Email clients should just strip out hyperlinks. You link in the email? Write it directly, then people can copy/paste it. It wouldn't stop all phishing, but it would be a start to increase people's awareness of shady links.
They’re vibe-coding spam now
51–60 of 91 posts
Re: They’re vibe-coding spam now
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
That theory was always bunk. People just can't comprehend, that the average spammer really is that bad. So that theory was created to make sense of that. Because of my work I investigated a lot of spam, and I discovered real life identities of senders in many cases (because of horrible or no exostent opsec). Most of them were either underage, lived in third world countries, or both.
Phishing too. At one point in my job I was involved with taking down phishing sites, and we would sometimes get a copy of the Phish kit code from the site owner. These were basically extremely poorly written PHP scripts that people would buy from a scam-enabler and deploy to some website. The sophistication was the lowest possible level at each step. But even if you find the perpetrator bragging about it on Facebook,…
A Belgian ethical hacker showed how insecure these phishing platforms are: https://inti.io/p/how-i-infiltrated-phishing-panels
(By the way, the perpetrators are closer to home than Nigeria).
Re: They’re vibe-coding spam now
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason you'd want to filter for idiots is that a smarter person would waste the scammer's time when they figure out it's a scam after some human interaction. If the ai can take you all the way to the close, there's no reason to filter any more.
Scammers have no shortage of time to communicate with potential victims.
You've clearly never deliberately wasted a scammer's time. This is their livelihood, and I'm pretty sure most are commission only.
Re: They’re vibe-coding spam now
#54All these marketing pages with big bold text and unaligned scattered images have always felt spammy to me even when vibe coding was not there. Now that it is, you will ofcourse see that multifold. Given the humans are still the same behind it.
Re: They’re vibe-coding spam now
#55The mail I care about doesn't look like ad copy. It's usually plain-text or at least reads fine when displayed that way. It comes from people I know and/or care about. Attached images don't display by default. Remotely hosted anything doesn't even get requested. Fancier looking spam is just going to be easier to spot.
Re: They’re vibe-coding spam now
#56The "Cloud Storage Full - ACTION REQUIRED" emails sure aren't helped by Google, who communicate in a similar way.
The amount of borderline harassment I get about my Google Drive being almost full is shocking.
They have really amped up the ferocity of the language they're using to try and extract money from you for Drive. No wonder spammers are copying that.
Re: They’re vibe-coding spam now
#57This is interesting but I am not surprised. People got used to spammers putting in zero effort because it's a game of scale for them. Well now zero effort still gets them all the way there when it comes to looking convincing.
It's more than a game of scale: people who almost but not quite fall for the scam that follows the spam incur real cost to them. They don't want to trick as many people as possible with their mail, they want to trick only the most vulnerable. The obvious (to most people) mistakes are in there deliberately.
This changes, of course, with phishing. Will phishing by email even survive when voice imitation calls become more and more available? I guess it will, the bar for monetization is too low bar with resellable accounts and the like.
Re: They’re vibe-coding spam now
#58The use case for AI is, was and always will be spam.
Re: They’re vibe-coding spam now
#59[flagged]
Re: They’re vibe-coding spam now
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
That already exists, it's "voicemail". The scammers never leave a voice mail (idk why). If a real person is trying to reach you, they'll either leave a voice mail or text you after you don't pick up.
But voicemail implies storing the audio somewhere, and that means cost. And at least in my country one should explicitly enable voicemail. I never could make it work for some reason.. And as far as I can see, it is not widely used. EDIT: Oh, I completely missed the fact that there can be a fake voicemail where the phone automatically answers and asks the caller to speak and record it and store the audio on the phone…
https://developer.android.com/media/platform/mediaplayer
>Note: You can play back the audio data only to the standard output device. That is, the mobile device speaker or a Bluetooth headset. You cannot play sound files in the conversation audio during a call.
Damn google! You did this so that apps cannot do the above. You cater to spammers!