91–100 of 102 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's good to hear that scammers are taking your grandparents retirement money as reparations for colonial acts?
Why are you repeating what I wrote? Calling Globalization "colonial acts" is a nice touch, though. Thanks.
My elderly mother has been scammed twice (that I know of). She fell for one of those "Your computer has been hacked" popup windows a few years ago. Which led to her buying a "protection" service that installed malware on her machine. Every couple of months she'd have an "issue" and have to shell out more money to fix it. She's been using computers since the 80's (Apple ][e) but still is utterly clueless on how to ope…
I struggled to find the source the fact that $1T is lost to scammers. From the FBI internet crime report in 2023 Americans lost about 12.5 Billion dollars [0]. That is far from 1T$. Another source reports cost if cybercrime is reported to reach 9.5T$ in 2024 but again no source provided for that number [1] [0] https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2023_IC3Report.pdf#... [1] https://www.esentire.com/resources/libra…
It kinda just depends on the agenda, one source says it’s nothing, another says it’s a trillion, and that huge gap usually means someone’s trying to push something, like tougher laws or justify some policy shift. Half the time it feels like the facts don’t even matter, just the story they wanna sell.
It's god damn maddening. At least one side effect of the new GOP is they're partially dropping the pretense of needing B so we can at least not talk past one another sometimes.
I'm not going to read the "article" because it is a transcript and looks a bit rambly and I don't expect it to be talking about anything interesting. But just going to the headline here; consider the base rate. North America has huge per-capita wealth (by a bit of a margin over most other large players). It is expected that scammers would target them and make the most profit there.
Medicare Advantage for example.
My elderly mother has been scammed twice (that I know of). She fell for one of those "Your computer has been hacked" popup windows a few years ago. Which led to her buying a "protection" service that installed malware on her machine. Every couple of months she'd have an "issue" and have to shell out more money to fix it. She's been using computers since the 80's (Apple ][e) but still is utterly clueless on how to ope…
On it's surface, this is what it looks like, but in reality what's happening is that your mother learned what she needed to learn to do her job and the things she's interested in doing. Now, unfortunately, that is no longer enough. Now you need to have a decent understanding of how things work so you can know when to call bullshit.
What separates all of us from the general public is we're not content to just learn what's required to do our jobs - we must learn how the thing works.
I was at dinner many years ago with some friends, and one of them had invited an opinion piece writer from the New York Times and she and I got into - what she felt - was a slightly heated back and forth, but I was actually just stating the reality of the new paradigm in which we live, which is this:
The days of learning everything you'll need to learn to operate in the world in high school and college are over. They've been over. You're going to have to continually learn new skills, all the time, if you expect to maintain your job and position in the modern world. If you're not willing to do that, you will no longer be promoted and if you continue to maintain that perspective, you'll eventually be fired for someone that will dedicate hours after work to keeping abreast of all the changes.
She said that was, "inhumane" and "unrealistic". I told her it didn't matter what she thought it was, because this is the reality of Corporate America, and it's even more true in technology companies, and the absolute gospel in Big Tech. She got a little huffy, but frankly I don't give a fuck when people get huffy over hearing how the world actually works, because 1) I'm not causing it and 2) no one can stop it, or even slow it down. The best you can do is adapt or choose to lay down and die. And I'm not gonna fuckin' lay down and die.
Apparently, neither is your Mom, since she's learning how to discern bullshit scammer emails from legitimate communications, so I say, good on her, and I hope she keeps on keeping on!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And most people dramatically underestimate what a death sentence a low trust society is for economic development. Countries that allow a culture of scamming are all poor because a low trust society will never develop into a first world economy. Trust and property rights are the basis of all development and investment and human collaboration.
Which is why it’s so depressing to see the U.S. backslide into this so quickly and willfully.
Corruption starts at the top, but eventually it's everywhere.
I'm not going to read the "article" because it is a transcript and looks a bit rambly and I don't expect it to be talking about anything interesting. But just going to the headline here; consider the base rate. North America has huge per-capita wealth (by a bit of a margin over most other large players). It is expected that scammers would target them and make the most profit there.
But why less Europeans? A language barrier for some countries? More regulations about robocalls etc? GDPR and better privacy so our data isn't as easy to exploit?
I'm sure there are scammers targetting Europe, but the US is a better market, because you get more people with one language, voice calls and sms are nearly free, and the dominant payment networks have a global footprint.
For Europe, you need a different language per country (more or less), calling cellphones and sending sms can be expensive (depends on the country), and victims may have country specific payment networks that may be hard to integrate from outside the area (lots of direct bank payments, which isn't easy to integrate with).
We need a federal police in charge of tracking down and stamping out scams. They attack our elderly, and otherwise vulnerable. They steal money from the people who can least afford it and fund various violent, illegal and nefarious organizations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why less Europeans? A language barrier for some countries? More regulations about robocalls etc? GDPR and better privacy so our data isn't as easy to exploit?
Language proficiency seems like a significant factor. India and Nigeria have the second and third largest number of English speakers by absolute population, I don't think it's a coincidence that both countries are also notorious for their scammers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English...
Plus, since all the transactions go through reputed banks why isn't there a decline, it has been happening since a decade now.