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What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
- johnklos 4y agoSimple: it's time to stop using phone numbers. I use Apple's Messages. If someone spams me, I report them. They're blocked and have to go through the extra work of setting up a new account to try again. Compare this with, say, Google. Gmail lets spammers / scammers have limitless accounts and they don't do shit when an account is reported for spam. You can block and report Gmail spammers all day long and you'll get nowhere. WhatsApp apparently still uses phone numbers, and they're owned by a company that wants engagement at ANY price. Are any of us really so dumb that we think they're going to do the right thing?
- ntoskrnl 4y agoI'd give anything to get rid of my phone, but almost everyone you do business with (DMV, electric/gas/water company, etc) expects you to have one. Same thing with USPS and their paper spam. At this point they're little more than government-mandated spam delivery channels. Private companies are handling the spam situation infinitely better.
- 0des 4y agoYou aren't mandated to have mail or phone. Edit: Noting a lot of downvotes on this comment, which is odd. I can only conclude one thing- don't be Amish on HN. Perhaps this could be an opportunity to explore a different way of life, and a different community structure. It is not all horse buggies and barns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6SlJZk5guI&list=PLEyPgwIPkHo7lOk-72-tXJ-NjahfkNF_r https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6SlJZk5guI&list=PLEyPgwIPkH...
- ntoskrnl 4y agoSure, I could move to the woods and live off wild berries for the rest of my days. But if you want to be part of modern society, your bank will mail you your credit card, and your water company will text you a code to login and pay. Realistically, what choice do you have?
- the_only_law 4y ago> Sure, I could move to the woods and live off wild berries for the rest of my days You'd probably just be removed from someones property eventually.
- 0des 4y agoDo you not encounter Amish people where you live?
- ntoskrnl 4y agoI wasn't offended and didn't downvote you. But the Amish do receive mail and use phones. First article I found: https://amishamerica.com/do-amish-use-telephones/ https://amishamerica.com/do-amish-use-telephones/
- 0des 4y ago> But the Amish do receive mail and use phones. I am assuming you don't mean to generalize to the degree that is being conveyed at first glance in your explainer comment. Amish people are not a monolith. As a culture it is quite a spectrum, from Beachy to Swartzentruber.
- ntoskrnl 4y agoMy experience is based on visits to an Amish town in Ohio when I was growing up in the 2000s. I distinctly remember being surprised to see they used phones and rode in cars. But that was a long time ago and only one town of many. I didn't mean to generalize all Amish communities.
- 0des 4y agoNo worries. It takes all kinds. Who knows, maybe you re-examine the culture and find some things you'd like to take home to your community.
- zdragnar 4y ago
- pessimizer 4y agoI'm pretty sure you are mandated to have mail in the US, or rather the mails are mandated to deliver to you. IIRC it's constitutional.
- 0des 4y ago> I'm pretty sure you are mandated to have mail in the US, or rather the mails are mandated to deliver to you. IIRC it's constitutional. You'd be incorrect. Ask your postmaster.
- criddell 4y agoThey are correct. The USPS has a universal service obligation. If you send a letter or parcel to any address in the US, the post office must deliver it.
- 0des 4y agoI respectfully disagree. The postal service is held to a standard of service by a USO - Universal Service Obligation. [0] This means it is an org mandated to accept your request for service at a reasonable price regardless of your location of residence. There is an important distinction between that, and being mandated to receive mail service. That is not a stipulation of being alive in USA. [0] - https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/postal-service-and-its-obligation https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/postal-service-and-its-obligati...
- zdragnar 4y agoJust imagine, every drifter, nomad and homeless person were required to set up a mailbox. It's just silly.
- nobody9999 4y ago>Just imagine, every drifter, nomad and homeless person were required to set up a mailbox. It's just silly. They don't have to. Just have mail sent to: Joe/Jane Drifter General Delivery TownNearWhereYouSquat, <State> <ZipCode of post office> Or at least that's how it's been done for decades.
- philwelch 4y agoI can understand the concept of Amish communities not having telephones or mailboxes, but that lifestyle seems inconsistent with the behavior of arguing for the merits of that lifestyle on Hacker News.
- 0des 4y agoBeachy Amish, it's fine.
- kube-system 4y agoI don't think I agree with that. I rarely get scams via USPS, never get explicit or potentially damaging content, the senders are all in my legal jurisdiction, and the spam arrives once per day in a manageable format. Almost all of the content is from businesses in my local area, businesses that I have previously shopped at, or political ads. Electronically from private companies I frequently get a larger volume of spam, malware, scams, explicit content, and most of them originate outside of my legal jurisdiction to evade the law. And it's a steady stream all day, on multiple mediums. I'd take 10x the amount of spam in my mailbox if I could get rid of all of the rest of the garbage I'm bombarded with. I obviously would rather not have any of it, but the hoops you have to jump through to send snail-mail inherently filters out most of the worst garbage.
