4 ms·

Scammers unleash flood of online gaming sites

60 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

JoeOfTexas 1y ago
I spent too much time trying to build one of these gaming portals, and they pop them up as a scam like nothing. Must be a team of people behind it. The technology behind the scenes and UI design are all well made.
- dylan604 1y ago
  Just goes to show the old adage "crime doesn't pay" is bullshit. it pays very well, right up to the point of if you get caught.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
  Supposedly there are groups who make build-a-scam-website toolkits. The selling shovels model (which might even eliminate some legal risk).
- jerf 1y ago
  As I like to say in some other contexts on HN, you must not underestimate the criminal underground. You should not model it as some hacker alone in his basement trying to run scams. You're probably a lot closer thinking of the industry as at least the equivalent of a Dark Google in size and sophistication. If I can imagine a framework where I have a strong set of modular APIs that we can deploy rapidly and put together some prompts for AIs to customize the frontends and graphics hooks so each site looks different, deploying them just like you'd deploy a k8s cluster of these things (and, heck, for all I know, actually being on k8s), the industry as a whole has more than enough firepower to actually implement it. There's an entire dark economy out there where you can outsource parts of this to specialized businesses and get sketchy cloud hosting of all kinds, there's a rich economy around who is taking what actual risks and who gets compensated for them, everything you can imagine.
  - psychoslave 1y ago
    Wait, didn't they officially adopted Darth Google as name when they drop the don't be evil moto façade ?
- simmerup 1y ago
  Must be easier to build them if you don't have to commit to building the actual product to be fair
chihuahua 1y ago
A random website asks me to give them my cryptocurrency, and then they refuse to return it? Why, I thought I had seen the most shocking thing on earth, but this takes the cake!
- ryandrake 1y ago
  I don't understand who keeps falling for this stuff. The victims are not all 90 year old grannies suffering from cognitive decline.
  - datadrivenangel 1y ago
    If you thought you had won thousands of dollars you would likely be tempted to pay a hundred to get that out.
    - blaufuchs 1y ago
      Well there's the problem, who honestly thinks they won thousands of dollars from an ad?
      - toast0 1y ago
        I punched that damn monkey, where's my prize?
        dhosek 1y ago
        EVERYONE KNOWS YOU DON’T PUNCH THE MONKEY!
      - alt219 1y ago
        Sadly, I have a family member who is susceptible to these types of scams. They’ve been duped too many times to count. They’re overly eager to believe they’re exceptional and that good fortune is due them. No amount of explaining has had any impact on their beliefs for the past fifteen years. It’s heart-wrenching.
nottorp 1y ago
Not online gaming. Online gambling.
- fknorangesite 1y ago
  This (i.e., gambling specifically) is a very common definition of the word "gaming". Certainly that predates online video games, obviously.
  - eddythompson80 1y ago
    You can’t call negative things gaming. You can gamify anything, but if it’s negative you can’t call it gaming. Gaming is always good and never causes any problems. Plenty of research shows that gaming is good. Please stop villainizing gaming. Gaming is good. If it’s negative, just call it what it is. Gambling, addiction, radicalization, etc all are just that. They have nothing to do with gaming. Gaming is good. Media has no affect on people.
    - nottorp 1y ago
      > You can gamify anything Actually gamifying is as predatory as gambling so what's your point again?
      - eddythompson80 1y ago
        Don’t call it gaming. Gaming is good and has nothing to do with gambling. What is your point? Ok look. If you put poison in food, it ceases to be food. It’s just poison at that point. Calling it food or even poisoned food is only an attempt to besmirch the good name of food. Food is always good for you. Any food that’s not good for you by definition isn’t food and no one can mistake it for food and any attempt at calling it food is just dishonest. Even having a discussion about food safety is nothing but a slippery slope to ban food they don’t like. Food is good.
        fknorangesite 1y ago
dylan604 1y ago
“We were being spammed relentlessly by these scam posts from compromised or purchased [Discord] accounts,” Thereallo said. “I got frustrated with just banning and deleting, so I started to investigate the infrastructure behind the scam messages. This is not a one-off site, it’s a scalable criminal enterprise with a clear playbook, technical fingerprints, and financial infrastructure.” This quote does not read like something I'd expect from a 17 year old.
- erikerikson 1y ago
  17 year olds come in many flavors.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    possibly, or possibly someone brushing up the original quote on the 17 year old's behalf.
tantalor 1y ago
> the gaming site will reject the request and prompt the user to make a “verification deposit” of cryptocurrency — typically around $100 — before any money can be distributed This is called "advance fee" scam. It is hundreds of years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam
- cyanydeez 1y ago
  Well, anyone who has $100 crypto bucks has already been scammed once.
  - tantalor 1y ago
    A fool and his crypto are soon parted!
    - BrenBarn 1y ago
      And even sooner joined!
  - southernplaces7 1y ago
    Blatantly stupid takes like this little gem about crypto are part of the reason this site has become something of a joke for anything resembling a nuanced discussion about crypto, in both its cons and pros.
    - cyanydeez 1y ago
      If it quacks like an orange duck, it's a grift. Also, do you think anyone cares that this site has less crypto propaganda.
      - southernplaces7 1y ago
        another moronically flippant response, and no, discussing -on a "hacker" tech news site no less- the nuances of a unique technology that effectively works as a hack against the deeply controlled playing field of financial transactions, is not "propaganda". The sheer ignorance and dismissive naval gazing about crypto on this site is pathological among some, a sort of childish resentment that strays far from rational consideration.
mathgradthrow 1y ago
Its a good thing that cryptocurrency transactions are easy to reverse.
MOARDONGZPLZ 1y ago
Who exactly is online gambling? And out of that subset, who is doing super shady appearing online gambling? I don’t mean to be flippant, but who exactly is falling for this slop? At some point, permit me to victim blame, the victim is somewhat to blame.
- shkkmo 1y ago
  I would hazard a guess is that a generation of youth has been addicted to gambling by mobile game companies and even some desktop game companies like Valve (which has worked to limit it, but only when it was forced to by bad publicity.) Gambling is a dangerous addiction for some people. I don't think victim blaming is an effective response. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling
  - citizenpaul 1y ago
    >a generation of youth has been addicted to gambling by mobile game companies I think you nailed it. I made a comment about the new "religion" of games in the current youth in another discussion a while back. It really seems to me that there is an incredibly strong illogical loyalty to game companies in the current youth. So much that they ignore bad actors assuming that they must be just another game company, even after they get scammed. I'm guessing it has something to do with zero real value nature of loot box and skin gambling that is prevalent.
- dec0dedab0de 1y ago
  There are a lot of people using the internet with different physical and mental disabilities that make it difficult for them to identify these scams that might seem super obvious to you or I. When I had cancer and I was in the hospital getting chemo I fell for a scam for the first time. It was an instagram ad for a cool steampunk looking keyboard with a price that was too good to be true. It was almost christmas, and I had felt guilty for not shopping, but my brain fog made it difficult to reason about. I ordered it and forgot all about it until it was too late to challenge. It was only $60, but it made it very clear to me how easy it would be to fall for something like this for a significant part of the population.
MattSayar 1y ago
Tangentially, I haven't received a Pig Butchering opening text ("hey") in quite a while. A quick scan through my Spam & Blocked doesn't show much either, just a lot of political spam. Did something happen to improve the situation, or am I just lucky?
- don_neufeld 1y ago
  I get between 5-10 per day, so I’d say you’re just lucky.
  - quickthrowman 1y ago
    Are you recently divorced? Just curious if public filings like divorce decrees would make someone a target for pig butchering scams.
    - brookst 1y ago
      The cost to operate is so low I can’t see why they’d bother targeting?
    - don_neufeld 1y ago
      No

