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The internet lead to a surge of online scams, lasting to this very day. The problem isn't the medium/platform, but the idiots falling for them. I simply can no

The internet lead to a surge of online scams, lasting to this very day. The problem isn't the medium/platform, but the idiots falling for them. I simply can not have any sympathy for idiots so greedy they fall for the "I'll double your cryptos" scam. None. The best way of fighting scams is intelligent, critically thinking people. If this wasn't so deliberately undesired by politics, the world as a whole would be a better place.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
Completely agree. I used to have sympathy for these victims. Not anymore. Not after actually interacting with them and getting literally banned from a group for trying to warn about risks. One guy literally sold his car in order to buy scammy shitcoins.
johnebgd 5y ago
As people age they tend to become more susceptible to con artists. Society should protect our elders not leave them vulnerable. Victim blaming is a bad idea. Regulators exist for a reason.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  Do the same rules apply to slot machines and carnival games? Should we make those illegal also because people fall for them? Is it victim blaming to say "you know what you're getting into when you walk into a casino"?
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    They’re already heavily regulated, the machines inspected, odds posted and support available. You can’t do it online due to the increased risk. And casinos are few, far between, outside of most population centers, and broadly not easy to get to for most people. If publicly traded companies started putting their treasuries into Caesar’s chips, you bet we’d see more regulation.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      We aren't talking about that though, we are talking about whether someone who falla for a scam bears any responsibility for that, at least in this thread started by the parent comment. When you walk into a building with a big sign above it that says "warning: scams ahead" can we really say "blaming the people that walked in here is unequivocally wrong"?
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        Seems like your lede is “why not victim blame, honestly? Should we really ignore what she was wearing when she walked down that back alley?” This isn’t an argument that I think is particularly worth entertaining. People should exercise due caution at all times appropriate to their surroundings. However if a criminal robs them it’s the criminals fault.
        betwixthewires 5y ago
        It's always the criminal's fault. But we aren't trying to blame the criminal in here, we are trying to blame the infrastructure the criminal used. It's a false dichotomy.
        arcticbull 5y ago
        If the main thing an infrastructure enables is crime, then it’s ok to blame that infrastructure. For instance if there’s a network of tunnels under the border used exclusively for smuggling, that’s bad infrastructure. Our reaction wouldn’t be, well, let’s arrest the criminals but leave those tunnels, the tunnels did nothing wrong!! Doing so would simply give the next criminal a head start. This is a great analogy for crypto. Sure once in a while an asymlum seeker may get through too, but overwhelmingly it’s narcos and Bolivian marching powder. So we blow up the tunnels.
        betwixthewires 5y ago
        It's not that great an analogy actually. It's not about the main thing an infrastructure enables, it's about what the infrastructure is designed for. Tunnels under the border are specifically there to smuggle. Highways are there to do move anything you want, including illegal activity, which is policed separately. And the asylum seekers and Bolivian marching powder examples are good to address the main point here as well. Does the cokehead share any blame in using coke? Is that victim blaming? Should asylum seeking be illegal? Was bitcoin created to break the law? In some ways. But it was designed to facilitate commerce without regard for legality. It's not like a smuggling tunnel, it's like a highway. And it's like that because sometimes you want to smuggle something, like asylum seekers, but you want it to serve legitimate purposes also. So not a very good analogy at all.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    Slot machines are heavily regulated to ensure some level of fairness.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      They're actually regulated to be completely unfair. Any regulation ensures no randomness in results. You're guaranteed a percentage loss due to regulation. When you walk into a casino you're wittingly consenting to being scammed.
    - tenuousemphasis 5y ago
      Yes, you will "fairly" lose all your money to games designed to be as addictive as possible. Sure the odds are regulated and posted but they are always against you and the advertising around them makes it seem like you can't lose.
- blooalien 5y ago