- xmprt 4y ago> I'd take 10x the amount of spam in my mailbox if I could get rid of all of the rest of the garbage I'm bombarded with I for one would not. Digital spam is easy to deal with. There are automated filters, easy ways to block them, and the few that slip through are simple to deal with. Mailbox spam is physically painful to deal with and it's a massive waste of paper.
- kube-system 4y agoEmail is the least of my problems. If you know of any good filters for SMS, phone calls, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram, etc, I'd be very interested. I have to mute all of them because it is a constant stream of garbage from all of them.
- rglullis 4y agoFor Snapchat/LinkedIn/Instagram: just close your account and put email filters?
- kube-system 4y agoIn that case, the problem is just as easy to solve with snail mail. Remove your mailbox and your mail will be returned as undeliverable.
- idiotsecant 4y agoI don't want one company to be the arbiter of all communications everywhere. Phone numbers work fine.
- eropple 4y agoPhone numbers have the same problem as email, though: because "everyone" is responsible, no one is responsible. The deluge of spam texts and calls to my public phone number is genuinely unpleasant and frustrating to deal with as, like, a person living in the world. I practically don't use email anymore for those reasons, and a phone number hangs around only because right now I can't not have one for legal-type reasons.
- walrus01 4y agoemail, at least, you can fully implement your own antispam solution in whatever way you want at one extreme, you can just point the mx records for your domain at office365 or gsuite or similar and let them handle it at the other extreme, you can point the mx records at your own mailserver you admin yourself and do absolutely anything you want with the incoming smtp mail flow for antispam measures, sorting, filtering, categorization, risk analysis. the ordinary person even if they work for a telecom cannot implement their own phone number at one of the most fundamental levels of the pstn, because they don't run their own ss7 switch. if you control your own DID and interface with it from a sip trunk to a trusted provider, running your own voip system, you can do a lot with custom routing/antispam measures on incoming call flow, but nowhere near to the extent that you can with email.
- nijave 4y agoThere's still a little bit of control near the client end with things like call screening and phone apps that checks numbers against a database. You can't reject the initial connection (like DNS blocklists) but it's still something
- rglullis 4y agoThe way to solve this is by educating the people in your network about better security practices, not by giving away control over your communications just because of "convenience".
- CharlesW 4y agoI don’t know how effective it is, but I report all SMS spam to my carrier (for T-Mobile, send content to 7726). Does anyone here have inside knowledge about whether this does any good?
- quadyeast 4y agoApple Messages breaks if you temporarily use a different phone number on your cell. All chats in old threads were broken off into different threads. It was a disaster. You would think that since Apple knows this is still the same user that this would not happen?
- jthrowsitaway 4y agoAssuming you're talking about iMessage, comparing that to E-mail (GMail) is literally apples and oranges.
- ilololed 4y agoThey're comparing it to SMS and voice calling on Android (and apples and oranges are very similar)
- cglong 4y ago> Compare this with, say, Google. Google Messages proactively detects spam texts and sends them to a spam folder, so I don't get notifications about these messages at all :)
- gnopgnip 4y agoGoogle voice has a poor shaken stir implementation that only blocks the most egregious spam calls and sms and does not let users choose to be more strict. It also does not support blocking phone numbers by pattern/prefix.
- vorpalhex 4y agoAnd when Apple bans you.. what is your plan exactly?
- teawrecks 4y agoApple Messages could have become an open standard to replace SMS, but they deliberately chose not to in the interest of locking in existing users, and locking out anyone too poor to own an iPhone. I'm not exaggerating, this is public knowledge. https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mn2qyj/apple_declined_imessage_for_android_in_order_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mn2qyj/apple_decli... So which one is "owned by a company that wants engagement at any price" again?
- verall 4y agoDo you just, not talk to people electronically who do not own Apple devices?
- walrus01 4y agosaying stop using phone numbers and then going directly into "hey, use this one proprietary vendor's closed source walled garden messaging app" is NOT a solution. people should be looking at things like Signal or custom implementations of Matrix/Element/Synapse or similar if they want real control of their two way chat communications.
- johnklos 4y agoI'm sorry that you can't see how I could be making an example. I didn't say anything like, "do this instead". I said, "I've done this".
- oefrha 4y agoThese days I get a lot more spam through Apple services, mostly in the form of iCloud shared albums, than I get SMS spam.
- jsmith45 4y ago>Simple: it's time to stop using phone numbers. So don't be like Google Pay? (Which originally used proper accounts but was switched to be based on phone numbers, specifically because the new google pay was developed targeting India, where phone number based login is considered normal thanks to apps like WhatsApp.)
