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Scammers unleash flood of online gaming sites

krebsonsecurity.com

11–20 of 58 posts

Re: Scammers unleash flood of online gaming sites

#11

A random website asks me to give them my cryptocurrency, and then they refuse to return it? Why, I thought I had seen the most shocking thing on earth, but this takes the cake!

I don't understand who keeps falling for this stuff. The victims are not all 90 year old grannies suffering from cognitive decline.

If you thought you had won thousands of dollars you would likely be tempted to pay a hundred to get that out.

Re: Scammers unleash flood of online gaming sites

#14

Who exactly is online gambling? And out of that subset, who is doing super shady appearing online gambling? I don’t mean to be flippant, but who exactly is falling for this slop? At some point, permit me to victim blame, the victim is somewhat to blame.

I would hazard a guess is that a generation of youth has been addicted to gambling by mobile game companies and even some desktop game companies like Valve (which has worked to limit it, but only when it was forced to by bad publicity.)

Gambling is a dangerous addiction for some people. I don't think victim blaming is an effective response.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling

Re: Scammers unleash flood of online gaming sites

#15

A random website asks me to give them my cryptocurrency, and then they refuse to return it? Why, I thought I had seen the most shocking thing on earth, but this takes the cake!

I don't understand who keeps falling for this stuff. The victims are not all 90 year old grannies suffering from cognitive decline.

It's probably the law of probabilities at play, like with 419 scams. If you cast a sufficiently big net, chances of catching something in it are decent

Re: Scammers unleash flood of online gaming sites

#16

Who exactly is online gambling? And out of that subset, who is doing super shady appearing online gambling? I don’t mean to be flippant, but who exactly is falling for this slop? At some point, permit me to victim blame, the victim is somewhat to blame.

There are a lot of people using the internet with different physical and mental disabilities that make it difficult for them to identify these scams that might seem super obvious to you or I.

When I had cancer and I was in the hospital getting chemo I fell for a scam for the first time. It was an instagram ad for a cool steampunk looking keyboard with a price that was too good to be true. It was almost christmas, and I had felt guilty for not shopping, but my brain fog made it difficult to reason about. I ordered it and forgot all about it until it was too late to challenge. It was only $60, but it made it very clear to me how easy it would be to fall for something like this for a significant part of the population.

Re: Scammers unleash flood of online gaming sites

#17

Who exactly is online gambling? And out of that subset, who is doing super shady appearing online gambling? I don’t mean to be flippant, but who exactly is falling for this slop? At some point, permit me to victim blame, the victim is somewhat to blame.

Half the population has a sub-100 IQ.

Re: Scammers unleash flood of online gaming sites

#18
post #6

“We were being spammed relentlessly by these scam posts from compromised or purchased [Discord] accounts,” Thereallo said. “I got frustrated with just banning and deleting, so I started to investigate the infrastructure behind the scam messages. This is not a one-off site, it’s a scalable criminal enterprise with a clear playbook, technical fingerprints, and financial infrastructure.” This quote does not read like so…

17 year olds come in many flavors.

Re: Scammers unleash flood of online gaming sites

#19

Who exactly is online gambling? And out of that subset, who is doing super shady appearing online gambling? I don’t mean to be flippant, but who exactly is falling for this slop? At some point, permit me to victim blame, the victim is somewhat to blame.

There are a lot of people using the internet with different physical and mental disabilities that make it difficult for them to identify these scams that might seem super obvious to you or I. When I had cancer and I was in the hospital getting chemo I fell for a scam for the first time. It was an instagram ad for a cool steampunk looking keyboard with a price that was too good to be true. It was almost christmas, and…

I think it's better to think of these things as relative. Not that I personally am absolutely invincible against scams, but that there is some scam of some level of sophistication that would get me, there's some threshold.

And that threshold will move over time, and as you say, depending on conditions. Even our personal defenses should not be predicated on being perfect all the time, and that's completely impractical at a societal level. And I worry about AI making it practical to target more people directly at scale and raise the sophistication on their end over the next 10-20 years.

Today I think I can say with a straight face that I'm quite sophisticated against this sort of scam. But the day will come, unless something gets me earlier, when my children will have to take my email account away if they want to inherit anything. Old age makes fools of us all. And who knows if something will get me earlier some other way. Unfortunately, invincible confidence in the here and now won't protect me.

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