Beware of the perfect gentleman • Hacker News Board

Re: Beware of the perfect gentleman

#91

Post by m000 » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 9:36 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #45

My mind is blown. Even when the ruse is revealed, many victims are unwilling to let go. The truth triggers an emotional whiplash—the promise of a soulmate, a new, fulfilling life, and mutual trust is suddenly lost, leaving the intense feelings of love behind. Once found, the real man in the photos becomes a surrogate for the fantasy. “Some of them would reach out to me and [say], ‘Now that I know what the real person…

Loneliness is a bad relationship advisor it seems. It's like going to the supermarket with an empty stomach: you end up loading your cart with a lot of crap.

Btw, these scams are a worldwide trend. The wildest case I've read was about a Japanese lady scammed by a "Russian astronaut" seeking $ to pay his "landing fees" for returning to earth to meet her [1]. I've also read in local Greek news for >1 cases of ladies getting scammed by "US soldiers/officers", who at some point claim to be stranded in their deployment and ask for $ so they can travel to meet them in Greece.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ad7vn/japan-romance-scam-ru...

Re: Beware of the perfect gentleman

#92

Post by AshamedCaptain » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 9:36 AM UTC

rkagerer wrote: post #42

When I was growing up you never posted your photo online where strangers could see it. Earlier than that, it was also considered proper etiquette to ask before taking someone's photo. There's been a huge culture shift and some of the outcomes are disheartening but quite predictable. ...little recourse other than to continuously report fake profiles across social media platforms If they don't take down your fraudulent…

> When I was growing up you never posted your photo online where strangers could see it.

I have _never_ uploaded my photo "online" voluntarily, but still it was common to put your photo in many places that were easily reachable by the common public. My school published a yearbook with my photo, for example. Many journal papers I've published had my photo attached, starting at least from the 90s.

Some of these have been digitized and thus my photo is easily reachable for anyone who searches for my full name, without me ever voluntarily uploading it "online".

> Earlier than that, it was also considered proper etiquette to ask before taking someone's photo.

This much is still true, or can you imagine going around randomly flashing people with your phone on the street?

Actually I think this has improved over time. I'm far from a celebrity, but my photo is on the press -- and they never asked for permission. Nowadays, they do.

Re: Beware of the perfect gentleman

#93

Post by texasbigdata » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 9:37 AM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #75

dijit wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed that a lot of tech recruiters are conventionally attractive women.

Because sex sells. Where you not aware of this by now? This has been proven to death by now. And by sex I don't mean the copulation act, but just seeing very handsome and attractive people that trigger your primal mating desires, works in advertising when trying to convince people to buy something from you or give you something (a product, a service, an idea, their time, their money, their attention, their assistance…

There was an academic paper about this recently; we’re aware of “Asian” as a bias but not “physically attractive” and disproportionately favor the more pleasing individuals.

Re: Beware of the perfect gentleman

#94

Post by quickthrower2 » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 9:48 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #73

> “‘You shouldn’t have anything on social media. People are using your pictures.’ And I’m like, ‘Excuse me. I’m not gonna move to a deserted island or live my life as a monk. That’s just not gonna happen.’” Not posting pictures of yourself online seems to be a pretty reasonable, sensible preventative measure for anyone. I don’t (to my knowledge) have pictures of myself floating around social media, and I don’t consid…

Not really since anyone else can post a picture of you. Work dos, nights out, even incidental picture of you in someone elses tourist photo. Maybe you wont be mentioned by name in the photo but maybe you will.

Re: Beware of the perfect gentleman

#95

Post by m4x » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 9:51 AM UTC

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #84

andrewflnr wrote: post #25

So are the scammers already using deepfakes for this, or is that still to come? A video chat is already a pretty obvious thing to do in a long distance relationship, so it will be weird if they can't do it (building an orphanage in Africa is a pretty good excuse, but it won't last forever). If it's possible, they'll definitely want to be able to deepfake video chats.

I think it is hard to generate multiple deepfake images of the same “person”.

