I have sons heading to college this and next year and I have tried to prepare them for the world of scamming that exists out there. I sure hope I've done enough.
Just a few minutes ago I had a scam text that pig butchering begins. I typically delete them immediately but this time just to see what happens I wrote back in several languages aggressively counter-offering to teach them how to buy crypto. I got a puzzled response, then a picture of a waifish asian woman on restaraunt balcony, I think it's AI generated, but it doesn't matter, and then after me clearly not biting a "Fuck you". I wrote "I feel for you doing pig butchering, but its not going to work here", translated it to Chinese and sent that, and got back another "Fuck you", this time in Chinese. ... Now that I typed this out, I realize this was kind of pointless exchange
They will be, or already have been, exposed to people telling them that crypto/leveraged day trading/AI/whatever is the shortcut to wealth. That will likely be their peers, or the people (podcasters) that have high status amongst their peers, and is a much more insidious problem. That's what will get them into trouble.
A guy I knew back in high school was notorious for falling for 419 type scams all the time. His brothers would constantly dunk on him for being scammed online. It was like 7, 8, 9 times...
Years later he was caught on TV by Chris Hansen and charged. Went to prison. That recontextualized everything. He wasn't falling for scams -- that was a fiction to cover the fact that he was being repeatedly blackmailed by people who caught on to his activities online.
It makes me extremely angry to think that people knew what he was up to and let him continue just so they could keep getting evidence against him to blackmail him again and again. Fucking furious, honestly.
The thought of giving money to a stranger who I met via a dating app or other social media platform who shifted the conversation to WeChat and asked me to wire money to a bank account is so incomprehensible to me that the mind of someone who would do that is entirely different to how mine is constructed physically, chemically, and electrically to such a degree that it is difficult for me to even believe that it exists.
I am not even particularly financially literate. In college. I barely scraped by my statistics class, took no finance or business classes, and the only formal financial literacy education I have ever received was a single one hour course given to me by the US Army in late 2001 when they announced the TSP (401k for military) was coming where the only takeaways were “compounding interest is magic” and “put your money into a retirement account and don’t look at it until you’re a decade out from retirement”.
To me, believing an unsolicited stranger who is offering you an investment opportunity like what pig butchering scams are will make you rich is the same exact thing as walking out of a rundown gas station that also sells nunchucks, bongs, and ninja throwing stars with a little baggie of pills that have a tiger on the label thinking that they’ll turn you a super sex machine.
Is it desperation?
Profound financial illiteracy that exceeds mine by several orders of magnitude?
My stepfather passed away just before Covid. After he passed away, my mom was isolated and started spending time on Match.com.
Eventually she found her match - a total scamming operation.
She proceeded to liquidate my deceased step father's retirement savings and also took out high interest loans to send her match money.
She wired the scammer well over $100k. The high interest loans totally ruined her life.
They were using a US bank. She was using Wells Fargo.
She is/was:
1. Desperate for attention 2. Prone to deception 3. Tech illiterate - some of the photos the scammer sent her were so obviously photoshopped
Happy to share more if it's helpful. It's been one of the most difficult things to deal with throughout my life, but I hope that our story can be helpful to someone else.
A former roommate of mine who is extremely tech-savvy but just fat and lonely was constantly wiring women he'd never met money.
He was constantly getting catfished on dating apps and talking all day to fake facebook profiles 2-3 hours away and they'd always have an excuse to not meet him and have their hand out for escalating amounts of money until reality hit him and he'd start over and do it again with another catfish. I moved out partly because he would miss his mortgage payments because he wired some scammer money.
A lot of these people lived decent rational lives and should know better. They are college educated and had good careers and large retirement accounts and made all the right financial decisions to lead a good life. But then some stranger pretends to misdial your number and reads a script about how they feel like they really connected with you. You get 'activated' and enter an irrational universe where you can be convinced to send your money away and keep the relationship a secret from everyone you know and lie to your bank about why you are withdrawing anything and who knows what else.
I like to think I am immune to this but who knows what I will be in 30 years. I make a living by being distrusting (security) and got activated as a good boglehead at a really young age. Or maybe the stupid-juice will suffuse my brain at age 70 and I'll give it all away to a cute AI voice that robodials me after decades of not answering any call that isn't already in my contacts, and everybody who knows me will be mystified as to why, including myself.
so it's not a stranger, it's "your close online friend says they have a good retirement fund and it might do better than yours, would you try it out?"
