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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

#91

Post by rurp »

Last5Digits wrote: post #54
Gigachad wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Man the techno-utopianism is awfully strong for some people when it comes to LLMs. There are a wide range of opinions about these models on HN, many positive and many point out the very real flaws the current models have. If you find this mix of takes so offensive you might want to reconsider your own opinions a bit. These models are interesting, but they aren't magically perfect.

Most people outside of tech don't understands how these models work at even the highest level of them being text predictors or their output being highly dependent on the training data. Many people don't even realize the enormous amount of energy and data consumption required to train these models.

Seriously, try asking a random relative how an LLM works at a basic level. You're likely to get a blank stare at even the term "LLM".

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

#92

Post by maxbond »

maxbond wrote: post #33
jessriedel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Also, realistically, I don't imagine the phone number literally just telling you that the service wasn't available and hanging up. I imagine it would offer you options to get various pieces of information (the URL of the website, the legal address of Meta, how to navigate to the support knowledge base on the website, ...) and let you draw your own conclusion about how useful it was. Maybe it's occasionally handy to someone. At worst it's harmless.

I think in an ideal world, you could use speech recognition to let people leave a message, and open a ticket, as if they had emailed support@. When someone responds, the system gives them a call them back and delivers it using text to speech.

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

#93

Post by ceejayoz »

dylan604 wrote: post #90
ceejayoz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "helpful SEO guy" likely is (or was hired by) the scammer. StackOverflow gets lots of fake posts like this promoting numbers. Around tax time there's a lot of Quicken ones.

See, this is what confuses me to know end. Not once, ever, have I thought of asking an online forum for a phone number. Maybe I'm paranoid enough after all??? Also, I'm old, so I actually visit companies webpages. We've been through enough "don't fall for phishing" enough now, right? You don't trust links, phone numbers, whatever from anything that is not the official places for that information.

Facebook doesn't provide phone support, and people get desperate. People then Google things like "Facebook support phone".

All you'll find is results like https://gethuman.com/phone-number/Facebook or https://facebook-pay.pissedconsumer.com/customer-service.htm... or the Quora post that all have numbers that almost certainly goes to a scammer.

Bonus points when it makes it into the AI models (as happened here) where they repeat it verbatim as if it were the truth.

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

#94

Post by dylan604 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #93
dylan604 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, this is what confuses me to know end. Not once, ever, have I thought of asking an online forum for a phone number. Maybe I'm paranoid enough after all??? Also, I'm old, so I actually visit companies webpages. We've been through enough "don't fall for phishing" enough now, right? You don't trust links, phone numbers, whatever from anything that is not the official places for that information.

Facebook doesn't provide phone support, and people get desperate. People then Google things like "Facebook support phone". All you'll find is results like https://gethuman.com/phone-number/Facebook or https://facebook-pay.pissedconsumer.com/customer-service.htm... or the Quora post that all have numbers that almost certainly goes to a scammer. Bonus points when it makes it into the AI models (as happened here) where…

again, even if I were the one doing that Google search, with the domain examples you provided, I wouldn't trust one of them.

Like, common sense on the interwebs just continues to disappear. Gullibility seems to have increased as critical thinking and coming to logical conclusions are disappearing.

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

#95

Post by [deleted] »

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".

[deleted]

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

#96

Post by ceejayoz »

dylan604 wrote: post #94
ceejayoz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook doesn't provide phone support, and people get desperate. People then Google things like "Facebook support phone". All you'll find is results like https://gethuman.com/phone-number/Facebook or https://facebook-pay.pissedconsumer.com/customer-service.htm... or the Quora post that all have numbers that almost certainly goes to a scammer. Bonus points when it makes it into the AI models (as happened here) where…

again, even if I were the one doing that Google search, with the domain examples you provided, I wouldn't trust one of them. Like, common sense on the interwebs just continues to disappear. Gullibility seems to have increased as critical thinking and coming to logical conclusions are disappearing.

In this case, it was Meta's own AI regurgitating something it found on Quora. Quite a few people would trust that, especially non-technical folks.

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

#97

Post by happypumpkin »

boscillator wrote: post #73
janalsncm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was searching for apartments every complex had the same AI program for scheduling. It was horrible. I got to talk to one of the leasing managers at one of the viewings and I told him it made them seem cheaper, not more tech-savvy. He told me they had spent millions of dollars on it.

There seems to be a semi-infinite market for garbage software sold to landlords. At my current place I need an account to unlock my door, a different account to open the garage door (because the garage is managed by a third party), an account to reserve the elevator for move in day (which tried to up sell me moving services), an account to get sent my water bill which charges me $15 a month for the privilege (I don't…

Don't forget the account to open shared mailboxes for packages. "Luxor" for me. It actually works so I don't mind much but I hadn't really considered how much extra rent all the apps might be costing me.

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

#98

Post by idle_zealot »

RecycledEle wrote: post #52
idle_zealot wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bad thing is that people still think LLMs can be trusted at all. LLMs are as trustworthy as humans. Humans have been being wrong for about as long as we have been lying. Whether you get information from a human or an LLM, check it. I worry about the people who insist on credible sources rather than checking information for themselves. I think 80% or more of them are trolling me, but there are some who genuinely…

Good luck checking every fact you encounter with the scientific method (and making sure to repeat your experiments to ensure reliability, oh and don't forget peer review to evaluate your methodology). What is your proposed scientific experiment to test... what Facebook's support number is?

My point is just that credible sources are absolutely necessary for information to disperse. Nobody can afford to figure out the modern world from first principles.

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

#99

Post by maxbond »

Thadawan wrote: post #86
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…

“There is a phone number for Meta online. When CBC called it, an automated recording said, ‘Please note that we are unable to provide telephone support at this time,’ and directed callers to meta.com/help.”

My mistake. Thanks for the correction.

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

#100

Post by e40 »

My 89 yr old data called "AMEX" and was scammed. He googled the number for AMEX and took the top result (he says, I did not witness this). I'm across the country, so that zoom session was quite tedious (it took us an hour to get the permissions straightened out for zoom to be able to share his screen).
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