60 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

I spent too much time trying to build one of these gaming portals, and they pop them up as a scam like nothing. Must be a team of people behind it. The technology behind the scenes and UI design are all well made.

dylan604 1y ago
Just goes to show the old adage "crime doesn't pay" is bullshit. it pays very well, right up to the point of if you get caught.
0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
Supposedly there are groups who make build-a-scam-website toolkits. The selling shovels model (which might even eliminate some legal risk).
jerf 1y ago
As I like to say in some other contexts on HN, you must not underestimate the criminal underground. You should not model it as some hacker alone in his basement trying to run scams. You're probably a lot closer thinking of the industry as at least the equivalent of a Dark Google in size and sophistication. If I can imagine a framework where I have a strong set of modular APIs that we can deploy rapidly and put together some prompts for AIs to customize the frontends and graphics hooks so each site looks different, deploying them just like you'd deploy a k8s cluster of these things (and, heck, for all I know, actually being on k8s), the industry as a whole has more than enough firepower to actually implement it. There's an entire dark economy out there where you can outsource parts of this to specialized businesses and get sketchy cloud hosting of all kinds, there's a rich economy around who is taking what actual risks and who gets compensated for them, everything you can imagine.
- psychoslave 1y ago
  Wait, didn't they officially adopted Darth Google as name when they drop the don't be evil moto façade ?
simmerup 1y ago
Must be easier to build them if you don't have to commit to building the actual product to be fair

chihuahua 1y ago

A random website asks me to give them my cryptocurrency, and then they refuse to return it? Why, I thought I had seen the most shocking thing on earth, but this takes the cake!

ryandrake 1y ago
I don't understand who keeps falling for this stuff. The victims are not all 90 year old grannies suffering from cognitive decline.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  If you thought you had won thousands of dollars you would likely be tempted to pay a hundred to get that out.
  - blaufuchs 1y ago
    Well there's the problem, who honestly thinks they won thousands of dollars from an ad?
    - toast0 1y ago
      I punched that damn monkey, where's my prize?
      - dhosek 1y ago
        EVERYONE KNOWS YOU DON’T PUNCH THE MONKEY!
    - alt219 1y ago
      Sadly, I have a family member who is susceptible to these types of scams. They’ve been duped too many times to count. They’re overly eager to believe they’re exceptional and that good fortune is due them. No amount of explaining has had any impact on their beliefs for the past fifteen years. It’s heart-wrenching.

nottorp 1y ago

Not online gaming. Online gambling.

