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More than 100 arrested in Spain in $900k WhatsApp scheme

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Re: More than 100 arrested in Spain in $900k WhatsApp scheme

#31

Post by afavour »

danduma wrote: post #7

My mother fell for exactly this scam, thankfully was able to cancel the transaction just in time and gave evidence to the police. Funny to see on HN something that touches one so close. The most fascinating thing here is the lack of sophistication of the approach. No fake images or audio or anything. I'm worried about the new wave of impersonation scams that's coming thanks to voice cloning.

> I'm worried about the new wave of impersonation scams that's coming thanks to voice cloning.

That at least isn’t replicable at mass scale. You’d need to have a training set for each relative you’re pretending to be.

But in general, yes, it’s going to be a mess.

Re: More than 100 arrested in Spain in $900k WhatsApp scheme

#32

Post by personjerry »

_yb2s wrote: post #6

It’s hard to understand how someone could fall for this scam… if a loved one was having an emergency of some kind I would expect them to call rather than text, and I would respond with a call either way to discuss the details. I’m also generally leery of people “urgently needing money.” It seems like something a scammer would do, and I couldn’t see any of my family members doing it. Maybe I’m a jerk, but I’d be more…

Soon your calls won't be safe either; Voice cloning is getting REALLY good.

Re: More than 100 arrested in Spain in $900k WhatsApp scheme

#33

Post by zlefgram »

afavour wrote: post #31
danduma wrote: post #7

My mother fell for exactly this scam, thankfully was able to cancel the transaction just in time and gave evidence to the police. Funny to see on HN something that touches one so close. The most fascinating thing here is the lack of sophistication of the approach. No fake images or audio or anything. I'm worried about the new wave of impersonation scams that's coming thanks to voice cloning.

> I'm worried about the new wave of impersonation scams that's coming thanks to voice cloning. That at least isn’t replicable at mass scale. You’d need to have a training set for each relative you’re pretending to be. But in general, yes, it’s going to be a mess.

You only need a few seconds. If you can access whatsapp shared filed of the victim this may be enough.

Re: More than 100 arrested in Spain in $900k WhatsApp scheme

#34

Post by abrookewood »

afavour wrote: post #31
danduma wrote: post #7

My mother fell for exactly this scam, thankfully was able to cancel the transaction just in time and gave evidence to the police. Funny to see on HN something that touches one so close. The most fascinating thing here is the lack of sophistication of the approach. No fake images or audio or anything. I'm worried about the new wave of impersonation scams that's coming thanks to voice cloning.

> I'm worried about the new wave of impersonation scams that's coming thanks to voice cloning. That at least isn’t replicable at mass scale. You’d need to have a training set for each relative you’re pretending to be. But in general, yes, it’s going to be a mess.

Luckily for the scammers we keep posting videos to Facebook, Instagram and any other social media app you can think of. It's going to be a nightmare.

Re: More than 100 arrested in Spain in $900k WhatsApp scheme

#35

Post by joegibbs »

They only got $9000 each? That seems like a very small amount of money for a lot of work, and it's probably not getting divided up equally either. What's their motivation to get into this kind of scam? Spain's GDP per capita is $30,000, and I'd assume they'd been doing it for at least 6 months, so they're not even making an average wage.

Re: More than 100 arrested in Spain in $900k WhatsApp scheme

#36

Post by zlefgram »

randycupertino wrote: post #15
_yb2s wrote: post #6

It’s hard to understand how someone could fall for this scam… if a loved one was having an emergency of some kind I would expect them to call rather than text, and I would respond with a call either way to discuss the details. I’m also generally leery of people “urgently needing money.” It seems like something a scammer would do, and I couldn’t see any of my family members doing it. Maybe I’m a jerk, but I’d be more…

> It’s hard to understand how someone could fall for this scam… if a loved one was having an emergency of some kind I would expect them to call rather than text, and I would respond with a call either way to discuss the details. I think elderly are more vulnerable to this, because they get scared and want to help. My elderly mother fell victim to a "microsoft" and "paypal" technician calling her twice, despite my tra…

There are collaborative filtering apps that come as a replacement for your phone's native phone app. Works well.

Next level approach would be to plug in a LLM with voice synthesis and make the scammers waste time and money.

