Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

maxread.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 326 posts

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

#301

Post by cmg »

yorwba wrote: post #149
cmg wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was an 802 area code in this case, but I think it’s pretty clear now that these scammers have multiple personas and numbers to work with.

Does the profile picture have a sign in the background saying "Vilan Pho - Fresh Soup Everyday", perchance? I got "Hello are you Mr.Jack? My aunt recommended you to me,saying that the found the shop I wantend." Burmese phone number.

Nope. It’s some kind of restaurant. She’s drinking a tea or juice or something like that from a glass with a straw

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

#302

Post by goguy »

cinntaile wrote: post #133
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 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!

Or so you think...

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

#303

Post by cultofmetatron »

fortran77 wrote: post #298
cultofmetatron wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

This is an outrageous untruth.

my original statement was intended to be a joke but it is based on actual precendent. so here's my sources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_slavery#:~:text=....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_views_on_slavery

TLDR: perfectly fine to keep non jews as slaves.

Now in the interest in fairness, I want to emphasize that every culture has some shitbird crap like this going on and unlike everyone else, you could convert to judaism and thus become a non slave which was hella progressive compared to everyone else at the time.

I don't see anything about white plantations holders setting their black slaves free when they adopted Christianity for instance.

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

#304

Post by [deleted] »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #131

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 th…

[deleted]

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

#305

Post by ctoth »

notahacker wrote: post #110
ctoth wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per the article the scammers pay a minimum of $8,000/person, plus cost to feed, imprison, etc. Pretty sure that a model that only requires electricity and GPUs to run will work out being less expensive than this especially when you consider that GPT-N (YaLM-1T?) will be able to run as many scams as you have GPUs to run inference on concurrently, increasing your possible take, and won't have to sleep.

I think we can probably rule out OpenAI and equivalent cloud services allowing people to use their APIs to run phone scams. It's even worse PR than bots saying racist things. And if they need to train their own model, you can get a lot of slaves and poor wannabes for the price of one competent NLP engineer, and the slaves and poor wannabes are less likely to decide they're the brains of the outfit and cut you out of…

Fortunately? Somebody already did the training for them! https://github.com/yandex/YaLM-100B

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

#306

Post by shartshooter »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #131

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 th…

This just happened to me, yesterday, for the very first time! Watch out!

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

#308

Post by cinntaile »

goguy wrote: post #302
cinntaile wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Or so you think...

It's fine, he had some money troubles and needed $300 to pay his bills on time.

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

#309

Post by 0des »

philwelch wrote: post #271
0des wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't mandated to have mail or phone. Edit: Noting a lot of downvotes on this comment, which is odd. I can only conclude one thing- don't be Amish on HN. Perhaps this could be an opportunity to explore a different way of life, and a different community structure. It is not all horse buggies and barns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6SlJZk5guI&list=PLEyPgwIPkH...

I can understand the concept of Amish communities not having telephones or mailboxes, but that lifestyle seems inconsistent with the behavior of arguing for the merits of that lifestyle on Hacker News.

Beachy Amish, it's fine.

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

#310

Post by AgentME »

aaaaaaaaata wrote: post #285
AgentME wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow when I was in high school, my ex girlfriend's cellphone number became linked to my cellphone number so that if someone called me while I was already in a call, the new call would be redirected to her. It caused some awkward situations. I have no idea how it happened. I had once set her number as a speed-dial on my phone and also set it as a Verizon "friends & family" number so I could call her for free, so I…

Consider that she did it? Seems an odd coincidence for it to be fwd to her number of all people.

Nah, she was confused by the situation and I've always been the sort to keep my phone locked and to myself. She never had my phone unlocked.
Post reply on HN