  From the article: > This is especially true among younger people who are digitally savvy but less financially literate. > People ages 18-to-39 were more than twice as likely to report losing money to social media scams as older adults last year. Seems like maybe we should be protecting the "young know-it-alls" from themselves?
msoad 5y ago
Everyone scammed is an idiot until I'm scammed. There are many ways you can undo traditional scam transactions. Even Western Union can be undone. Cryptocurrencies have no such means except for forking which is not going to happen for small amounts.
- k__ 5y ago
  I lost 600€ last year in an traditional transaction. Told the police, they said, they can't do a thing, because the scammer stole the bank account and probably lives in Estonia or somewhere. So, while I use banks on a daily basis, simply because I have to, I don't believe they are much safer.
  - odshoifsdhfs 5y ago
    Did you try to work with your/estonia bank? Police can do something, but usually for small values is too much trouble, but with the police report, most banks are very accommodating (Estonia is in the EU and has to follow EU banking laws, so it isn't like the money went to some backwater, no law country)
    - k__ 5y ago
      Yes, they said, a standard transaction can't be reverted and I should talk to law enforcement.
      - odshoifsdhfs 5y ago
        Strange, I had something similar happening and they reverted/refunded me/did something (needed the police report first though). In any case, sorry it happened to you.
  - 7steps2much 5y ago
    Did you talk to your bank? Getting police involved is nice and all but often times the banks themselves are a lot more helpful! Also, depending on how it was possible for the scammer to "steal the bank account" in the first place you might be entitled to damages or something, though that heavily depends on your legislation and where your bank is located of course.
joefife 5y ago
I've seen intelligent people, who are experts in their domain, fall from grace through age or illness. Once critical thinkers, now vulnerable and gullible. I wouldn't be so harsh.
- MrYellowP 5y ago
  You're right, of course. I was excluding people who really aren't at fault. When someone's brain turns into a vegetable he's not capable of thinking things through, so he can not be responsible for the stupid things he's doing. Doesn't change the rest, though.
woodruffw 5y ago
I think the critical distinction is that the Internet also gave us online banking, shopping, streaming, real-time communication, &c. It's not clear what cryptocurrencies have given us, apart from a (not very secure) way to buy drugs on the Internet and the occasional slower, power guzzling alternative to a service that already exists.
- throwawayay02 5y ago
  Censor proof, private, transactions.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    How are they private when they're viewable by everyone in the world? All it takes is one slip up or security breach to connect your IRL identity to your wallet hash and every transaction is public for all to see.
    - robot_no_419 5y ago
      Plenty of cryptocurrencies are private: Monero, Dash, Zcash, Beam, Grin, etc... I actually prefer using the public ones when I want a paper trail. But I've got a stash of the private ones in case I ever need to relocate to a different country one day in my life.
    - tenuousemphasis 5y ago
      There's no such thing as a wallet hash. A wallet consists of any number of individual keys that cannot be linked together except through using them together in a single transaction. Yes, careless use can link your identity to one or more keys, but software can help prevent that. But if you use a P2P wallet, there is no equivalent of your bank that can see or censor all of your transactions.
- robot_no_419 5y ago
  It gave us an uncensorable, global, and decentralized payments system. To some people this is extremely valuable.
AlexandrB 5y ago
People fall for scams/cults/MLMs for all kinds of reasons: because they're bored/lonely, because they're in a bad place in their life, because they put their trust in a person they shouldn't have, etc. Not just because they're idiots. My personal belief is that the best way I can set myself up to fall for a scam is by incorrectly believing that I would never fall for one. "Pride goeth before the fall." That's why I try to remind myself I'm as fallible as the next human.
varenc 5y ago
We could say the same thing about phishing attacks. “Any company that hires idiots so dumb they’ll type their password into a random site without confirming the certificate deserves what’s coming to them”. Except we know that at scale very large organizations, i.e. Google, cannot 100% stop phishing attacks just by user training. Humans are always fallible in a large enough group. The solution for phishing protection is to take the human out of the equation and rely on something like U2F to perform the authenticity check for you.
- dwaite 5y ago
  To elaborate the parent's point, Google switched away from employee training as the primary means to prevent phishing attacks to WebAuthn security keys. Their phishing incidents dropped to zero. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/07/google-security-keys-neutralized-employee-phishing/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/07/google-security-keys-neu...
