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What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

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Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#131

Post by noveltyaccount »

Related. I listed something for sale on Craigslist recently and got a bunch of messages right away that asked obvious questions that were in the listing. One suggested that his wife pick it up, and can I take Zelle? Went silent when I said cash only.

But the most interesting scammer said: "for my safety, can I send you a 6-digit number, and you confirm it, so I know the listing is not fake?" I say yes, unsure what the scam was going to be, but sure it was a scam. Moments later I got an SMS from Google Voice asking me to verify my phone number. Mofo tried to steal my number, presumably to use it to scam other people. I was pissed and impressed.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#132

Post by spicybright »

cmg wrote: post #74
avalys wrote: post #29

Wow, how interesting. I started getting these a few months ago, right after starting a new job in a somewhat high-profile area. I have been getting 1-2 per month but found them quite unusual because none of them ever progressed to an actual scam - just a few messages back and forth about the fabricated "wrong number" situation and then each thread would stop, seemingly earnestly. Since there was no obvious scam, I've…

I've gotten a few in the last couple months, with a US cellular number that I've had for over 20 years. At least two are "I missed you at the gym today!" via text and another was from a Vermont area code via WhatsApp to a "Dr. Jack": > Hi Dr. Jack! My cat is very slow and does not eat cat food. Can you make an appointment for me? > Sorry, you have the wrong number > Sorry, I just checked, I entered a wrong number, pl…

Oh wow. I got EXACTLY the same message, only with a sick dog and an asian woman in a car. I did the exact some response you did too. So weird.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#133

Post by cinntaile »

deepspace wrote: post #43
avalys wrote: post #29

Wow, how interesting. I started getting these a few months ago, right after starting a new job in a somewhat high-profile area. I have been getting 1-2 per month but found them quite unusual because none of them ever progressed to an actual scam - just a few messages back and forth about the fabricated "wrong number" situation and then each thread would stop, seemingly earnestly. Since there was no obvious scam, I've…

What would the motivation be for anyone to reply to a text from an unknown person? I have also been getting these for months, in it was 100% obvious from the get-go that it must be a scam. I have never felt the slightest urge to reply.

I got a peculiar msg the other day from a number I didn't recognize.

"Hey dude, Are you good? Do you still live in X?"

Turns out it was an old friend that I hadn't heard from in a few years!

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#134

Post by lupire »

Transfinity wrote: post #104
jerf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Train the scambot to perfectly push your buttons by having it practice against your own style of thought as embodied by your social corpus." Fortunately, that's not really what these language models can do. They can easily be trained to mimic you. They can be trained to mimic what normal people reply to you with. But there's no way to train the transformer-based high-probability-next-word AIs to be superhumanly good…

> But there's no way to train the transformer-based high-probability-next-word AIs to be superhumanly good at fooling you into doing something, on the grounds of lack of training data The conversations of all those human scammers would be prefect training data for this. You even know exactly what conversations led to payouts. Assuming you can get all your data in one place, of course.

That's not how how transformers work. They just babble loosely related content. They have no logical model.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#135

Post by lupire »

notahacker wrote: post #105
bigodbiel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! Even Microsoft had a paper on this ‘Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?’ [1]. 'By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.’ [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

A theory which would be more convincing except that [i] saying they're from Nigeria also filters out all the gullible people with spam filters, and yet despite spam filters now preventing the majority of gullible people from responding, the scripts haven't changed [ii] the more straightforward explanation is that they say they're from Nigeria because their ultimate objective is getting you to send money to Nigeria...…

Modern spam filters are almost entirely based on sender, not content.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#136

Post by rglullis »

eropple wrote: post #123
rglullis wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way to solve this is by educating the people in your network about better security practices, not by giving away control over your communications just because of "convenience".