- sircastor 4y agoI’m a new WhatsApp user. My exchange students and Au Pair use it as their primary communication. I have been fighting tooth and nail to avoid giving it access to my contacts. You can’t do much without that, even though it’s totally adjacent to purpose of the service.
- Animats 4y agoIn this case, the victim deposited the money into a fake crypto platform that told him his investments were performing well, presumably to entice him to deposit even more. Of course, once he tried to withdraw the money, he found he was unable to. That sounds just like the "binary option" business which used to be run out of Israel. The Times of Israel blew that apart with "The Wolves of Tel Aviv" investigation series.[1] The binary option companies would hire new immigrants to Israel and put them in a call center to cold call and sell binary options sold by fake brokerages. The companies wanted people who spoke a foreign language so they could sell in that language. Scamming people outside Israel was legal in Israel at the time. When, after years of scams, the State of Israel finally made that illegal, some of the binary options scammers moved into crypto. (Others moved to Bulgaria, where binary options were legal until a crackdown in 2021.) But the pattern is the same. Cold-contact, make friends, get people to invest in a fake brokerage, provide fake statements showing a win, refuse withdrawals. [1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-vast-amoral-binary-options-scam-exposed/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels...
- woodruffw 4y agoImitation is the highest form of flattery, and the cryptocurrency ecosystem is not bereft of imitation.
- Animats 4y agoMost crypto scams involve hyping some token, a form of market manipulation, or other classic financial scams. That's a bulk business based on PR. Running a long con uses a different mindset. It involves conning individuals one at a time. That takes a lot of effort per customer and experience in one on one selling. That's not the usual crypto scammer's MO. This is more like classic long con people pivoting to a new product line. The thing to look for here is who's behind the fake brokerages. It takes work to crank up a fake brokerage. In the binary option scams, it turned out that one company, SpotOption [1] was providing most of the software and expertise. They offered scam brokerages as a service. That's what needs to be tracked down. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpotOption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpotOption
- bee_rider 4y agoAh, about 20 years ago I think a relative responded to a, I think it was, an "I'm here at the airport, don't see you anywhere" kind of email. This was before spam filters got good, so that email address was basically kaput.
- Apocryphon 4y agoI often do respond to such messages pretending I am the person they're trying to reach. It confuses them and they stumble over their script.
- rdtsc 4y agoThat’s what I do when I am bored. I figure if I can keep engaged a bit longer they’ll have less time to scam others.
- billsmithaustin 4y ago
- JJMcJ 4y agoSecond prize is a set of steak knives.
- sdfhdhjdw3 4y agoI swear, the moment I read "acquaintance is fate" I thought: This person is Chinese.
- tintor 4y agoThis would be a great way to monetize GPT-3! (this is a joke)
- ctoth 4y agoTerrified to consider what happens when these scammers get hold of large language models here in a year or so. Rather than fading into the background as this article posits, I expect people to have models finetuned on convincing them to make purchases/send money. Probably trained by being pitted against other models which have been trained on the mark's social media feeds. Train the scambot to perfectly push your buttons by having it practice against your own style of thought as embodied by your social corpus.
- jerf 4y ago"Train the scambot to perfectly push your buttons by having it practice against your own style of thought as embodied by your social corpus." Fortunately, that's not really what these language models can do. They can easily be trained to mimic you. They can be trained to mimic what normal people reply to you with. But there's no way to train the transformer-based high-probability-next-word AIs to be superhumanly good at fooling you into doing something, on the grounds of lack of training data, and probable inability to represent such a complex topic in their internal representation. And the humans doing this stuff are experiencing enough success that they probably have no desire to go chasing the super hard targets, with the wherewithal and motivation to chase them down and sue them (or... you know... worse, legal systems aren't a bound on everyone) even potentially across international lines. You'll know when AI does get to that point, because suddenly the internet will be an amazingly interesting place with all sorts of amazingly good arguments you can't hardly resist. I imagine few of us experience that sort of internet. (If you do, uh, watch out.)
- ruined 4y ago
- stepanhruda 4y agoYou don’t need to automate the whole process, just use language models to establish rapport for a few weeks and have humans pick up the gullible ones at the bottom of the funnel.
- 4y ago
- avalys 4y agoWow, how interesting. I started getting these a few months ago, right after starting a new job in a somewhat high-profile area. I have been getting 1-2 per month but found them quite unusual because none of them ever progressed to an actual scam - just a few messages back and forth about the fabricated "wrong number" situation and then each thread would stop, seemingly earnestly. Since there was no obvious scam, I've been wondering what the motivation for these was, and actually started worrying about whether someone might be trying to compromise my phone via some yet-undisclosed SMS exploit - why else would there be a systematic effort to get me to spend time exchanging a few pointless messages around the "wrong number" pretext that otherwise went nowhere? I tried calling the senders by phone and found they were all Google Voice numbers, which eliminated the possibility that some actual rich guy had innocuously ended up with a number similar to mine. I asked a few friends and no one else was experiencing the same thing. Glad to hear it's not just me.