I didn't send money to the mexx.com site but I did send some to a site called ftx.com which pulled a more subtle scam. Got that refunded eventually.
What does work is an absolute, ironclad rule that I do not trust and am not friends with anyone I meet online until we've met multiple times in person. But there's a lot of lonely people out there who don't find that rule so easy.
The more sophisticated attempts seemingly do not straight up ask for cash. They offer an investment opportunity on a scam website which will report the investment doing well, so the victim will independently invest more money.
That's a good rule and should be common sense for all internet users.
I found both situations unbelievable but I can see how. Two situations which turned out legitimate were:
* I was in a bad accident and there was a settlement which was intended to go to the insurer but went to me instead. The subrogation claim eventually made it to me and I was informed via phone. I told them to send the docs etc. and contacted the insurer to ensure this was their guys. It was and I paid (perhaps more than I should have but not all that I received)
* About half the time I send a big wire on Chase, they call me to confirm details and this and that. I always say "I shouldn't really be doing this, right? Can you tell me how I can call you?" and they tell me to go on the site and find the number etc. etc.
So it seems there are many cases where the fake seeming is legit. These two were drowned in a large number of other scam phone calls, admittedly, and I must confess that hearing an Indian accent with a Western name now sets off my alarm bells.
Sure, we can explain how this works, you just need to subscribe to our educational series on the topic...
It's all about framing the con in a way that gets past the defense mechanisms the OP assumes. Whether this is done with synthetic intimacy, urgency, exclusivity, high-mindedness, etc. depends on the target victim profile.
But, it's always social engineering. The only 100% defense is to assume a deeply untrusting posture that makes social living nearly impossible.
"All the lonely people, where do they all come from? All the lonely people, where do they all belong?"
There are a lot of sad people out there. And some of them are at the nunchucks, bongs, and throwing stars store.
The thought of telling somebody your real name to somebody online used to be considered a poor decision.
The bar has really moved for what people need for trust.
Desperation and loneliness are often a part of it, and these scams happen over a period of months, so at the critical moment it doesn't feel (emphasis on "feel") like you're talking to a stranger at all. These criminal organizations have done this thousands and thousands of times, they know how to emotionally manipulate someone away from thinking objectively about the situation. They just have to catch someone at a vulnerable moment and get them talking for a day or two, and already they aren't a stranger anymore, they're "a guy I've been talking to", and they just build up the relationship for weeks or months before they even bring up money or investing.
This Economist podcast is pretty good if you want to understand more, even if you don't have a subscription the three free episodes are great: https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc.
This is also a good blog post about how even someone extremely knowledgeable about technology and fraud can be easily scammed if you just catch them at the right time: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/. It can happen to you too, you are not immune just because these victims seem like morons to you. They seem like morons to themselves too, but it still happened.
> I've been arrested/kidnapped/lost my wallet
the scammers create a flase sense of urgency and exploit the victim's concern for their loved one's well-being.
To me, pig butchering is a long term process where the victim is convinced that a new contact is a trusted friend, and then the trusted friend needs money for (transportation, investment, living arrangements, etc). The symbolism being that the victim is a pig that is fattened up via building up a relationship, and then butchered via the demand for money.
Of those you have met, who would be at risk of falling for such scams? I know about maybe two.
And the combination of being both susceptible and not chronic broke is quite rare. Both those I know about who I guess fall for this stuff are broke.
Young folks on the other hand get hit with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextortion
which often ends by suicide in 15-20 minutes.
Same logic behind AI girlfriends or in general losing yourself to online life. It's a lack meeting your needs offline and scammers/technology willing to fill those needs online.
Criminals just use stolen identities (from breaches of KYC data).
You gotta understand, there's the law, then there's enforcement of laws, then there's punishments for getting caught breaking the law. The banks have done the math. Maybe they've even lobbied to have the penalties/enforcers reduced. It doesn't pay for them to follow this law strictly, so they don't. You'll find this across the legal system. It comes down hard on the poor and marginalized, but gives a lot of grace to the rich, even if at our expense.
