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Scammers Steal $1T a Year – Mostly from Americans
21–30 of 102 posts
Re: Scammers Steal $1T a Year – Mostly from Americans
#22I am always confused how someone will fall for the scammer with such poor knowledge of your native language. If you look at the reports from the scams it is always so obvious that they are scams just by looking at the way sentences are structured or the way they speak.
I would expect that easier targets for such scammers would be people who don’t use English as their primary language. Not someone living in US.
It is weird that such things are not an immediate red flags to people. Then again, I have a better grasp on English language than last 3 US presidents so I guess you have to lower your expectations.
I thinks that this is also a reason that Musk, with his ramblings, didn’t reach such cult following here.
Re: Scammers Steal $1T a Year – Mostly from Americans
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why less Europeans? A language barrier for some countries? More regulations about robocalls etc? GDPR and better privacy so our data isn't as easy to exploit?
Europe somehow is often a bit lagging behind the US - in good and in bad - the obesity pandemic is also just really starting to show here as well. Scammers upped their game here also in the last few years and especially months. No week in the local news without a love/crypto/elderly scam going into the 10s to 100 thousands. Especially in the last few months, in my social circle, scammers really increased in density a…
The biggest annoyance is "private" numbers, which are not private anyway just invisible. Some companies still use them, but most are scammers. Really annoying if you have to unblock private numbers because some company does not want to pay for masking their internal numbers with the general number.
Re: Scammers Steal $1T a Year – Mostly from Americans
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Europeans have less money than Americans. Even if there are no differences in law or practice scammers are still going to make more money off the wealthier people. I suppose in some sense we could jot that down as more regulations leading to less scamming.
This Global Anti-Scam Alliance website [1] says Americans, Danes and Swiss have the highest average scam amount, at $3520, $3067 and $2980. But it also says Pakistan lost 4.2% of GDP to scams, vs 0.2% for Italy, Netherlands and France. It looks like I'd need to register to see more details statistics. [1] https://www.gasa.org/post/global-state-of-scams-report-2024-...
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Re: Scammers Steal $1T a Year – Mostly from Americans
#25Certain cities in countries like Nigeria and Morocco have become fraud “Silicon Valleys” where there’s quite literally tens of thousands of people collaborating and sharing best practices on how best to scam Americans and Europeans. This will only get worse with AI.
When I worked for a certain large inbox provider a few years back, I was astonished at the volume of fraud and phishing attempts that actually originate from these countries. And it’s amazing how centralized it is in certain cities.
Most people have no idea that a significant portion of the local economy in places like Lagos is driven by internet fraud, and due to local corruption it’s nearly impossible to prosecute.
If 100,000 Nigerians were physically pillaging a countries land and stealing physical assets that country historically would immediately go to war. The fact that this doesn’t matter as much since its all digital may need to be re-evaluated now that our financial lives are almost entirely digital. Western countries are going to have to finally put their foot down at some point.
Re: Scammers Steal $1T a Year – Mostly from Americans
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
This Global Anti-Scam Alliance website [1] says Americans, Danes and Swiss have the highest average scam amount, at $3520, $3067 and $2980. But it also says Pakistan lost 4.2% of GDP to scams, vs 0.2% for Italy, Netherlands and France. It looks like I'd need to register to see more details statistics. [1] https://www.gasa.org/post/global-state-of-scams-report-2024-...
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Which is 100 since it has to be measured against a peer group.
Re: Scammers Steal $1T a Year – Mostly from Americans
#27Certain cities in countries like Nigeria and Morocco have become fraud “Silicon Valleys” where there’s quite literally tens of thousands of people collaborating and sharing best practices on how best to scam Americans and Europeans. This will only get worse with AI. When I worked for a certain large inbox provider a few years back, I was astonished at the volume of fraud and phishing attempts that actually originate…
It is good to hear that it is coming from countries which has been played by the Western World on the globalization front. Then ripping off those who profited from their low status and relevance on the world market gives it a nice Robin Hood touch.
Re: Scammers Steal $1T a Year – Mostly from Americans
#28A perspective: redistribution finds it's ways.
People with roughly equal wealth would not scam each other's at this level
Re: Scammers Steal $1T a Year – Mostly from Americans
#29I struggled to find the source the fact that $1T is lost to scammers. From the FBI internet crime report in 2023 Americans lost about 12.5 Billion dollars [0]. That is far from 1T$.
Another source reports cost if cybercrime is reported to reach 9.5T$ in 2024 but again no source provided for that number [1]
[0] https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2023_IC3Report.pdf#...
[1] https://www.esentire.com/resources/library/2023-official-cyb...
Re: Scammers Steal $1T a Year – Mostly from Americans
#30I am always confused how someone will fall for the scammer with such poor knowledge of your native language. If you look at the reports from the scams it is always so obvious that they are scams just by looking at the way sentences are structured or the way they speak. I would expect that easier targets for such scammers would be people who don’t use English as their primary language. Not someone living in US. It is…
By explicitly being obviously a scam, scammers can preselect for the most gullible people