Re: More than 100 arrested in Spain in $900k WhatsApp scheme

#37

Post by Aurornis »

joegibbs wrote: post #35

They only got $9000 each? That seems like a very small amount of money for a lot of work, and it's probably not getting divided up equally either. What's their motivation to get into this kind of scam? Spain's GDP per capita is $30,000, and I'd assume they'd been doing it for at least 6 months, so they're not even making an average wage.

From the article:

> The scammers were so convincing that in most cases, they managed to get continuous payments from their victims, according to the police.

They managed to secure continuous income streams of free money by talking to people on their phones. It’s extra money and surely they planned on doing more scams. That’s the motivation.

> Spain's GDP per capita is $30,000, and I'd assume they'd been doing it for at least 6 months, so they're not even making an average wage.

I guarantee they weren’t working on this 8 hours per day, 5 days per week. That’s not how scams like this work. They’re talking to people through WhatsApp. It’s about as demanding as texting their friends, albeit with additional overhead of maintaining the ruse and keeping facts straight. They could have carried on these conversations while working their day jobs.

Some people just get a thrill from committing crimes and extracting money or goods through crime. It doesn’t have to be life changing money, these people just like doing crimes and getting a few thousand extra dollars to do whatever they want with.

Of course, the actual cost is devastating once they’re caught. But they’re not thinking about that.

Re: More than 100 arrested in Spain in $900k WhatsApp scheme

#38

Post by danielodievich »

makeitdouble wrote: post #10
_yb2s wrote: post #6

It’s hard to understand how someone could fall for this scam… if a loved one was having an emergency of some kind I would expect them to call rather than text, and I would respond with a call either way to discuss the details. I’m also generally leery of people “urgently needing money.” It seems like something a scammer would do, and I couldn’t see any of my family members doing it. Maybe I’m a jerk, but I’d be more…

The scam has a similar phone version, with a signature "Hey , it's me" first contact to get the victim to fill in the details on who's calling. A good enough scammer can explain away a lot of the red flags (why it's coming from an unknown number etc.) And of course it doesn't require a 100% success rate, they'll call number until hitting a jackpot.

I sometimes respond to those in random languages, turkish, finding, farsi, polish, really throws them off the script...

Re: More than 100 arrested in Spain in $900k WhatsApp scheme

#39

Post by hugocbp »

In Brazil this is likely the most common scam nowadays. Almost every month one of the 4 members of my family gets a message in WhatsApp, usually from a cloned profiled, with the same script:

"Hi ! I'm trying to buy something in store X but my card is getting declined, can you make a PIX (Brazil's real time rail payment) for for YYYYY (4, 5 digits amount) reais for me? I'll pay you tomorrow"

Or the out of fashion "This is X and I have your daughter, pay X so we can release her".

I have never understood how those people can do this for that long with the amount of tracing and spying the government has. Specially using payments from the Real Time Reail (PIX) that is tied to a CPF (equivalent to SIN/SSN).

Even in the current state of streaming, with sports spread between several providers, you can get, in good faith, in YouTube watching a pirated live stream of a major competition where the broadcaster fakes a famous bank or financial institution pretending to make lottery and faking draws on screen. It is so rudimentary you can see the person literally typing random names.

This is probably one of the easiest crimes to automate enforcement against in the age of AI, and yet, it happens for months, every day.

Good for Spain for actually doing something about it. I wish Brazil would start doing the same.

Re: More than 100 arrested in Spain in $900k WhatsApp scheme

#40

Post by caf »

lupire wrote: post #8
_yb2s wrote: post #6

It’s hard to understand how someone could fall for this scam… if a loved one was having an emergency of some kind I would expect them to call rather than text, and I would respond with a call either way to discuss the details. I’m also generally leery of people “urgently needing money.” It seems like something a scammer would do, and I couldn’t see any of my family members doing it. Maybe I’m a jerk, but I’d be more…

Here's how it works, in scams and high pressure sales: 1. Victim suspects scam 2. Victim recognizes the presence of predator. 3. Victim gets scared. 4. Victim tried to maintain composure, but can't think of a way to escape the situation without the predator pursuing. 5. Victim appeases predator because they fear all the terrible things this predator might do, as the predator has no morality and the victim's civilizat…

in scams and high pressure sales

...but you repeat yourself, sir.

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