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Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me

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Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me

#101

Post by jlgreco »

Johngibb wrote: post #86
enraged_camel wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Blaming the victim is not some brave, heroic concept. Blaming the victim is bad only if you believe that blame is a zero sum game. Unfortunately, it is not. If you walk down a dark alleyway in New York at night alone and get mugged, the mugger is guilty of mugging you, but you're also guilty of being a silly goose. You don't gain immunity to blame simply because you were the victim.

Why shouldn't you be able to walk down a dark alley in NYC at night? It's not your fault if something happens. With that attitude, we are just tolerating crime and accepting it. If more people walk around at night, the crimes will gain more exposure, be more aggressively stopped, and things will get safer.

The individual has every right to walk down a dark alley, and the group very well may be safer if more people walk down dark alleys, but if the individual is optimizing their behavior for self-preservation (and I think that is how individuals are most likely to act, at least in the 'West') then avoiding the alley is likely the best action

Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me

#102

Post by jlgreco »

sliverstorm wrote: post #100
jlgreco wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that a criminal is equally guilty if they commit a crime in a dark alley NYC or if they commit a crime in backcountry Idaho. If I replace my bicycle u-lock with a nice hefty rope and start lashing my bike to whatever object seems solid at the time (this is a concept that actually appeals to me), then I should receive some blame when my bike gets inevitably stolen. However the bicycle thief is no more nor…

I was talking about the guy who got mugged. What if he had never lived in the city.

What I was trying to say is that your hypothetical does a good job of showing why blame is not zero sum. Obviously in either case the criminal receives the same blame, but I think it is fairly clear that the victim who took drastic measures to reduce risk is less to blame than the one who did not.

The important thing to remember is that the blame of the victim, while present, has no relation to the blame of the criminal and should never be relevant in, for example, a criminal trial for the criminal. I really feel like I can't emphasis that enough.

Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me

#103

Post by paulhauggis »

"If people in the U.S. aren’t suspicious of free money, PayPal payments that look fake, the absence of a payment in their account, fake emails from PayPal’s FBI department or just Nigerians in general, then they deserve to have their money taken from them."

Nigerian scammers are also just as dumb. A few years ago, I was easily able to phish them out of their accounts and other valuable information.

I made it into a game to see how far I could go. After I got into their accounts, I would change the password and shut their operation down (all through lots of proxies and other sorts of protections).

Most had large lists of stolen credit cards and pictures of licenses and passports.

Many of the people that actually freely gave away their info were lonely and desperate.

Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me

#104

Post by hiphophippo »

Ahh.. It all makes sense now. After recently trying to sell my car on craigslist I received at least 20 emails of the same nature: vague, never a specific label of what they actually wanted to inquire of mine, and very interestingly using ASAP. Almost every one used that term... hm. Anyways I knew by the broken english and vague response it was a scam but never knew how they intended on pulling it off. They would ask for a paypal account to send funds too immediately without even seeing the car. I never did give them my paypal account as I didn't intend on wasting my time of getting faulty payments etc. But before I permanently deleted these contacts, I wanted to see if I could actually talk to one. I gave them all my number (it was in the add anyway) and told them before I can release my paypal info they have to call me.

The responses were priceless! 7-10 of them were in the navy deployed at sea and didn't have a phone (none of them knew each other surprisingly) a few were government officials who worked in such high level jobs that they couldn't be caught on the phone(but can buy cars on craigslist interestingly enough) and the last one claimed to be deaf.(and get this didn't know how to text!) Moral: Ask to speak with anyone who buys items off of you locally.

Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me

#105

Post by tvladeck »

DrStalker wrote: post #93
graue wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd still think paying $100 more than the asking price (with no explanation as to why) would be a strong clue something is amiss in this case. But you're probably right that the use of English and the FBI enforcement letter are obvious only to a subset of people who grew up in a Western, Anglophone culture.

I only skimmed the article; I'd assumed that was part of the scam (forward the extra $100 on via western union, or paypal it back to me on this different account, etc)

Isn't that graue's point though, that it looks like it would be part of the scam and thus should throw alarms?

Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me

#106

Post by sliverstorm »

DrStalker wrote: post #93
graue wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd still think paying $100 more than the asking price (with no explanation as to why) would be a strong clue something is amiss in this case. But you're probably right that the use of English and the FBI enforcement letter are obvious only to a subset of people who grew up in a Western, Anglophone culture.

I only skimmed the article; I'd assumed that was part of the scam (forward the extra $100 on via western union, or paypal it back to me on this different account, etc)

The extra money is usually not a scam in itself if they are trying to actually get you to ship the item. Once upon a time scams were all about moving cash, but I surmise those have gotten harder, so now they secure your item and (presumably) resell it.

Thus, the promised extra money is actually just a way to both ensure you'll "sell" to them as they made the highest bid, and also perhaps an attempt at triggering just a touch greed which does wonders for putting the blinders on.

Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me

#107

Post by sliverstorm »

jlgreco wrote: post #102
sliverstorm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about the guy who got mugged. What if he had never lived in the city.

What I was trying to say is that your hypothetical does a good job of showing why blame is not zero sum. Obviously in either case the criminal receives the same blame, but I think it is fairly clear that the victim who took drastic measures to reduce risk is less to blame than the one who did not. The important thing to remember is that the blame of the victim, while present, has no relation to the blame of the crimi…

I don't think we are talking about the same thing.

Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me

#108

Post by DanBC »

enraged_camel wrote: post #51
DanBC wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Internet has been around for fifteen years WWW has been around for 20 years. But it's only recently that people have always on cable modems and active content. > without educating themselves about their dangers first. HN is full of stories of well funded, international businesses, with considerable sums of cash at risk, who do stupid insecure things. If they can't get it right why should Joe Sixpack be expected…

>>I'm interested to see what kind of help there is for people who want to learn how to protect themselves on the Internet. What kind of help is there for people who want to learn to protect themselves in real life ? Does the fact that there is no comprehensive resource somehow remove one's burden to learn anyway?

In real life I have my parents to keep a watch on me for most of the early part of my life. This takes years of intense involvement, with a lot of teaching about risk and safety.

I have Public Information Films on a variety of subjects:

Tables are dangerous (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icbYf_aR91o)

A collection of terrifying ads (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0xmSV6aq0g)

There are a variety of crime prevention and community safety websites. There are radio and tv programmes with advice about avoiding scams. There are magazine articles (even a well respected consumer law advice magazine "Which?") about scams and consumer law.

All of this is built up over many years and modified when needed.

How are people expected to learn how to keep themselves safe on the WWW? What search terms are they expected to use? (This is when I need Matt Cutts or some other Googler to give us useful stats about the words people use to find information about scams)

Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me

#109

Post by esrauch »

sharkweek wrote: post #31
patdennis wrote: post #22

"If people in the U.S. aren’t suspicious of free money, PayPal payments that look fake, the absence of a payment in their account, fake emails from PayPal’s FBI department or just Nigerians in general, then they deserve to have their money taken from them." I could easily see my parents falling for this. I don't think they deserve to have their money taken. Although, to be fair, I doubt my parents could set up and us…

I used to work as a bank teller while in school. About once or twice a month someone would come in with checks from these types of scams. The spectrum of who was falling for it was a lot wider than I would have ever imagined. We were trained pretty extensively on stopping these checks from being deposited, but it sure broke my heart being the bearer of bad news so often. I remember one guy who didn't believe me that…

Did you ever have the opposite, where you thought something was a scam check but it turned out to be legit?

Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me

#110

Post by DanBC »

jlgreco wrote: post #99
RegEx wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're expanding on my point exactly. The Internet does not have such an obvious dark alley. You can copy HTML/CSS, have anchors with a different href than shown, and a lot of sly things. I hate using anologies when talking to hackers, so I didn't use the alleyway example even though I was thinking it.

> The Internet does not have such an obvious dark alley. http://p3n1zp1llz.48djkhcd.com.shadyurl.info/freemoneyz.exe ;) Edit: Forgot about this site, but perhaps it could be used as a training tool for family members you feel are not quite as savy as they should be: http://www.shadyurl.com/ Make a page that just says "Grandma, don't click links like that!" , convert it to a "shady" url with shadyurl.com, then email i…

A nice idea!

But [urls are disguised so easily](http://horribleurl.example.com). The A element has split the real URL from the text description since forever.

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