Even one as big as NFCU. I've never looked back since switching.
How does the bank verify the scammer and the "victim" aren't colluding?
I.e. Mal opens a bank account with $100k, it gets cleaned out when he's "scammed" by Eve, then Mal is reimbursed $100k. Mal & Eve collectively start with $100k, and end up with $200k.
(This is why I put "victim" in quotes: In this scenario, Eve and Mal are co-conspirators trying to defraud the scam reimbursement system.)
They’re not going to just take your word at being scammed, either, and the police are going to be involved for it to even get off the ground.
To add to that - there are several barriers to taking out large amounts of cash. You can’t just walk into a bank and pull out £10k, no questions asked, because of the likelihood of it being part of a scam.
These days you can open bank accounts completely online with fraudulent info
You can even open bank accounts from countries on the other side of the world. How will they arrest you, exactly?
Analogies are by definition imperfect but:
1. why not point the finger at ATT and Verizon for allowing phone calls and IP packets that facilitated crime?
2. toll road owners, car/truck manufacturers, UPS, USPS, should they be tasked with "knowing" more about their customers?
All this just ends up blaming the victim and doesn't really fix the problem while having massive collateral damage like folks having their bank accounts closed for no good reason and causing real losses to actual businesses.
What's the solution? I'm not sure. Perhaps it begins with holding countries more to account for the actions of their resident criminals.
The US alone loses 158 billion $ each year [1] to scams, the global toll is allegedly around 1 trillion $ [2]. That's fucking insane, this has to stop.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ftc-states-scams-cost-us-cons...
[2] https://www.gasa.org/post/global-state-of-scams-report-2024-...
> DO NOT REDEEM
Imagine Americans living in small towns with few to no Indians, and their only association with Indian accents is someone trying to steal their (or their parents' or granparents') money.
EDIT: seatac76, your reply got shadowed; perhaps your entire account. Not sure why.
How much control does an average citizen have over these criminal enterprises? Does an average US citizen know/care/take-action when mercenaries from their country topple governments of other countries? As long as the crime is not visible, they just enjoy fruits of their crimes.
I suspect the reason they don't is many of them know that following the money will lead right to their own front doors.
According to the article, this is originating in China - we're sanctioning them pretty hard as it is, and they don't seem to care that much.
As in past, the future US dispensation would be far more more decent to disturb peacock like dancing Modi.
Umm you are targeting the wrong person here. Majority of the scam call centers come from West Bengal, particularly Kolkata. Which is headed by Chief Minister Mamta Banerjee.
India has a federal structure, with cooperation between Center and States. Similar to USA. Modi just can't invade Kolkata using Indian Armed Forces and dismantle the operations without facing significant legal challenges in the Supreme Court of India.
West Bengal is a islamo-commie state. Nearly impossible to flip the state electorally for BJP to win (Narendra Modi heads BJP). The state is a stronghold of Mamta Banerjee who heads the TMC party. She came to power after nearly 4 decades of Communist rule.
> India has a federal structure, with cooperation between Center and States. Similar to USA. Modi just can't invade Kolkata using Indian Armed Forces and dismantle the operations without facing significant legal challenges in the Supreme Court of India.
There are ways in any federal system to force the cooperation of unwilling states. The US, infamously, threatened to withhold federal highway funding unless states raised the minimum drinking age to 21.
The federal government could also be transparent about hints of scammers they get and explain why the scammers are not being targeted. Particularly when the state in question is run by the opposition, I would expect the federal government party to use this as political ammunition.
The fact that there is zero such efforts visible leads me to the conclusion that Modi just doesn't give a fuck.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...
The US GDP is more than 27 trillion. If 158 billion is being lost. That's about .6% of the GDP. So, my question is, why does this have to stop? If it is stopped the benefits to the global population seems trivial. I'm sure at the individual level it is devastating. Good luck getting the national government to care about such a small percent.
Yet another reason to avoid cryptocurrency, until that is 100% fully regulated, I will always avoid it.
One of the biggest reason is every tom, dick or harry is creating their own cryptocurrency these days. Including the dummy in charge of the US :)
People are asked to buy and send crypto, they're not the same people who know what crypto is.
