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Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

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Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of people who'd do something like this is miniscule. Human society is built on trust for a good reason. We know that rules are imperfect and trust our fellow humans to do the right thing. They don't always but most of the time, the average person will.

Who is we? I don’t trust my fellow humans to do the right thing. Average don’t matter, what matters is, are you offering me a sandwich? Is it poisonous? Would you tell me if it was?

Your incredibly low level of trust, thankfully, is just as rare as sandwich poisoners.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an extremely basic check. If I'm going to be getting on a plane to see someone, I want to do a basic background check.

But what are you checking with a call? That just seems like creating a false sense of security since there is virtually no additional “useful” information that is being sent over the audio channel above and beyond what is in text.

A deepfake requires significantly more effort than just impersonating someone over text.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#154

"She tells me a bit about her metaverse project, Space Falcon. I'm not really sold on it, but I'm not really an NFT person so I didn't have any reason to think it was a bad idea either.[...] It seems kind of like a get-rich-quick scheme, but again, that's kind of how I see a lot of NFTs. With all that she's doing for Arrow, there's no harm in showing a little support." The real takeaway from this is that it's dangero…

Sure, NFTs and crypto in general may be get rich schemes at the core, but a lot of people do believe in them, so a charitable view would be that HE saw it as a scheme, but he thought that perhaps SHE believed in it. And FWIW I'm not sure "fraudulent" is the right word. NFTs are not a fraud, you usually get what you pay for, a mediocre jpeg, and perhaps a really primitive game. And to be fair, what are the odds his VT…

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Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the NFT would "keep track of", but you have to be more specific. And changing the organisation is a completely separate question from which database technology they use. IF you just switch from SQL to NFT the organisation will not suddenly become less corrupt, or whatever the issue with them is.

If you're asking for the implementation details, there's a group trying to do it right now. You should look them up if you're interested. > IF you just switch from SQL to NFT the organisation will not suddenly become less corrupt, or whatever the issue with them is. It's true that it won't make the managing organization less corrupt - it will make them nonexistent. That's the idea behind decentralized decision-making…

How would you be able to get rid of the organisation? So many people talk about various crypto use cases but they can almost never explain how it would work.

From land deeds to insurance to domain registration to in game assets etc etc, people have all these wonderful ideas. It would be interesting to one day have at least one of these ideas explained.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced it isn't crypto itself, and NFT is just an extension of that.

It’s degrees of suspension of disbelief. Software is just tricking sand into to thinking. I have no issue believing that an imaginary consensus stored ledger in thousands of computers all secured by massive amounts of energy and limited to 21M units over 100 years might be valuable. The ability for people to copy this software idea? Not valuable. The ability for people to issue new tokens on existing chains? Not valu…

I think SV libertarians saw the scam of world finance and thought, y’know what if we could get in on this too and then we would never have to innovate again.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#157
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Discord" by itself is a pretty big red flag to be honest. I would personally not engage in any business or industry where that is the main communications platform.

Billion dollar deals are negotiated on Discord all the time.

That sounds really surprising to me. Have any references to share?

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that help? Are you thinking it might be easier to prosecute with a voice or image file?

It's way easier to lie via text. There are verbal and facial cues that make it much harder to maintain a convincing lie.

Scammers have plenty of time to practice compared to the average person, and the face to face nature can make people more susceptible due to a false sense of trust / thinking that they can judge character over video.

OTOH it'll probably be harder for non-native English speakers to pull off a phone/video call considering that a lot of amateur scammers have telltale bad grammar even over text

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#159
Imagine Bill Gates stored all his money in cash in a room in his house.

That's probably more secure than crypto, where click of a button can siphon it all away. At least with physical money you have to be able to carry it, and physically present to steal.

I'm sure there are strategies like using multiple wallets etc, but overall it will never be mainstream if you put the onus of security on the individual. Literally just typo-ing an address can disappear all of your money.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#160
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is just saying “that’s what you get for playing with crypto you degenerate”. No, it isn't. It's a reminder that we have all of this financial structure for a reason. The person you're responding to didn't make any light of the potential victim or call them a degenerate. In traditional finance, you (Joe Shmoe) can't just wire someone ~100M USD, regardless of jurisdiction. There are controls, most of which have…

You ever heard of asset forfeiture? There's two sides to everything. Not really "owning" something is great if you're the victim of fraud, but has its downsides when you become a target and someone wants to arbitrarily capture your wealth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture

Civil asset forfeiture is a national disgrace.

But it's also not a disgrace for traditional finance: it's a disgrace with respect to the latitude our justice system gives to individual LEOs and a sign that the government is willing to extrajudicially punish people instead of pursuing justice through the courts.

Put another way: assert forfeiture is not some kind of "gotcha" against traditional finance in favor of cryptocurrencies. When law enforcement seizes your bank account, they're going to seize your cryptocurrency accounts too. And if you (unadvisedly) attempt to hide those assets, then you will be making their job in court much easier.

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