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Someone tried this at a firm I was working with. In that case, it was quite obvious, but nonetheless one should think the tech will only get better. In this ca

Someone tried this at a firm I was working with. In that case, it was quite obvious, but nonetheless one should think the tech will only get better. In this case, it was a guy pretending to be an investor, the scam being that they require a small "investment insurance" to be paid to an "insurer" controlled by the scammer. So basically "hey your business sounds great, we want to invest $4M, just send $3K to this guy and we have a deal". Where of course, you will never hear from them again if you send the $3K. In the video meeting he had a moving mouth on the video, with a mostly static guy sitting at his desk. It looked weird. He also had a Nigerian accent, while pretending to be from Israel. Like with this article, I thought it would be most obvious if he stumbled over some sort of cultural knowledge. I asked him if he was happy to do a follow up call on a Friday evening, something that seemed unlikely for a guy claiming to be Jewish. He also didn't seem to know the time. But I can totally see this scam working in the near future. Better real-time graphics would make it hard to know that it wasn't actually what the guy looked like. I could also imagine accent-changing software becoming a thing. The cherry on top would be an AI that actually does know that time zones are a thing, and cultural information from various places.

JoeAltmaier 2y ago
It's not supposed to be better. It's supposed to be fairly obvious, as I understand it. So only gullible people will respond. They are the mark, not savvy educated people.
- me_me_me 2y ago
  only stupid people fall for scams... These are business targeted scams and those are different to run-of-the-mill nigerian prince email spam. The scammer tries to inject himself into the org to funnel funds out. You will not go far being obvious scammer.
- notahacker 2y ago
  Dodgy chain letters full of terrible typesetting, exclamation marks and wildly implausible claims of wealth are designed specifically to attract gullible, uneducated and slightly desperate people, sure People that can't hide their Nigerian-ness when spending an hour on a call trying to persuade a particular business to wire them $3k for a nominally legitimate business transaction, not so much[1]. They make money when the least gullible person on the call doesn't warn their coworkers they're obviously not real Israelis, not the other way round. [1]and not so much for the email spam scammers essentially filtering out the 99% of gullible people that have spam filters either...

JoeAltmaier 2y ago

It's not supposed to be better. It's supposed to be fairly obvious, as I understand it. So only gullible people will respond. They are the mark, not savvy educated people.

me_me_me 2y ago
only stupid people fall for scams... These are business targeted scams and those are different to run-of-the-mill nigerian prince email spam. The scammer tries to inject himself into the org to funnel funds out. You will not go far being obvious scammer.
notahacker 2y ago
Dodgy chain letters full of terrible typesetting, exclamation marks and wildly implausible claims of wealth are designed specifically to attract gullible, uneducated and slightly desperate people, sure People that can't hide their Nigerian-ness when spending an hour on a call trying to persuade a particular business to wire them $3k for a nominally legitimate business transaction, not so much[1]. They make money when the least gullible person on the call doesn't warn their coworkers they're obviously not real Israelis, not the other way round. [1]and not so much for the email spam scammers essentially filtering out the 99% of gullible people that have spam filters either...