131–140 of 305 posts
Cryptocurrency enables a big part of this. Not saying that there weren't any wire scams before crypto, but crypto has made it much easier for average people to make anonymous international money transfers that can't be reversed. Not to start a big argument, but to my eyes the main usecases of cryptocurrency are to bet on them as a speculative asset or to use them for various forms of crime. Someone will probably tell…
The US does not do enough in this space to punish companies. It feels like such low hanging fruit too that would significantly help the elderly population. Reported to Vercel a bank phishing site weeks ago, no response still. It’s amazing how little companies care.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forcing telecos to authenticate phone calls would probably be the single most important change. But instead of forcing them, we have been letting them drag their feet while while regular people are losing billions to scams. The whole phone system is ancient and long deprecated. When I get a call from my bank I should see their name and a badge of authentication. Not a random phone number. Imagine you could register i…
Telcos have systems in place that are specifically to allow international phone calls to appear as if they're local calls. This is to "facilitate business". They have these services and continue to offer them because they get paid for having them, despite the double decker bus sized hole this provides for scammers. I agree 100% that there should be much tighter regulation on telcos. What I'm not sure of is actually w…
Cryptocurrency enables a big part of this. Not saying that there weren't any wire scams before crypto, but crypto has made it much easier for average people to make anonymous international money transfers that can't be reversed. Not to start a big argument, but to my eyes the main usecases of cryptocurrency are to bet on them as a speculative asset or to use them for various forms of crime. Someone will probably tell…
And before someone comes in with very specific, anecdotal examples - notice I said "common", ie not buying your indie music from a retro-Serb band that plays using the concept of instruments as instruments and from abandoned sewers; but only on Mondays.
I definitely feel like the majority of crypto traffic is primarily due to bubbles/moneymaking/bets/pumps+dump and then the secondary/next closest use case is for criminal activity. And then after that perhaps the myriad of much smaller use cases like people paying for Proton using crypto.
This stuff makes me so mad. I know a friend who told me about a loved one getting scammed. Dude meets some girl from a foreign country online. Next thing you know he thinks she got him into some great cryptocurrency, and nothing anyone can tell him will make him realize he is getting scammed. Sad stuff.
I'm a big fan of YouTube anti-scammer vigilantes. They bait scammers, expose their tactics, humorously waste their time, or even manage a counter attack. I believe these guys can be a big part of the solution. YouTube creates a financial incentive for individuals to go down this route, and apart from being entertaining to viewers, it broadens awareness of scammer tactics, which hopefully means more people detect scam…
No, YouTube creates a financial incentive for individuals to produce videos where they seem to do this. The problem of this is obvious, and if, as you hope, more of this content appears, there will not be enough people to check them all and keep them honest.
Cryptocurrency enables a big part of this. Not saying that there weren't any wire scams before crypto, but crypto has made it much easier for average people to make anonymous international money transfers that can't be reversed. Not to start a big argument, but to my eyes the main usecases of cryptocurrency are to bet on them as a speculative asset or to use them for various forms of crime. Someone will probably tell…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is horrifying. From your perspective, what's the hook that gets a person to hand over the money? Is it to make return on investment, or is it because they think the scammer loves them, or some other reason?
I cannot find the article again, it was posted here a few months ago so maybe someone knows of it but, A guy intentionally went down the rabbit hole of one of these and wrote about the anatomy of it. In his case it was a young (like 30 something young) woman who graduated at the top of dentistry school in Uzbekistan and got a large grant to start a practice in the UK. Something like that. They talked/flirted for week…
For men; sexy pictures, flirting, promises or chances of physical intimacy.
Older, single or widowed people are especially vulnerable.
From my limited research there seem to be a surprisingly large number of bad actors that own moderate swathes of ip address ranges and even Autonomous Systems (AS) that are known and can therefore be blocked.
I use OPNSense, which seems to allow AS blocking in the firewall rules, and also have some automated blocking based on external malicious IP address lists. My not very well maintained project can be found here: https://github.com/UninvitedActivity/UninvitedActivity
I have no idea if these sites would have been blocked by my setup.
Another concept I like but haven't put the research time into is blocking recently registered domains (RRDs). It would appear to be the case that RRDs probably aren't crucial to the average persons daily browsing experience, so blocking them for a certain period of time shouldn't cause too much hassle. There are some services that list them - problem is that there can be tens of thousands per day, which can be difficult to manage into lists compatible with various blocking softwares ( I haven't found how to automate it for pihole yet - but I haven't tried very hard either).
The US does not do enough in this space to punish companies. It feels like such low hanging fruit too that would significantly help the elderly population. Reported to Vercel a bank phishing site weeks ago, no response still. It’s amazing how little companies care.