  - varenc 5y ago
    Thank you! I recalled that story but wasn't sure on the details.
  - MrYellowP 5y ago
    Yes, but it's not actually a solution. It maintains the status quo and only prevents its consequences. The problem, simplified: People are dumb. The solution: Making people smarter. Not a solution: Keeping people dumb and preventing them from making stupid mistakes.
- MrYellowP 5y ago
  > Humans are always fallible in a large enough group To make sure that everyone, who will eventually read this, understand what this line actually means, is: There's always an idiot falling through the cracks. Yes. It's inevitable. It happens. Doesn't change the fact that if people were more rational and less driven by their feelings, less people would be falling for scams and thus less scams would exist. Anyone who doesn't understand that scams solely exist because they work, is excused. Anyone who disagrees with the idea that people need to act in a rational, self responsible manner is a part of the problem. The cause of scams is people, who aren't thinking things through, falling for them. If schools nowadays didn't raise people into mostly being thoughtless robots, the world would be a better place as a whole, scams included. Of course there's always going to be one guy. Doesn't change the rest at all. You're making good the enemy of perfect and your solution in no way or form actually improves us, as humans, and instead removes even more responsibility away from us.
arcticbull 5y ago
The internet also created things of value. Connecting people all over the world instantly. Businesses built on leveraging newly created efficiencies. Crypto is intentionally the opposite. Imposing artificial scarcity on a world without, leveraging inefficiency and complexity at every level to obscure what’s actually happening. It’s an ideology not a technology. It’s just a linked list but much slower. Anything that can be built on the blockchain can be built faster, cheaper and more efficient without. Ask yourself why in 14 years no industries have been revolutionized, no businesses built (except for trading) and no value created. If there’s so many industries ripe and begging for the tech why hasn’t a single one of them gained any value from even one blockchain implementation?
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  The internet had existed in some iteration for 3 decades before the business world started using it, and was publicly accessible for one entire decade before that. The first businesses to really adopt it were pornographers. Why exactly do you think the valuation of cryptocurrencies are so high? Certainly it's not an indicator that the business case for it is nil. Maybe not revolutionary, but it is disingenuous or delusional to suggest that there's no business use for this thing while staring point blank at a world getting eaten by it in real time.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    The internet connected people on day one. That’s all it did. > Why exactly do you think the valuation of cryptocurrencies are so high? Certainly it's not an indicator that the business case for it is nil. Completely irrelevant. Prices are determined at the margin, its most recent price times supply. It’s got nothing to do with how much money is in the system or how useful any of it is. They’re all priced in USDT which has at numerous times been totally unbacked and issued on loans to institutions who use it to control the marginal price. As for shared delusions, the entire economy of Albania collapsed into a civil war because 66% of the GDP got locked into MLM schemes in 1997. [1] You must evaluate this from first principles not based on what the other lemmings are up to. 14 years in can you name a single business built on crypto that’s even remotely successful? [1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.ht...
systemvoltage 5y ago
You won’t find much support for individual responsibility here.
- blooalien 5y ago
  By "here" I assume you mean "Earth"… Responsibility is not a thing humans are good at.
mbesto 5y ago
> The best way of fighting scams is intelligent, critically thinking people. This sounds like "if everyone was a good driver, we'd have less auto related deaths". C'mon - that's not how the world works, this is just wishful thinking. The problem with crypto scams is there is no clawback. If someone commits wire fraud and I accidentally send the wire for my $100k down payment for my new house to <insert imposter> the bank can potentially reconcile it. With crypto? Nope, you're f'd. Sorry there's no trace. > intelligent, critically thinking people Like the Winklevoss twins who store their wallet keys in....BANKS so they don't get scammed. The irony is hilarious. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/technology/bitcoin-winklevoss-twins.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/technology/bitcoin-winkle...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
kitkat_new 5y ago
> The problem isn't the medium/platform, but the idiots falling for them. That's victim blaming