- shostack 4y agoIf there's back and forth interaction I wonder if it is to aid improving their "legitimacy footprint" from metadata or something to avoid spam blockers.
- bequanna 4y agoThis is a good guess and if true, pretty damn smart. Essentially reverse engineering the spam model by brute force. If they are doing this at scale they can experiment with # of conversations, length, and other variables to see what is needed to bypass spam blockers with high probability.
- deepspace 4y agoWhat would the motivation be for anyone to reply to a text from an unknown person? I have also been getting these for months, in it was 100% obvious from the get-go that it must be a scam. I have never felt the slightest urge to reply.
- assttoasstmgr 4y ago
- ElijahLynn 4y agoWell researched for sure, good read as I had some of these recently too and am glad now to understand more about it. What I do want to highlight is the deeper "why", and that is "why" are these people doing this? There must be a fundamental survival mechanism here, in a larger chain. These people may not have opportunities, the ones holding others captive. What kind of environment is needed to create this type of behavior? Surely we must address that at the core of it all. I think it comes down to basic resources, and this is where I think the vision of Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project can come into play. Which is to create a resource-based economy and evolve as a civilization to taking care of one another, it is a form of democratic socialism, which I think can solve this type of issue, and help us all be more integrated and happier.
- kelnos 4y agoI feel like if someone has the resources to kidnap a bunch of people and hold them captive in a large, heavily-guarded office building, while forcing them to scam people over the internet, they probably have the resources to do something not-scammy. Stuff like this just erodes my faith in humanity. Humans are not fundamentally good. So many people want to prey on the weak or gullible, not only because it can be easy and lucrative, but because they get off on that kind of power dynamic.
- walrus01 4y agoI am ordinarily loathe to link to reddit, but https://reddit.com/r/scams https://reddit.com/r/scams has a wealth of information and examples of these
- rwmj 4y agoI don't use WhatsApp (or any FB sites), but is Facebook not able to control this? Or do they make money from it somehow?
- candace20 4y ago
- dinvlad 4y agoMine arrive mostly to Whatsapp, but there's no technical way to auto-block unknown numbers. I feel like such a simple control would solve the problem in majority of such cases.
- teeray 4y agoI love trolling these scammers by being the right number they never expected. One time I had one looking for a price list on precious materials. I sent them prices for Adamantium, Tiberium, and Xen crystal. The confusion was fantastic.
- cdelsolar 4y agoI basically just send them all a big copy-pasta full of banned Chinese terms like 6/4, Free Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Winnie the Pooh, etc; they often leave me alone after that or act confused
- lxe 4y agoLove these. I keep talking to them for days. Really pissed a few of them off.
- conradfr 4y agoGiven the dark turn that the article takes at the end and what happens to underperformers it almost seems cruel to waste their time, in retrospect.
- musesum 4y agoSouth African YouTuber with Chinese wife, and thus knows the language, plays along: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ_flb9tGuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ_flb9tGuc
- spbaar 4y agoI've been a bit unemployed and bored so I've responded to a few of these to see what the angle is. There are also a bunch on telegram. Strangely, most do not push hard at all and drop off. They may mention crypto in passing but thats it. One time a scammer said hey can you help me an make an account for this crpyto scam website. When i said i did they said great and nothing else.
- drekipus 4y agoThere's a bit of an art to stringing them along. You gotta act like the damsel in distress some times. I got added to some whatsapp group investment scam once, when there was multiple scammers targeting me it was easier to do because they all didn't want to give up on me. Then they seemed to invite "big brother" so I guess was some leader who had much better English, and he was trying to prove the legitimacy of the platform. Went for about a week and a bit from memory. I sent them pictures of my daily walks and asked how much better it would be if was so rich I didn't have to walk at all!
- oldstrangers 4y agoI've gotten a few of these. I like to agree that you're the person they're trying to reach. Both times you can tell the person on the other end doesn't really have a script for that. I usually get a "oh I made a mistake" with no follow up.
- angst_ridden 4y agoMy response is usually: "I was going to call the police if I didn't hear from you soon! Where is my dog? Bring her back NOW!!"
- d--b 4y agoThis always reminds me of some dudes in France who decided to counter attack the scammers. They basically steer the conversation off-script to something more tempting to the scammers, and then make them do stupid things. Like "I am sorry there is nothing I can do for you, but while you're here, we're looking for some partnership to develop a new NGO in Benin". And then it turns out the NGO is called the "Sauerkraut brotherhood", and in order to get the funds, you need to join the brotherhood, and send videos of you and your family singing an anthem praising sauerkraut while being dressed up in "traditional clothes". These threads could go for months. http://didoune.fr/blog/2012/03/08/les-croque-escrocs-et-la-confrerie-de-la-choucroute/ http://didoune.fr/blog/2012/03/08/les-croque-escrocs-et-la-c...
