can train a model to follow through to those who fall for the scams the scammers already know, which is a fair point. My point is that you're not going to get a superhuman AI out of our current transformer technology that can talk you into believing you're a superintelligent camel from Arcturus IV and if you don't immediately turn over your credit card number, the Star Alligator of the Galactic Core is going to eat your homeworld.

GPT-3 may even gamely try to do exactly that with the correct prompt! But it'll fail. The result won't be cognitively dangerous to anyone with a grip on reality, it'll be risible.

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

#323

Post by NylaTheWolf »

chefandy wrote: post #126

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 a…

You might enjoy Kitboga's videos![0] His channel is basically him messing with scammers and going on tangents. I really enjoyed his collab with CallMeKevin.[1] There was also one video where he ended up calling a second scammer for "tech support", pitted them against each other, and made them get into a literal rap battle with each other.[2]

[0] https://youtube.com/c/KitbogaShow

[1] https://youtu.be/dshtGUi3gto

[2] https://youtu.be/9HzuCXXC8Sg

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

#324

Post by rtkwe »

asdff wrote: post #165
jeromegv wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those are crypto scams. The IG account starts posting about how they got rich on crypto. This is a very prevalent scam.

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,…

Part of it is they're just looking for the lowest hanging suckers that won't notice, easier victims mean less wasted effort on someone who might bite initially but won't convert into real cash. Also I'm betting it's to legitimize their existing spam accounts with follows from (formerly) authentic users.

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

#325

Post by forgetfulness »

KMag wrote: post #111
forgetfulness wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair, my wife says the same thing about the photos I take with my phone.

Finding the right place to focus the camera is essential, to both focus on the plane you are looking for as to have it focused on a spot that will produce the desired brightness in the overall picture (how that works I don't know, just advice from an ex that went to photography school for some time)
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