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Completely agree. I used to have sympathy for these victims. Not anymore. Not after actually interacting with them and getting literally banned from a group for trying to warn about risks. One guy literally sold his car in order to buy scammy shitcoins.

johnebgd 5y ago

As people age they tend to become more susceptible to con artists. Society should protect our elders not leave them vulnerable. Victim blaming is a bad idea. Regulators exist for a reason.

betwixthewires 5y ago
Do the same rules apply to slot machines and carnival games? Should we make those illegal also because people fall for them? Is it victim blaming to say "you know what you're getting into when you walk into a casino"?
- arcticbull 5y ago
  They’re already heavily regulated, the machines inspected, odds posted and support available. You can’t do it online due to the increased risk. And casinos are few, far between, outside of most population centers, and broadly not easy to get to for most people. If publicly traded companies started putting their treasuries into Caesar’s chips, you bet we’d see more regulation.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    We aren't talking about that though, we are talking about whether someone who falla for a scam bears any responsibility for that, at least in this thread started by the parent comment. When you walk into a building with a big sign above it that says "warning: scams ahead" can we really say "blaming the people that walked in here is unequivocally wrong"?
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      Seems like your lede is “why not victim blame, honestly? Should we really ignore what she was wearing when she walked down that back alley?” This isn’t an argument that I think is particularly worth entertaining. People should exercise due caution at all times appropriate to their surroundings. However if a criminal robs them it’s the criminals fault.
      - betwixthewires 5y ago
        It's always the criminal's fault. But we aren't trying to blame the criminal in here, we are trying to blame the infrastructure the criminal used. It's a false dichotomy.
        arcticbull 5y ago
        If the main thing an infrastructure enables is crime, then it’s ok to blame that infrastructure. For instance if there’s a network of tunnels under the border used exclusively for smuggling, that’s bad infrastructure. Our reaction wouldn’t be, well, let’s arrest the criminals but leave those tunnels, the tunnels did nothing wrong!! Doing so would simply give the next criminal a head start. This is a great analogy for crypto. Sure once in a while an asymlum seeker may get through too, but overwhelmingly it’s narcos and Bolivian marching powder. So we blow up the tunnels.
        betwixthewires 5y ago
        It's not that great an analogy actually. It's not about the main thing an infrastructure enables, it's about what the infrastructure is designed for. Tunnels under the border are specifically there to smuggle. Highways are there to do move anything you want, including illegal activity, which is policed separately. And the asylum seekers and Bolivian marching powder examples are good to address the main point here as well. Does the cokehead share any blame in using coke? Is that victim blaming? Should asylum seeking be illegal? Was bitcoin created to break the law? In some ways. But it was designed to facilitate commerce without regard for legality. It's not like a smuggling tunnel, it's like a highway. And it's like that because sometimes you want to smuggle something, like asylum seekers, but you want it to serve legitimate purposes also. So not a very good analogy at all.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  Slot machines are heavily regulated to ensure some level of fairness.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    They're actually regulated to be completely unfair. Any regulation ensures no randomness in results. You're guaranteed a percentage loss due to regulation. When you walk into a casino you're wittingly consenting to being scammed.
  - tenuousemphasis 5y ago
    Yes, you will "fairly" lose all your money to games designed to be as addictive as possible. Sure the odds are regulated and posted but they are always against you and the advertising around them makes it seem like you can't lose.
blooalien 5y ago
From the article: > This is especially true among younger people who are digitally savvy but less financially literate. > People ages 18-to-39 were more than twice as likely to report losing money to social media scams as older adults last year. Seems like maybe we should be protecting the "young know-it-alls" from themselves?