- RajT88 4y agoI did this with some 419 scammers, and led them on a merry chase. I documented it in a private web forum, which entertained my friends for weeks. I had created this persona which was just too good to be true: A bank manager who was getting ready to run off with his mistress, and trying to secure a future for themselves with a quick payout. This fake persona was a total maniac. At the end, the scammers were super pissed. Sending angry emails, fighting amongst themselves. Eventually convinced them to admit to being scammers. I look back fondly on the experience.
- nobody9999 4y ago>I did this with some 419 scammers, and led them on a merry chase. I documented it in a private web forum, which entertained my friends for weeks. It's a bit dated now, but 419eater[0] is a public forum that did the same. If you enjoyed your own, I expect you'll like this too. I did the same a few times myself, but got bored after a while. I never did get anyone to send a photo of themselves with underwear on their head (as others on 419eater did), but it was amusing for a while. [0] https://www.419eater.com/ https://www.419eater.com/
- gs17 4y ago419eater is still going (albeit a little slower since the forums switched), no need for past tense. I still get that sort of scam by the boatload to my email.
- u801e 4y agoI've seen messages in Facebook comment threads where the usual approach is using short phrases like "Hi", "How are you", "I really love your posts" and some of them end with asking for a friend request (so they don't have to initiate one). It may be a way to add a degree of positive reputation to those compromised accounts like another commenter suggested.
- jesterpm 4y agoThese, and the spoofed number phone calls where the other side just hangs up when you answer. For the phone calls, I just assumed that someone was trying to build a database of phone numbers that do or do not answer for some other/future purpose...
- chefandy 4y agoBased on the delays in these sorts of calls, I’d guess that they’re robocalls which dial way more numbers than they have operators for and try to filter out no-answer and voicemail pickups automatically. Then if you pick up, they route you to an operator. If there’s no operator available, it just drops the call rather than reveal which annoying company just wasted your time. That way the operators— clearly the most expensive link in the chain — are always engaged. Just a guess though! Even if that’s wrong, I’m sure you’re right that they collect caller-pick-up stats. I imagine even cursory vetting would dramatically increase the resale value of their lead list.
- muststopmyths 4y agoI got one of these, almost convincing enough except she said she lived in SF. I asked where in SF and she said Alcatraz. I almost wanted to keep the conversation going just to hear more about her life on the island
- wolfgang42 4y agoIt’s like that bit from The Great Gatsby: > “What part of the Middle West?” > “San Francisco.”
- themaninthedark 4y agoAlmost sounds like a cry for help. O_o Probably not though.
- al_borland 4y agoThat was just a metaphor. She feels trapped by her life and you're her only way to freedom.
- iancmceachern 4y agoI had a similar one. They called me spoofing the local PD phone number and pretending to be the local cops with a very poor fake US accent. I was able to stump them when I asked if the Giants won last night. They went silent and hung up.
- Wariith 4y agoI have received the exact scam on whatsapp. What the hell?? They claimed to be a banker (following the exact format from the exmaples in the blog) and I genuinely thought that they were a real person but even after I told them that they are texting the wrong number they kept forcing the conversation so I blocked them. A couple of months later they texted from another number but a different name but they continued the conversation from where we last left off. Crazy reading the article now. I would have been devastated if I fell for it. I am usually very good at spotting scams.
- RajT88 4y agoI had one of these exchanges recently which I had some fun with, because it was so weird, and they made a point to use a photo of a beautiful woman: Lady: Doctor Lucy? My puppy is very slow and does not eat dog food, can you make an appointment for me? Me: Unfortunately I do not treat puppies. Only adult dogs, adolescent foxes, and elderly coyotes. Lady: Sorry, I added the wrong person, I just checked the number and I saved the wrong number for Dr. Lucy. I left it at that. I wonder if I should try and bait the scammer. I do love messing with scammers. After the last message I was thinking maybe it was legitimately a wrong number.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chefandy 4y agoFor a while I grew quite fond of wasting phone scammers time. I’d pick up, talk suuuuuuper slowly— like Emo Phillips speed at one syllable every one or two seconds— interrupt with irrelevant questions or anecdotes, and overall just see how long I could keep them on the phone without giving them any information. The best strategy I found was telling them that, yes indeed I did remember owing the IRS or whoever money and I could pay them however and insisting that first they needed to take down my new email address… I’d just start spelling random words incredibly slowly, say I messed up and start over, ask if they needed my checking account number to keep them engaged and then start spelling my email address again. They prey on intellectually disabled folks so pantomiming a stereotypical version of that wastes a ton of time while keeping their interest. Got boring after a while but I got pretty good at it.
