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Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media and driving some to suicide

bloomberg.com

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Re: Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media and driving some to suicide

#51

Post by DoreenMichele »

Some thoughts I've had for years:

A. My understanding is an underage teen who takes a nude selfie and sends it can be charged with distributing "child porn." This is a serious problem and should not be true. If other people forward it, they should be charged, but a teenager should not get in legal trouble for making a nude selfie and sending it privately.

B. We need to culturally get over a lot of our hangups about certain things. His girlfriend was attending church. The church should be telling kids "This is not worth killing yourself over."

C. We somehow need to come up with reasonable accommodation for the reality that teens have phones and budding sexualities and these two things are colliding horrifically in a legal and cultural system strongly rooted in assuming "child porn" is made solely by abusive adults and not willingly by underage teens who don't think it's a big deal at the time the photo is snapped.

Taking a nude selfie should be safer than baring your body in person. No risk of STDs or pregnancy are involved. And yet we've turned it into this hugely dangerous thing for anyone who hasn't spent years thinking about sexual morality who isn't prepared to say to law enforcement and the world "Nudes of me? Big fucking deal."

No idea how to further any of those things, but this is hardly the first article I've read about teen selfies being involved in extreme levels of harsh consequences that I just think morally should not happen and I think have roots in cultural and legal stuff going bad places in part because we aren't keeping up with the times.

Re: Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media and driving some to suicide

#52

Post by jmopp »

gttalbot wrote: post #46

Why would Facebook not just block messages from Nigeria to rando North American towns at this point? Shouldn't the network analysis required to detect this sort of crime ring be a slam-dunk at this point? I don't get how this is still even possible.

On the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, the false positives (and the fallout from it) might outweigh the negatives: imagine a volunteer doctor who disappears in West Africa due to being kidnapped/robbed etc and someone local tries to contact the family back home, but all the messages end up getting blocked.

Re: Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media and driving some to suicide

#53

Post by ben_w »

hannofcart wrote: post #24

While my heart goes out to all the victims' families, what are platforms like Facebook supposed to do here? Are they supposed to monitor the content of the chats? Some would call that eavesdropping. The sad fact is that desperate people exist. And these desperate people are willing to do despicable things to make a buck.

> Are they supposed to monitor the content of the chats? Some would call that eavesdropping.

I rather assumed they already did monitor chat, in order to target adverts, A/B test, handle abuse reports, filter spam, etc.

Even if FB says it has "end to end encryption", I can't fully believe them due to the political pressure under the banner "terrorism/kids get hurt" is immense regardless of us here regarding that as thought terminating cliché from the intelligence agencies.

Re: Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media and driving some to suicide

#54

Post by QuiDortDine »

andersa wrote: post #34

I don't understand what would motivate someone to ever send an explicit photo of themselves to a stranger. The whole premise of this scam makes no sense. Like, is this not the most basic of the basics of online safety?

It's not just teenagers, my friend's brother fell prey to this. His life is one ongoing mental health crisis. These people are truly the scum of the earth, their scam only works on vulnerable people by design. Disgusting.

Re: Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media and driving some to suicide

#55

Post by ben_w »

jjmarr wrote: post #17
colechristensen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is. If a country can’t find and enforce a law or extradite someone for doing such a thing, order the carrier of the extortion messages to block the entire country or charge the message carrier itself, especially if minors are involved. Like if Facebook is being a safe haven for Nigerian extortionists, either they block Nigeria or Australia blocks Facebook.

Even assuming this is technically feasible (a premise others don't believe), it is ethically wrong to cut off an entire country from the Internet because a small portion of the population are committing crimes. Imagine a large American city getting cut off from Facebook because there are many people selling shoplifted items on FB Marketplace and your underfunded govt doesn't have the financial ability to crack down o…

There's a right to life, there's no right to social media.

I think it's fine to cut off FB entirely in response… but then, I also think FB monetised what was previously free, collecting rent on being social, and as such everyone will be better off if it gets blocked in their area.

Including the advertisers. Sales can't exceed global income, so at this point the extra ad slots being forced everywhere only serve to make the advertisers part of a Nash game to spend ever more to fight each other for the same potential reward.

Re: Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media and driving some to suicide

#56

Post by ben_w »

thfuran wrote: post #15
colechristensen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is. If a country can’t find and enforce a law or extradite someone for doing such a thing, order the carrier of the extortion messages to block the entire country or charge the message carrier itself, especially if minors are involved. Like if Facebook is being a safe haven for Nigerian extortionists, either they block Nigeria or Australia blocks Facebook.

What you're describing is the end of the internet.

They're describing a border. When I was a teen in the late 90s, the internet without borders was cool (until I wandered into trolls I didn't have the resilience to deal with), but very obviously not compatible with national sovereignty on what counted as "illegal".

Now? Does any country today block zero domains? There's nearly 200 nations so I've never bothered to check, but my guess is all block something.

Re: Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media and driving some to suicide

#57

Post by vintermann »

k8svet wrote: post #7
fromthegut wrote: post #3

Black Mirror. S3 E3

Bit different imo. If some scammer sends me my bro's penile pic, I'm gonna delete it and warn him. If the scammer sends me proof he was consuming illegal, immoral CSAM, I'm having a vastly different reaction. The shame is the key to this scam. The intersection of (especially teenaged) insecurity, and America cultures nonsensical relationship to sex and shame, is tragic.

Yes, this is maybe something that is true that we can tell victims of this scam/attack: If I get an anonymous mail with a picture of any sort, I'm not going to look at it. No matter what they say it is. This goes for other platforms too.

There are fortunately few ways for random strangers to cram images I don't want to see into my eyes. Most of the ones that do exist (e.g. making a social media profile and trying to "add" me) are automatically scanned for porn by the social network site.

Re: Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media and driving some to suicide

#58

Post by TheFreim »

SoftTalker wrote: post #26

In this day and age, if you fall for something like that, just refuse to pay and say you'll tell people it's an AI fake. I think the days of this sort of scam being very effective are over, or will be soon.

Encouraging people to become liars is not a solution.

Re: Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media and driving some to suicide

#59

Post by orwin »

colechristensen wrote: post #16
thrownaway561 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if they do that they will just use VPNs. you can't stop this no matter what, you just have to educate people and hope they don't fall victim.

Then blackhole the VPNs when they're involved in crime and make them share legal financial responsibility for the crimes they enable. Eventually you keep walking down this line until you write laws that local ISPs are required to globally blackhole countries which otherwise evade law enforcement.

I can make a VPN for like 3 euro on AWS (thinking about it, I can probably do it with their free tier offer). I could probably do the same for a bit more work and study on most PaaS.

Re: Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media and driving some to suicide

#60

Post by ben_w »

thfuran wrote: post #23
colechristensen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not. Facebook making money off of illegal activity conveniently hidden behind national borders is not the cornerstone of the Internet.

You think that argument stops at Facebook? Why won't it apply to the VPNs people use to get around the geofencing on Facebook, to all the other social media platforms, to all messaging services, and so on? Now you've blocked huge swaths of services and fragmented all the platforms.

I think, if The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was remade today, the quote would be:

"…an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think social media is a pretty neat idea."

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