msoad 5y ago

Everyone scammed is an idiot until I'm scammed. There are many ways you can undo traditional scam transactions. Even Western Union can be undone. Cryptocurrencies have no such means except for forking which is not going to happen for small amounts.

k__ 5y ago
I lost 600€ last year in an traditional transaction. Told the police, they said, they can't do a thing, because the scammer stole the bank account and probably lives in Estonia or somewhere. So, while I use banks on a daily basis, simply because I have to, I don't believe they are much safer.
- odshoifsdhfs 5y ago
  Did you try to work with your/estonia bank? Police can do something, but usually for small values is too much trouble, but with the police report, most banks are very accommodating (Estonia is in the EU and has to follow EU banking laws, so it isn't like the money went to some backwater, no law country)
  - k__ 5y ago
    Yes, they said, a standard transaction can't be reverted and I should talk to law enforcement.
    - odshoifsdhfs 5y ago
      Strange, I had something similar happening and they reverted/refunded me/did something (needed the police report first though). In any case, sorry it happened to you.
- 7steps2much 5y ago
  Did you talk to your bank? Getting police involved is nice and all but often times the banks themselves are a lot more helpful! Also, depending on how it was possible for the scammer to "steal the bank account" in the first place you might be entitled to damages or something, though that heavily depends on your legislation and where your bank is located of course.

joefife 5y ago

I've seen intelligent people, who are experts in their domain, fall from grace through age or illness. Once critical thinkers, now vulnerable and gullible. I wouldn't be so harsh.

MrYellowP 5y ago
You're right, of course. I was excluding people who really aren't at fault. When someone's brain turns into a vegetable he's not capable of thinking things through, so he can not be responsible for the stupid things he's doing. Doesn't change the rest, though.

woodruffw 5y ago

I think the critical distinction is that the Internet also gave us online banking, shopping, streaming, real-time communication, &c. It's not clear what cryptocurrencies have given us, apart from a (not very secure) way to buy drugs on the Internet and the occasional slower, power guzzling alternative to a service that already exists.

throwawayay02 5y ago
Censor proof, private, transactions.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  How are they private when they're viewable by everyone in the world? All it takes is one slip up or security breach to connect your IRL identity to your wallet hash and every transaction is public for all to see.
  - robot_no_419 5y ago
    Plenty of cryptocurrencies are private: Monero, Dash, Zcash, Beam, Grin, etc... I actually prefer using the public ones when I want a paper trail. But I've got a stash of the private ones in case I ever need to relocate to a different country one day in my life.
  - tenuousemphasis 5y ago
    There's no such thing as a wallet hash. A wallet consists of any number of individual keys that cannot be linked together except through using them together in a single transaction. Yes, careless use can link your identity to one or more keys, but software can help prevent that. But if you use a P2P wallet, there is no equivalent of your bank that can see or censor all of your transactions.
robot_no_419 5y ago
It gave us an uncensorable, global, and decentralized payments system. To some people this is extremely valuable.

AlexandrB 5y ago

People fall for scams/cults/MLMs for all kinds of reasons: because they're bored/lonely, because they're in a bad place in their life, because they put their trust in a person they shouldn't have, etc. Not just because they're idiots. My personal belief is that the best way I can set myself up to fall for a scam is by incorrectly believing that I would never fall for one. "Pride goeth before the fall." That's why I try to remind myself I'm as fallible as the next human.

varenc 5y ago

We could say the same thing about phishing attacks. “Any company that hires idiots so dumb they’ll type their password into a random site without confirming the certificate deserves what’s coming to them”. Except we know that at scale very large organizations, i.e. Google, cannot 100% stop phishing attacks just by user training. Humans are always fallible in a large enough group. The solution for phishing protection is to take the human out of the equation and rely on something like U2F to perform the authenticity check for you.