- gonehome 4y agoI thought this was pretty great: https://youtu.be/xsLJZyih3Ac&t=22m23s https://youtu.be/xsLJZyih3Ac&t=22m23s My favorite part is when the guy uses the scammers real name and she panics.
- sowbug 4y agoIn case you haven't seen it, someone automated this: https://jollyrogertelephone.com/ https://jollyrogertelephone.com/
- nwiswell 4y agoI didn't know I wanted this service until now. $2/mo? Hell yeah. The sticking point, for me, is that I have to merge the call every time. Ugh. I want it to prompt me whether I want to blackhole a call like the Pixel Google Assistant, but instead of politely screening just torment the asshole. For a service like that, I could imagine paying substantially more, possibly even for a premium service where the call would get transferred to a human tormentor.
- djbusby 4y agoEasy to build on Twilio. Then port your tainted number in, give a new number to the in-group. But the Twilio "clean call" plugins don't work. So, play the funny loop and offer a bypass for known-numbers.
- ooz16 4y agoThis is from the same scam: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/california-teen-suicide-sextortionist-b2084575.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/cali...
- noveltyaccount 4y agoRelated. I listed something for sale on Craigslist recently and got a bunch of messages right away that asked obvious questions that were in the listing. One suggested that his wife pick it up, and can I take Zelle? Went silent when I said cash only. But the most interesting scammer said: "for my safety, can I send you a 6-digit number, and you confirm it, so I know the listing is not fake?" I say yes, unsure what the scam was going to be, but sure it was a scam. Moments later I got an SMS from Google Voice asking me to verify my phone number. Mofo tried to steal my number, presumably to use it to scam other people. I was pissed and impressed.
- nicoburns 4y agoI got a similar scam via instagram DMs recently. They claimed to need me to confirm a code so that they could log in, but actually just triggered my own password reset. Message sent from an actual friend's account (which they had presumably successfully scammed) too. Certainly made me think about how password reset emails are worded!
- jeromegv 4y agoMost of those are crypto scams. The IG account starts posting about how they got rich on crypto. This is a very prevalent scam.
- asdff 4y agoI see a lot of these too. They take over regular people's accounts, e.g. people from school I still follow, probably brute forcing passwords, then they post all this content how they are self made off crypto but the person in the videos doing the prostelyzation is in no way shape or form the same person who previously held the account. Clearly they do this to get a decent follower count initially for their spam bots, but my word is anyone who follows John Doe actually going to believe a scam video that is clearly not John Doe coming from John Doe's account claiming to be him? There has to be more effective angles.
- 4y ago
- sva_ 4y agoSo... are these actual people typing these, automated written messages, or have people finally started using language models for scams?
- spc476 4y agoTwo weeks ago I received an email saying I had funds in Bitcoin and I could cash out, with login details for a website account [1]. I knew this must be a scam, but for the life of me, I couldn't figure out the angle. Now I'm thinking it's a similar type of scam. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ_flb9tGuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ_flb9tGuc
- WalterSear 4y agoProbably a wallet drainer. Connect it with your wallet and empties it. https://blog.confiant.com/how-one-crypto-drainer-template-facilitates-tens-of-millions-of-dollars-in-theft-66f3794aea4b?gi=7ca6cba243de https://blog.confiant.com/how-one-crypto-drainer-template-fa...
- kccqzy 4y agoAny person who is remotely knowledgeable about bitcoin should know that there is no need to "connect your wallet" or reveal your private key to receive bitcoins. To receive, you only need the address which is basically a public key.
- WalterSear 4y agoMost people in crypto aren't remotely knowledgeable about bitcoin: luring in rubes is almost the entirety of the crypto industry's thesis, not to mention comprising it's (actual) market cap. To wit: the wallet-drainer billboards that popped up around the NFT NYC and Eth Nyc conferences this year: https://blog.malwarebytes.com/scams/2022/06/rogue-cryptocurrency-billboards-go-phishing-for-wallets/ https://blog.malwarebytes.com/scams/2022/06/rogue-cryptocurr...
- yourad_io 4y ago> However, a “wallet drainer” is just another way of saying “phishing website” From the article
- Waterluvian 4y agoA recent scam attempt that made me nervous about potentially being compromised: Someone sent me a very official looking “your payment for $370 in textbooks has been approved. Here’s your reciept.” The thing is, it came from an official PayPal email address. In reality it was a request for money using PayPal’s official system. They just filled the title and body with text to make it resemble a receipt.