"Just get everyone to be perfect, including random companies who require a phone number for validation, and if a single failure ever happens you're going to be spammed forever in a way that is directly interruptive and intrusive instead of one in a list of messages in a queue." I don't know how to say this any more nicely than this: this is a permanently losing solution with no redeeming qualities to such a degree th…

The point is not to "be perfect", the point is to raise the standard of acceptable practices, to make it harder to abuse it.

Just as an example: phone numbers should not be used for validation of anything as they are public. So companies who are requiring phones for any kind of authentication should be shamed into changing their practices, much like we learned to not trust companies that stored passwords in plain text, or use "recovery questions".

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#137

Post by krallja »

xmprt wrote: post #24
kube-system wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I agree with that. I rarely get scams via USPS, never get explicit or potentially damaging content, the senders are all in my legal jurisdiction, and the spam arrives once per day in a manageable format. Almost all of the content is from businesses in my local area, businesses that I have previously shopped at, or political ads. Electronically from private companies I frequently get a larger volume of s…

> I'd take 10x the amount of spam in my mailbox if I could get rid of all of the rest of the garbage I'm bombarded with I for one would not. Digital spam is easy to deal with. There are automated filters, easy ways to block them, and the few that slip through are simple to deal with. Mailbox spam is physically painful to deal with and it's a massive waste of paper.

Paper is a renewable resource, and also a carbon sink. Throw it in the garbage and consider it carbon sequestration.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#138

Post by gs17 »

nobody9999 wrote: post #122
RajT88 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did this with some 419 scammers, and led them on a merry chase. I documented it in a private web forum, which entertained my friends for weeks. I had created this persona which was just too good to be true: A bank manager who was getting ready to run off with his mistress, and trying to secure a future for themselves with a quick payout. This fake persona was a total maniac. At the end, the scammers were super piss…

>I did this with some 419 scammers, and led them on a merry chase. I documented it in a private web forum, which entertained my friends for weeks. It's a bit dated now, but 419eater[0] is a public forum that did the same. If you enjoyed your own, I expect you'll like this too. I did the same a few times myself, but got bored after a while. I never did get anyone to send a photo of themselves with underwear on their h…

419eater is still going (albeit a little slower since the forums switched), no need for past tense. I still get that sort of scam by the boatload to my email.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#139

Post by nathanasmith »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #113
deepspace wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the motivation be for anyone to reply to a text from an unknown person? I have also been getting these for months, in it was 100% obvious from the get-go that it must be a scam. I have never felt the slightest urge to reply.

I admit if I got a variant of the “Andy, will my custom mahogany furniture arrive next week?” text mentioned in the article, part of me would be very tempted to reply with, “Absolutely. On its way!” (I’d probably just ignore it, though.)

I usually reply to these fake texts with something along the lines of "send newdz". Have yet to get a response back for some reason.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#140

Post by eropple »

rglullis wrote: post #136
eropple wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just get everyone to be perfect, including random companies who require a phone number for validation, and if a single failure ever happens you're going to be spammed forever in a way that is directly interruptive and intrusive instead of one in a list of messages in a queue." I don't know how to say this any more nicely than this: this is a permanently losing solution with no redeeming qualities to such a degree th…

The point is not to "be perfect", the point is to raise the standard of acceptable practices, to make it harder to abuse it. Just as an example: phone numbers should not be used for validation of anything as they are public. So companies who are requiring phones for any kind of authentication should be shamed into changing their practices, much like we learned to not trust companies that stored passwords in plain tex…

The abuse is that without sufficient guardrails a ten-digit number can be used to bother me at all hours of the day or night unless I want to be less accessible to people who I may need to hear from, not that it's used as an authentication source (which, yeah, not great, but also not the end of the world).

Out-of-band authentication aside, a company is going to retain my phone number to be able to contact me. So are my parents. Somebody is also going to inevitably leak it because security is difficult. Breaking the capabilities of bad actors, then, is a requirement. You have entirely ignored this in favor of blame-the-user rhetoric and I can't come up with a great reason why you'd blame every user for a systemic failure other than that the system cannot be repaired.

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