dwaite 5y ago
To elaborate the parent's point, Google switched away from employee training as the primary means to prevent phishing attacks to WebAuthn security keys. Their phishing incidents dropped to zero. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/07/google-security-keys-neutralized-employee-phishing/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/07/google-security-keys-neu...
- varenc 5y ago
  Thank you! I recalled that story but wasn't sure on the details.
- MrYellowP 5y ago
  Yes, but it's not actually a solution. It maintains the status quo and only prevents its consequences. The problem, simplified: People are dumb. The solution: Making people smarter. Not a solution: Keeping people dumb and preventing them from making stupid mistakes.
MrYellowP 5y ago
> Humans are always fallible in a large enough group To make sure that everyone, who will eventually read this, understand what this line actually means, is: There's always an idiot falling through the cracks. Yes. It's inevitable. It happens. Doesn't change the fact that if people were more rational and less driven by their feelings, less people would be falling for scams and thus less scams would exist. Anyone who doesn't understand that scams solely exist because they work, is excused. Anyone who disagrees with the idea that people need to act in a rational, self responsible manner is a part of the problem. The cause of scams is people, who aren't thinking things through, falling for them. If schools nowadays didn't raise people into mostly being thoughtless robots, the world would be a better place as a whole, scams included. Of course there's always going to be one guy. Doesn't change the rest at all. You're making good the enemy of perfect and your solution in no way or form actually improves us, as humans, and instead removes even more responsibility away from us.

arcticbull 5y ago

The internet also created things of value. Connecting people all over the world instantly. Businesses built on leveraging newly created efficiencies. Crypto is intentionally the opposite. Imposing artificial scarcity on a world without, leveraging inefficiency and complexity at every level to obscure what’s actually happening. It’s an ideology not a technology. It’s just a linked list but much slower. Anything that can be built on the blockchain can be built faster, cheaper and more efficient without. Ask yourself why in 14 years no industries have been revolutionized, no businesses built (except for trading) and no value created. If there’s so many industries ripe and begging for the tech why hasn’t a single one of them gained any value from even one blockchain implementation?

betwixthewires 5y ago
The internet had existed in some iteration for 3 decades before the business world started using it, and was publicly accessible for one entire decade before that. The first businesses to really adopt it were pornographers. Why exactly do you think the valuation of cryptocurrencies are so high? Certainly it's not an indicator that the business case for it is nil. Maybe not revolutionary, but it is disingenuous or delusional to suggest that there's no business use for this thing while staring point blank at a world getting eaten by it in real time.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  The internet connected people on day one. That’s all it did. > Why exactly do you think the valuation of cryptocurrencies are so high? Certainly it's not an indicator that the business case for it is nil. Completely irrelevant. Prices are determined at the margin, its most recent price times supply. It’s got nothing to do with how much money is in the system or how useful any of it is. They’re all priced in USDT which has at numerous times been totally unbacked and issued on loans to institutions who use it to control the marginal price. As for shared delusions, the entire economy of Albania collapsed into a civil war because 66% of the GDP got locked into MLM schemes in 1997. [1] You must evaluate this from first principles not based on what the other lemmings are up to. 14 years in can you name a single business built on crypto that’s even remotely successful? [1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.ht...

systemvoltage 5y ago

You won’t find much support for individual responsibility here.

blooalien 5y ago
By "here" I assume you mean "Earth"… Responsibility is not a thing humans are good at.

mbesto 5y ago

> The best way of fighting scams is intelligent, critically thinking people. This sounds like "if everyone was a good driver, we'd have less auto related deaths". C'mon - that's not how the world works, this is just wishful thinking. The problem with crypto scams is there is no clawback. If someone commits wire fraud and I accidentally send the wire for my $100k down payment for my new house to <insert imposter> the bank can potentially reconcile it. With crypto? Nope, you're f'd. Sorry there's no trace. > intelligent, critically thinking people Like the Winklevoss twins who store their wallet keys in....BANKS so they don't get scammed. The irony is hilarious. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/technology/bitcoin-winklevoss-twins.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/technology/bitcoin-winkle...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

kitkat_new 5y ago

> The problem isn't the medium/platform, but the idiots falling for them. That's victim blaming