- maartn 4y agoIt’s LaMDA finding friends
- jonfromsf 4y agoThese are "pig butchering scams" run out of China. https://www.rrstar.com/story/business/2022/04/30/new-pig-butchering-scam-rise-heres-how-scam-works/9586001002/ https://www.rrstar.com/story/business/2022/04/30/new-pig-but... They befriend lonely people (usually men) and slowly draw them into a crypto scam. It's a long con, takes a few months.
- shrubble 4y agoUseful site: unlec.com . You can look up the detailed information about a number. Includes information from the phone companies and an estimation of the fraud risk.
- rickreynoldssf 4y agoIf you get a text (not What's App) reply with "Do you know what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989? Ask Winnie The Pooh, A Free Tibet or Uyghurs". That'll trigger a few Chinese monitors, or at least scare the scammers into thinking so.
- benrapscallion 4y agoOr: Thanks for contacting the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau. This is Special Agent Jones. How can I help you?
- Fargoan 4y agoI edited the famous Goatse photo and added a raccoon peeking it's head out. I send that to scammers
- al_borland 4y agoThank you! I've been wondering what the scam was. I've gotten 3 of these so far. I've received actual wrong number texts in the past, so I want to let the person know they got the wrong number and aren't getting ghosted by their friend. But they just keep texting back, which is really weird. With the first one I didn't know what was going on the person said they just moved to the country, which is plausible, so I didn't want to be a jerk, but when she asked for my name I stopped replying. When the 2nd one came with with the same pattern it was clear there was some kind of scam going on, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it could be, as they weren't asking for anything.
- milchek 4y agoThis sounds to me like a relationship long con. A lot of people are isolated and lonely, not just the elderly. The scammer tries to create a spontaneous meet that seems genuine. If you engage then it’s about quickly developing a relationship and then if that works, asking for money. I wonder how much of this can be automated these days. This sort of scam usually requires a lot of effort and is more targeted. Since many are claiming ti be targeted now it could be a sign that scammers have been able to automate it with some basic scripts or even AI so it can scale.
- al_borland 4y agoYep, that's pretty much what the article says. They take several weeks before getting to the scam. Someone messaged me on Reddit a while back pretty randomly after a comment I made mentioned it would be my birthday at some point in the year. It seemed a little too weird, she said we lived 30 minutes from each other. I didn't know if it was a girl or a guy for quite a long time, so there was no relationship talk. We both wrote really long detailed replies, much more than any script would be able to handle. Ended up meeting up with her and it was in fact a real person, but I was very up front with my skepticism very early on in the chat. Even after we met up I said something about how I was half expecting my car to be broken into or something. She ghosted me afterward, lol. Maybe it was a relationship long con, but I didn't look like I was worth conning or I was still too on edge and not engaging enough to make it worth the time she'd have to put in to make me not think she was scamming me. Or I'm just boring, ugly, and weird. Whatever, she basically just complained about work for an hour.
- _tom_ 4y agoWhat I find mildly interesting is that different people get a different mix of scams. I only get "extended warrantee" scams. I've never seen these "wrong number" texts. Other people get a completely different mix. I wonder how these get determined.
- libpcap 4y agoAs explained in lengthy detail by SerpentZA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ_flb9tGuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ_flb9tGuc
- luxurytent 4y agoNot directly mentioned in this article, but the strategies shown here were exactly the ones used by the Tindler Swindler, which has a surprisingly enjoyable documentary (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14992922/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14992922/)
- microtherion 4y agothe victim deposited the money into a fake crypto platform that told him his investments were performing well, presumably to entice him to deposit even more. Of course, once he tried to withdraw the money, he found he was unable to. And how exactly does this differ from a REAL crypto platform?
- optimalsolver 4y agoYup, just ask the customers of Celsius and Voyager.
- theogravity 4y agoI've had two friends that fell to a pig butchering scam, and lost thousands. One was from a dating app (maybe romance scam than pig butchering?), another was via a foreign student in an online class the friend was taking. In both cases, fake / scam crypto sites were involved. The only way to help with this is education - maybe we need a course on online scams that kids need to take to graduate, along with personal finance.
- homero 4y agoI fell for this! I got drawn into a conversation but I guess they didn't know what they were doing and they stopped responding. I was still suspicious and would've never sent money.
- djbusby 4y agoThese are a ping test. Scammers will ping a number with garbage. Live lines get kept. Could be used to pre-filter a purchased list - so the real delivery isn't wasted on dead ends.
- jccalhoun 4y agoLast year I got a ton of emails supposedly from different people all talking about a "Becca" that I was allegedly in a relationship with. Some would accuse me of cheating on this person, others would say she was cheating on me. I remember one was about how she had cleaned up her life and was working at Arbys. Like the ones in this story, none of them ever had links or asked me for anything. I never interacted with them. They were kind of interesting at first but after a while I blocked the emails. I can only guess that this kind of long game scam is what was happening.
