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Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

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Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#31

Post by szundi »

jessriedel wrote: post #28
maxbond wrote: post #10

> What he didn't know at the time is there is no phone number for Facebook customer support. Part of the problem here is that Facebook (though in fairness, they are not unique here) has left this traditional path of escalation void, leaving only fake numbers. They don't even have a real number to play a recorded message affirming that there is no ability to call. ETA: For instance, I notice Facebook appears to own th…

It’s untenable from a marketing perspective to advertise a phone line that just talks about the services you don’t offer. One could maybe hope for a statement on a help page that says “Facebook will never ask you to call a support number”.

It is easy as hell

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#32

Post by pavel_lishin »

mvdtnz wrote: post #22
hnuser0000 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The woman [from fake tech support] said she would clear the hackers out, but he had to give her access to his phone through an app she had him download.

That doesn't answer the question. No app on any Android or iPhone phone can reach out and take your PayPal credentials. These scam victims never own up to the most important fact - that they themselves give away the keys to the castle. There's always some hand-wavy techy explanation.

> These scam victims never own up to the most important fact - that they themselves give away the keys to the castle.

I bet they were wearing a real short skirt, too.

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#33

Post by maxbond »

jessriedel wrote: post #28
maxbond wrote: post #10

> What he didn't know at the time is there is no phone number for Facebook customer support. Part of the problem here is that Facebook (though in fairness, they are not unique here) has left this traditional path of escalation void, leaving only fake numbers. They don't even have a real number to play a recorded message affirming that there is no ability to call. ETA: For instance, I notice Facebook appears to own th…

It’s untenable from a marketing perspective to advertise a phone line that just talks about the services you don’t offer. One could maybe hope for a statement on a help page that says “Facebook will never ask you to call a support number”.

I think what you've gotta do is say, "You can't call, but here is the number anyway," because customers aren't necessarily interacting with your page anymore. They're interacting with AI summaries of your page. Those AIs might be in house, or might be provided by a search engine. What is tenable or untenable will have to shift to the realities of how users are interacting with the information you present.

If you can't provide their AI with text answering their direct question (eg, "what is the support number for Facebook"), they'll find a document which does provide such text. If it's not you then it's a scammer or competitor. UX for these customers means presenting information in a way that sorts high in a semantic search and is robust to transformation.

If you provide text indirectly answering the question ("that number doesn't exist" rather than a literal number), you're liable to be scored as less relevant than a wrong but direct answer ("the number is 1555 SCAMMER"). You're also less robust to transformations, because you can't pull a valid phone number out of the text.

Or maybe I'm wrong, take any certainty implied by my language as rhetorical. That's just the pattern I'm seeing in these tea leaves.

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#34

Post by JohnMakin »

_cs2017_ wrote: post #9

Seems like this information came from Quora: https://www.quora.com/Is-1-844-457-1420-really-Facebook-supp... . Screenshot: https://postimg.cc/gallery/2nFq5Cm . I suspect the helpful SEO guy who posted this answer was trying to get more visibility on Quora so answered many questions automatically or semi-automatically without verifying anything. This is the beginning of the post: Ruhul Alom Social Media Marketer at So…

Bit tangential, but what the heck is it with scammers saying "dear" so much? Pretty much every pig butchering or social engineering attempt has had them repeatedly addressing me as "dear."

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#36

Post by QuantumGood »

jessriedel wrote: post #28
maxbond wrote: post #10

> What he didn't know at the time is there is no phone number for Facebook customer support. Part of the problem here is that Facebook (though in fairness, they are not unique here) has left this traditional path of escalation void, leaving only fake numbers. They don't even have a real number to play a recorded message affirming that there is no ability to call. ETA: For instance, I notice Facebook appears to own th…

It’s untenable from a marketing perspective to advertise a phone line that just talks about the services you don’t offer. One could maybe hope for a statement on a help page that says “Facebook will never ask you to call a support number”.

I once had a Facebook rep I could call (they later ended this), and they didn't know that were two online newsletters about changes to internal Facebook apps used by advertisers (we used to be able to see who had clicked "interested" on an event). So they put in a bug report when the app stopped working, etc., but we later found it had been deprecated. All to say that dedicated support is often a cause of issues or confusion.

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#37

Post by idle_zealot »

simonw wrote: post #5

This one is pretty bad. This guy found a fake Facebook customer support phone number in a Google search, then asked the Meta AI chat in Facebook Messenger if the number he found was a real Facebook help line... and Meta AI said that it was. There's a screenshot of the chat in the article.

The bad thing is that people still think LLMs can be trusted at all. Companies integrating them into their offerings are not helping the public adopt the correct mental framing of these tools as "plausible text generators".

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#38

Post by burningChrome »

happypumpkin wrote: post #16
not_your_vase wrote: post #7

As a millenial, I'm more amazed that someone willingly uses a phone for non-mandatory and not-burningly-urgent phonecalls... why on earth would anyone do that is way beyond me.

I'm Gen-Z and talking to a human representative of a company makes me much more confident that something will happen as a result of my efforts (though still not certain). I scheduled an apartment viewing recently, and the only method they provided to do so was chatting with an AI (seriously)... I then tried and failed to find a way to contact a human for confirmation multiple times. Lo and behold nobody at the leasin…

Had the same thing happen for a town home I was interested in buying. Went through their online scheduling app. Got email confirmation with agent's name, but no phone number. Got another confirmation day of. Didn't think anything was amiss. Go out to building, wait for 20 mins and leave after agent was a no-show, no-call.

I called their office and after 20 minutes of trying to go around their obnoxious automated phone menu's I finally got someone who informed me who said they don't use THAT app any more to schedule appointments I need to use their NEW app and sent me a totally different app link in an email. I told them they are probably losing a ton of business because very clearly the OTHER app is still very much out in the wild and still very much being used.

I went with a different company and had much better luck.

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#39

Post by Gigachad »

idle_zealot wrote: post #37
simonw wrote: post #5

This one is pretty bad. This guy found a fake Facebook customer support phone number in a Google search, then asked the Meta AI chat in Facebook Messenger if the number he found was a real Facebook help line... and Meta AI said that it was. There's a screenshot of the chat in the article.

The bad thing is that people still think LLMs can be trusted at all . Companies integrating them into their offerings are not helping the public adopt the correct mental framing of these tools as "plausible text generators".

The general public is getting lied to constantly. HN users have a bit more context to see through the bullshit but the marketing getting pushed in people is that these AI tools are super genius incredible world changing tools that make everyone 100x more productive.

Re: Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real

#40

Post by djeastm »

JohnMakin wrote: post #34
_cs2017_ wrote: post #9

Seems like this information came from Quora: https://www.quora.com/Is-1-844-457-1420-really-Facebook-supp... . Screenshot: https://postimg.cc/gallery/2nFq5Cm . I suspect the helpful SEO guy who posted this answer was trying to get more visibility on Quora so answered many questions automatically or semi-automatically without verifying anything. This is the beginning of the post: Ruhul Alom Social Media Marketer at So…

Bit tangential, but what the heck is it with scammers saying "dear" so much? Pretty much every pig butchering or social engineering attempt has had them repeatedly addressing me as "dear."

In learning English as a second language, I suspect the textbooks tell them to start all correspondence with "Dear" so as to not appear impolite
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