fknorangesite 1y ago
This (i.e., gambling specifically) is a very common definition of the word "gaming". Certainly that predates online video games, obviously.
- eddythompson80 1y ago
  You can’t call negative things gaming. You can gamify anything, but if it’s negative you can’t call it gaming. Gaming is always good and never causes any problems. Plenty of research shows that gaming is good. Please stop villainizing gaming. Gaming is good. If it’s negative, just call it what it is. Gambling, addiction, radicalization, etc all are just that. They have nothing to do with gaming. Gaming is good. Media has no affect on people.
  - nottorp 1y ago
    > You can gamify anything Actually gamifying is as predatory as gambling so what's your point again?
    - eddythompson80 1y ago
      Don’t call it gaming. Gaming is good and has nothing to do with gambling. What is your point? Ok look. If you put poison in food, it ceases to be food. It’s just poison at that point. Calling it food or even poisoned food is only an attempt to besmirch the good name of food. Food is always good for you. Any food that’s not good for you by definition isn’t food and no one can mistake it for food and any attempt at calling it food is just dishonest. Even having a discussion about food safety is nothing but a slippery slope to ban food they don’t like. Food is good.
      - fknorangesite 1y ago

dylan604 1y ago

“We were being spammed relentlessly by these scam posts from compromised or purchased [Discord] accounts,” Thereallo said. “I got frustrated with just banning and deleting, so I started to investigate the infrastructure behind the scam messages. This is not a one-off site, it’s a scalable criminal enterprise with a clear playbook, technical fingerprints, and financial infrastructure.” This quote does not read like something I'd expect from a 17 year old.

erikerikson 1y ago
17 year olds come in many flavors.
- dylan604 1y ago
  possibly, or possibly someone brushing up the original quote on the 17 year old's behalf.

tantalor 1y ago

> the gaming site will reject the request and prompt the user to make a “verification deposit” of cryptocurrency — typically around $100 — before any money can be distributed This is called "advance fee" scam. It is hundreds of years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam

cyanydeez 1y ago
Well, anyone who has $100 crypto bucks has already been scammed once.
- tantalor 1y ago
  A fool and his crypto are soon parted!
  - BrenBarn 1y ago
    And even sooner joined!
- southernplaces7 1y ago
  Blatantly stupid takes like this little gem about crypto are part of the reason this site has become something of a joke for anything resembling a nuanced discussion about crypto, in both its cons and pros.
  - cyanydeez 1y ago
    If it quacks like an orange duck, it's a grift. Also, do you think anyone cares that this site has less crypto propaganda.
    - southernplaces7 1y ago
      another moronically flippant response, and no, discussing -on a "hacker" tech news site no less- the nuances of a unique technology that effectively works as a hack against the deeply controlled playing field of financial transactions, is not "propaganda". The sheer ignorance and dismissive naval gazing about crypto on this site is pathological among some, a sort of childish resentment that strays far from rational consideration.

mathgradthrow 1y ago

Its a good thing that cryptocurrency transactions are easy to reverse.

MOARDONGZPLZ 1y ago

Who exactly is online gambling? And out of that subset, who is doing super shady appearing online gambling? I don’t mean to be flippant, but who exactly is falling for this slop? At some point, permit me to victim blame, the victim is somewhat to blame.

shkkmo 1y ago
I would hazard a guess is that a generation of youth has been addicted to gambling by mobile game companies and even some desktop game companies like Valve (which has worked to limit it, but only when it was forced to by bad publicity.) Gambling is a dangerous addiction for some people. I don't think victim blaming is an effective response. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling
- citizenpaul 1y ago
  >a generation of youth has been addicted to gambling by mobile game companies I think you nailed it. I made a comment about the new "religion" of games in the current youth in another discussion a while back. It really seems to me that there is an incredibly strong illogical loyalty to game companies in the current youth. So much that they ignore bad actors assuming that they must be just another game company, even after they get scammed. I'm guessing it has something to do with zero real value nature of loot box and skin gambling that is prevalent.
dec0dedab0de 1y ago
There are a lot of people using the internet with different physical and mental disabilities that make it difficult for them to identify these scams that might seem super obvious to you or I. When I had cancer and I was in the hospital getting chemo I fell for a scam for the first time. It was an instagram ad for a cool steampunk looking keyboard with a price that was too good to be true. It was almost christmas, and I had felt guilty for not shopping, but my brain fog made it difficult to reason about. I ordered it and forgot all about it until it was too late to challenge. It was only $60, but it made it very clear to me how easy it would be to fall for something like this for a significant part of the population.

MattSayar 1y ago

Tangentially, I haven't received a Pig Butchering opening text ("hey") in quite a while. A quick scan through my Spam & Blocked doesn't show much either, just a lot of political spam. Did something happen to improve the situation, or am I just lucky?

don_neufeld 1y ago
I get between 5-10 per day, so I’d say you’re just lucky.
- quickthrowman 1y ago
  Are you recently divorced? Just curious if public filings like divorce decrees would make someone a target for pig butchering scams.
  - brookst 1y ago
    The cost to operate is so low I can’t see why they’d bother targeting?
  - don_neufeld 1y ago
    No