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

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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean we do cut off entire countries and their citizens from global markets and from traveling when they do shit like invading their sovereign neighbors and that is completely fine and even desirable. Why can’t we (morally) cut them off also from infecting our Internet? Fuck them. Fix your country then come back and we will reevaluate.

> I mean we do cut off entire countries and their citizens from global markets and from traveling when they do shit like invading their sovereign neighbors and that is completely fine and even desirable. It's actually not completely fine . Sanctions are effectively an act of war, just instead of shooting people and risking your own troops, you have your enemy's civilian population starve and shoot each other. This ca…

Maybe I missed the part about banning Facebook. I was more for banning users from countries that do a lot of scamming without any repercussions

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

#162
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?

You go on a dating app, a girl responds with her nudes and you send yours. It turns out it was a guy looking to extort you.

> a girl responds with her nudes and you send yours

But... WHY?! You're not The Rock. Unless you're ripped and/or packing, the chances of your "nudes" sent in reply scaring the recipient away are pretty high.

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on this being a basic first step, although any scammer of any value would just get a VPN. Another user noted that OnlyFans is analyzing text and bans anyone saying anything approaching blackmail. Odd (but maybe not odd at all) to think that OnlyFans might be the leader on this.

I agree. Yet, I assume professionals (with VPN) would definitely attract more law enforcement action due to size of transfers. But if you can prevent script kiddies, why not? The current barrier to entry is so damn low. Paying VPN is indeed a barrier to entry.

There are databases sold by the likes of Maxmind to identify a lot of the common VPNs so this could also be detected. Of course it's a game of cat and mouse but still better than nothing.

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

#164
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Not just a border, a closed border. That's not common except in times of war or extreme authoritarianism.

> order the carrier of the extortion messages to block the entire country

Banning a company from doing business with a country is called "sanctions", not "war", and sanctions happen a lot.

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

#165
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook does monitor - and sell - all user data. You don’t get to say “we will read your messages to sell ads, we will straight up sell your message history to other companies, but no we can’t do anything to protect users from trivially detectable scams.

That's really stretching the definition of sell. They used to actually sell your days to select groups. Now they sell advertiser ads based on your data but the advertiser does not get to see said data.

It sounds to me and others like they literally sold people's messages to netflix: https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/facebook-let-netflix-...

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

#166

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.

[flagged]

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

#167

This could all be solved if the OS vendors would add a 'share my childs screen' function to their operating systems. These incidents happen in isolation - make it possible for an adult to actually .. you know .. have oversight over their childrens online activities and it would be less dangerous.

This type of software is often abused by people to spy on their partners...

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

#168

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.

wear a five finger glove if you are going to take pictures.

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

#169
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite confused how forwarding a naked picture of an underage person to literally anyone, except a dedicated law enforcement team, wouldn't have already been distributing it. >Is it that rare for some teacher (even in high school) to receive some of their students work online? It's been a while, but when I worked in the education sector we had systems for students to upload their work, get graded, feedback, report…

> It's been a while, but when I worked in the education sector we had systems for students to upload their work, get graded, feedback, reports etc. Yeah, you could upload .pngs and .jpgs but it's hardly 'the next contact in the list' or 'maybe they had the same first or last name' in those scenarios, you upload the work for specific classes/courses. Obviously that's a single system, I don't know the full scope of wha…

It’s a weird market, I’ve mainly come across Moodle which was easily the most difficult integration I’ve ever worked on. I had the displeasure of using it several times for testing purposes and I had to wonder, how much money did a director get backhanded for buying that piece of crap?

I presume it’s a very difficult market to break into though for various reasons, a lot of which tech won’t solve any time soon, to the detriment of our new generations.

Edit: wait, Facebook education groups? Is this a thing that schools run, or something else?

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's insane for a teacher to forward evidence of problematic stuff happening with a kid to the kid's parents. After all, many parents think their kids are angels who can do no wrong. Granted, in this case I agree that it's better judgment not to forward the picture for all the reasons you've mentioned - but calling it insane is a bit much.

I was molested as a child, so out of vested personal interest I've read a lot of research over the years. If you're a teacher, it would be wise to assume the parents may be in some way part of the problem. If you're a teacher coming up with excuses to share nudes of your students with other people, you are at risk of being investigated very seriously as a potential child molester or distributor of child porn. This is…

Sure, but that's because you've clearly thought about the matter a lot. A sibling comment mentions that teacher go through mandatory reporter training -- if that's the case, then maybe you're right (depends on how frequently that's being refreshed etc.). Otherwise, I think the adjective "naive" is really way more appropriate than "insane".

(And that's part of the reason why some of the ways in which parts of society react to these things is so problematic. If you're reacting that strongly to something that most likely is just the result of naivety, then frankly you have a much stronger claim to being insane than the person who's being naive.)

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