Not any more - check out dreambooth. You can train a stable diffusion model to generate images of a specific person or object quite easily now. It's well within the realm of AI art enthusiasts, even those with no technical experience.

https://dreambooth.github.io/

Re: Beware of the perfect gentleman

#96

Post by quickthrower2 » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 9:53 AM UTC

MikePlacid wrote: post #50

DoreenMichele wrote: post #45

My mind is blown. Even when the ruse is revealed, many victims are unwilling to let go. The truth triggers an emotional whiplash—the promise of a soulmate, a new, fulfilling life, and mutual trust is suddenly lost, leaving the intense feelings of love behind. Once found, the real man in the photos becomes a surrogate for the fantasy. “Some of them would reach out to me and [say], ‘Now that I know what the real person…

>“‘Can I meet you? Can I FaceTime you?’” also >even after he convinced them that they had been scammed, they sometimes wanted to strike up a friendship with him. “I can’t even tell you. I would spend an hour on the phone sometimes talking to these women So: "Sure. Here's my 900 number".

In a similar vein to how it is now normal to give personal pronouns, even if you are he/she, we should normalise opsec when online dating, even if you feel it is not needed: if everyone mentions “can I check you are not a scammer and goes through a verification call”, and it is normal it wont be seen as rude or breaking the romance”.

Same should be done for a lot of interactions, such as hiring, employee to employee requests involving money, bank accounts or authorisation, and so on. With deep fakes and AI scamming will get more and more sophisticated and at scale.

Re: Beware of the perfect gentleman

#97

Post by kuhewa » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 9:59 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #73

> “‘You shouldn’t have anything on social media. People are using your pictures.’ And I’m like, ‘Excuse me. I’m not gonna move to a deserted island or live my life as a monk. That’s just not gonna happen.’” Not posting pictures of yourself online seems to be a pretty reasonable, sensible preventative measure for anyone. I don’t (to my knowledge) have pictures of myself floating around social media, and I don’t consid…

I don't reckon the intended meaning is that it is literally impossible, but that it is an unfair and likely ineffective way to prevent romance scamming. His visage is used because they have already farmed the pictures, probably because there were quite a few available so enough to titrate them out over several weeks. So it doesn't really make sense that he now has the duty to remove his online presence, which is important to many people's expression of themselves. In fact, the ability to find him online probably has ended a number of these scams and prevented the women from losing even more money.

Re: Beware of the perfect gentleman

#98

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 10:02 AM UTC

markus_zhang wrote: post #7

I have been constantly harrased by accounts with pretty girl pictures on LinkedIn, wish they could do something. Why did I know they are fake? One, I'm not handsome, neither do I work in those high status companies, why did they reach out to me? Two, they look more like models than software engineers. Completely bullshit.

[deleted]

Re: Beware of the perfect gentleman

#99

Post by kuhewa » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 10:05 AM UTC

koonsolo wrote: post #63

robocat wrote: post #49

As a tech guy, I would write some web pages with my image and textual explanations of the scam, then SEO optimise them for reverse image search. Hypothetically, of course, since I will never need to do it for myself as I am definitely not handsome enough. I wonder why the guys didn't want their faces in the article? That way any reverse image lookup could find the story, the victims would know without getting in touc…

Most people don't even know that reverse image search exists.

Presumably all the women contacting the photo guys in the article are aware of it.

The real issue is that the women aren't going to believe it if it doesn't link to a social media profile or similar, or if they don't talk to the person, and the scammer would easily explain the website away if they were aware of it.

Re: Beware of the perfect gentleman

#100

Post by jack_pp » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 10:14 AM UTC

bearmode wrote: post #88

jack_pp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering how good face recognition is these days it would be nice to have legislation in place that you have to give explicit consent to any website in order to use your image. Govt can crawl the web and block websites from the countries ISP that don't comply. Hard to see another automated solution for this problem

Congrats, now 90+% of all photographs taken outside are completely unshareable online, and the > century old art of street photography is dead.

Honestly I don't see anything wrong with that. The century old art is not dead, you can showcase your photos in a gallery just not online, without explicit consent of your subjects. A hundred years ago we didn't have this problem.

Most portraits have their background blurred so those wouldn't be a problem. Street photos can have the faces blurred. Why are we protecting sharing these street photos of random people anyway?