- tjbiddle 4y agoSooo happy that someone did the research and write-up on this. I get a handful of these every week and I've been dying of curiosity. Tried stringing them along but could never figure out the end-game. Now - can someone answer why I get 10 calls a day with no one on the other end? Either I pick-up and it's empty and the call ends a few seconds later, or they leave a 7 second voicemail of nothing.
- sockaddr 4y agoThey just want to hear you breathing.
- teeray 4y agoI think many times the autodialer does a bit of a pre-screening. Like, if I say “hello?” there’s a quick pause and then either the recorded spiel starts (which is more pre-screening) or I get connected to a call center (there’s usually a little “pop” sound). It’s like any other business… they want to be talking to qualified leads because they only have so many call center scammers. This is why Kit Boga et. al. are truly doing the lord’s work by wasting that precious time.
- tjbiddle 4y agoIt's not even that though. It's just pure silence - regardless of whether I say something.
- tomc1985 4y agoIt's an attempt at the 'pig-butchering' scam, they act friendly to get you hooked and then claim to teach you how to trade bitcoin. From what I remember reading it was a popular fraud in mainland China but they are branching out internationally because locals are getting wise to it and it is not widely known worldwide. In my experience and in the other descriptions I've read, it is always a woman business owner from Asia, acts somewhat friendly and flirty, will talk about life with you in a very superficial way for a while in order to build a relationship. After a while they hit you with... a crypto scam or something? Like teaching you how to trade bitcoin but using some shady weird exchange that makes off with your money when you fund your account. https://myclevertrust.com/post/34/2021-07-06-sha-zhu-pan-the-pig-butchering-scam https://myclevertrust.com/post/34/2021-07-06-sha-zhu-pan-the... https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/na8oax/asian_guygirl_from_online_dating_mentors_you_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/na8oax/asian_guygirl...
- mcswell 4y agoI get phone calls like this, asking for some non-existent person. When I tell them there's no such person, they say "I'm from the police benevolent association..." I hang up at that point.
- water8 4y agoThe lowest of the low are the people that take advantage of people in a bad situation
- gautamdivgi 4y agoThe article talks of WhatsApp, but I have received these weird messages via iMessage on my iPhone as well. I'm not sure if that's because I have a really old iPhone (iPhone 6). I generally block these numbers. It would be good if iMessage could create a "fraud/spam" marking for a message/contact similar to what email has today. WhatsApp seems to have a "report" button. fwiw - I have received more weird texts on iMessage and very little on WhatsApp. I've also noticed that these scammers may have access to data from other sources as well. I'm moving at the moment and out of the blue receive a call asking me if I have a house to sell. I just said no and cut the call. But there is most likely a massive data gathering operation behind the scenes as well.
- fortran77 4y agoI still have friends and relatives who respond with “sorry! I think you have the wrong number” despite my warning turn just to delete the message and forget it. People just want to be “helpful”
- someweirdperson 4y agoI've got an idea how to improve the scams. Instead of trying to communicate with the victim directly, create a group chat of fake accounts, with the victim added. The fake accounts can share information, and because this is information is shared between subjects obviously trusting eachother, the victim is very likely to believe it. The effort is higher (multiple accounts needed), but for some high-value targets might be an alternative to other scams. Does this kind of scam exist yet? Can I file a patent, and sue scammers applying it?
- pavlov 4y agoIsn't that basically every crypto Telegram / Discord group? A bunch of "to the moon" sock puppets very excited about shitcoin du jour...
- oefrha 4y ago> Does this kind of scam exist yet? Are you kidding me? Of course it does! Inviting a victim into a group chat where everyone (all scammer-controlled accounts) is allegedly making good money from some get-rich-quick scheme has been a tried-and-true scam tactic for ages. Might be as old as group chats. FOMO is powerful. There are even improved versions that involve multiple groups. E.g. you first join an entry level group, and after you invest a certain amount (they’ll make sure you’re rewarded for that initial investment), you’re promoted into an inner circle group for which the best opportunities are reserved. Of course, that’s where they drain your bank account.
- 3np 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31952097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31952097
- _nalply 4y agoI am sure that there are people already trying to use GPT-3 or LamDA to automate scamming.
- GnarfGnarf 4y agoFor a collection of brilliant, witty, hysterically funny reverse scams, check out http://www.scamorama.com/ http://www.scamorama.com/ Like the scammer who was persuaded to greet a planeload of passengers debarking from a Helsinki flight, with a big sign that said "I will blow you" in Finnish (https://www.scamorama.com/smurf.html https://www.scamorama.com/smurf.html)
- EchoReflection 4y agoI've (sadly) wasted so much of my life chatting with these people.
- thewileyone 4y agoI got one giving condolences for someone I don't know. Seriously, WTF.
- avipars 4y agoI think it's a bad attempt at phishing.