6 ms·

If you can be beguiled by random images from an unknown solicitor to make rash financial decisions, the root of the problem is probably sitting in front of the

If you can be beguiled by random images from an unknown solicitor to make rash financial decisions, the root of the problem is probably sitting in front of the screen. "A fool and his money are soon parted" is not a new thing, it's just easier to accomplish than ever before thanks to the dopamine conditioned internet and AI content generation. These victims don't need new legal layers of trust, they need a social media detox.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
Sigh. People will adjust. My point, and a subtle one at that, was that it does not bode well for the society of low trust ahead.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  What people say to respond to this critique is that high-trust people were always a problem. Low-trust societies have procedures in place that nobody ever considers just skipping because we're both good guys and you're from Boston, too, right? High-trust societies are self-regulating scammers paradises. Filled with people citing Occam's Razor, and affinity fraud. Even worse, for minorities the procedures never get dropped, but they're still expected (pressured) to drop procedures to fit in, so they end up highly unequal societies.
  - jnovek 1y ago
    The kind of high-trust we need to get back (at least here in the states) is the kind between neighbors on the same block. Of course it’s never been wise to trust someone just because you’re both from Boston, but in the past neighbors generally trusted each other and socialized. It’s particularly striking when I visit my parents’ house. I’m a millennial and I don’t even know my neighbors names and my parents, who are boomers, routinely talk, text and visit their neighbors. Their neighborhood (at least among the old people) feels like a community. Mine does not.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      This is also why parents don't let their kids play outside unsupervised anymore. No trust.
    - bonoboTP 1y ago
      You need a long time to establish trust. In European villages, if you moved to a place, and weren't born there you were considered an outsider, newcomer, and what's more, likely even the first generation who was born there was still considered a newcomer. Just because you went there from 100 kilometers, even though you speak the same language and have almost the exact same culture. High trust communities need a lot of time to develop and a lot of annoying gossip and reputation stuff that can feel nosy. My grandparents were always keenly aware of "but what are they going to say?!", what will they think of the mother if this or that (if the child uses swear words, if people peek through the window and see a messy room, if there is weed in the garden, if a guest is not stuffed full with food, if the curtains are still closed at 7 am, indicating that they are lazy and sleeping in etc). They were always worried about optics and reputation. They were in turn always evaluating how everyone else lived and behaved, who helped and who didn't, who lives neatly and orderly, or who doesn't cook for his (edit: her) husband properly, or which man is a drunkard or gambler, who shows up to church and who doesn't etc. This is suffocating but necessary for the kind of reputation that prevents antisocial behavior. Of course that's the other extreme, but the point is, you need 10+ years of living together and interacting, helping out in renovations, knowing the families, regularly sharing dinner etc to get it going. People move too often nowadays for this to be viable. And of course having to stay put has disadvantages for efficiency and adaptability, there's a reason why people are moving around.
      - optimalsolver 1y ago
        > who doesn't cook for his husband properly At least they were forward-looking on social issues.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  - raincole 1y ago
    But trust is necessary for the society to run efficiently. High-trust environments are more efficient. Technically, we can read the banks' financial reports, the executives' background checks, the video recordings of their gold reserves... to decide which banks are less likely to run away with your money. But no one wants to live in such a place.
    - throwaway48476 1y ago
      All the reports and checks are worthless ina low trust society because they are equally as corruptable. It's like the blockchain people trying to push blockchain for inventory management.
  - ashanoko 1y ago
    Trust is a tax , which is low in high thrust societies and high in low thrust societies. All you archieve there costs more, more surveilance, more stress , more guards, more fraud in science, products, services. It naturally appeals to the paranoid subset of society which wants to sell itself as a protector service.
    - throwaway48476 1y ago
      Current economic prosperity is coasting on the effects of high trust society. When the trust tax increases the economy reverts like in South Africa.
pohl 1y ago
To those downvoting this: two things can be true.
dgb23 1y ago
That's not the "root" of the problem but just a coping strategy. The root of the problem has something to do with the scammer.
- whimsicalism 1y ago
  we live in a globalized world of people competing to get money. hoping everyone begins singing kumbaya is nice but far from a practical solution or diagnosis of the problem.
  - dgb23 1y ago
    I‘m not against coping strategies, they are useful. I‘m against scamming and dishonesty. I also don’t think ignoring the actual problems is the way to go, on the contrary.
    - nradov 1y ago
      When a problem has no solution then it's not actually a "problem" but rather a fact to be accepted, like gravity. Regardless of new AI tools, there is no conceivable solution to the problem of having millions of scammers operating from jurisdictions without effective law enforcement. Time to start coping.
- Ferret7446 1y ago
  That's like saying the root of malnutrition is humans needing to eat. Perhaps technically true, but what's the point of pointing out that technicality? It does nothing to help address the problem.
sensanaty 1y ago
I have met multiple cybersecurity experts, and they really were experts and in general very intelligent and knowledgeable people, that have fallen for very obvious scams. One of them was one of those gift card scams which in my eyes is possibly the most obvious one. I myself have almost fallen for a well crafted phishing attack, the only reason I never ended up putting in my card details was that I was technical enough to know that a generic URL with no query params can't possibly have my tracking code pre-filled on a page I've never been to before. Had the scammers just made me enter my own tracking code, or if I didn't know what a query param is, I 100% would've fallen for it. My point is that no one is immune to a momentary lapse in judgement or just plain bad luck. You can be an expert, extremely intelligent, whatever, all it takes is 5 minutes of weakness to get you, whether that's because you slept bad, had something else on your mind, weren't being diligent enough (it's impossible to be diligent 24/7 after all) or any other myriad list of reasons. It's easy to put the blame on the victims here, but with generative AI the line between reality and fabrication is getting thinner and thinner. I'm a massive AI skeptic (just check my comments here), but I'm 100% positive that sooner or later we'll hit a stage where it's quite literally impossible to discern an AI fabrication from a real event unless you witnessed it in person yourself. You won't be able to trust images, or audio or even videos of your loved ones unless you basically see them send it to you, and even then there's no guarantee the final footage isn't doctored by the phone in some way. So sure, people need to smarten up a bit, but we also need to start thinking about these problematic issues with AI sooner rather than later, cause things are only going to get worse, and fast.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  What I've observed is that normally cautious people will fall for scams when the scam aligns with something expected. Maybe you've just paid your water bull and you get an email that says there's something wrong with your payment. Could just be random chance but it seems related to something you've just done so your normal instinct of "not giving information if I didn't initiate the process" might not be triggered.
  - sensanaty 1y ago
    > What I've observed is that normally cautious people will fall for scams when the scam aligns with something expected. Exactly! In my example for myself, I really was expecting a package, and I was expecting to be paying some extra duties/fees, so the phishing site asking me to enter card details didn't strike me as odd. The website itself looked exactly like how the real one looks, there were no grammatical errors or anything else that would tip you off that you're not looking at a legitimate page. The URL, in hindsight was a bit sketchy, but honestly I've received official legitimate communiques from various large companies from very weird URLs before so even then I didn't question the URL too hard, as it wasn't typosquatting or using the Turkish l instead of the regular l or anything like that, just something like dhl-express.com (I can't remember exactly what the URL was). It even had a proper header navbar that they carefully copied from the real thing. Literally the only thing that tipped me off that it was a scam was that it prefilled the tracking code for me, but the link I had received had no query param as I mentioned and I've never visited the page before (so the tracking code wouldn't be persisted in localStorage or a cookie). I can very, very easily imagine someone less technical falling for it, and hell depending on circumstances I probably would've fallen for it if I was tired after a long day of work or something like that.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago

Sigh. People will adjust. My point, and a subtle one at that, was that it does not bode well for the society of low trust ahead.

pessimizer 1y ago
What people say to respond to this critique is that high-trust people were always a problem. Low-trust societies have procedures in place that nobody ever considers just skipping because we're both good guys and you're from Boston, too, right? High-trust societies are self-regulating scammers paradises. Filled with people citing Occam's Razor, and affinity fraud. Even worse, for minorities the procedures never get dropped, but they're still expected (pressured) to drop procedures to fit in, so they end up highly unequal societies.
- jnovek 1y ago
  The kind of high-trust we need to get back (at least here in the states) is the kind between neighbors on the same block. Of course it’s never been wise to trust someone just because you’re both from Boston, but in the past neighbors generally trusted each other and socialized. It’s particularly striking when I visit my parents’ house. I’m a millennial and I don’t even know my neighbors names and my parents, who are boomers, routinely talk, text and visit their neighbors. Their neighborhood (at least among the old people) feels like a community. Mine does not.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    This is also why parents don't let their kids play outside unsupervised anymore. No trust.
  - bonoboTP 1y ago
    You need a long time to establish trust. In European villages, if you moved to a place, and weren't born there you were considered an outsider, newcomer, and what's more, likely even the first generation who was born there was still considered a newcomer. Just because you went there from 100 kilometers, even though you speak the same language and have almost the exact same culture. High trust communities need a lot of time to develop and a lot of annoying gossip and reputation stuff that can feel nosy. My grandparents were always keenly aware of "but what are they going to say?!", what will they think of the mother if this or that (if the child uses swear words, if people peek through the window and see a messy room, if there is weed in the garden, if a guest is not stuffed full with food, if the curtains are still closed at 7 am, indicating that they are lazy and sleeping in etc). They were always worried about optics and reputation. They were in turn always evaluating how everyone else lived and behaved, who helped and who didn't, who lives neatly and orderly, or who doesn't cook for his (edit: her) husband properly, or which man is a drunkard or gambler, who shows up to church and who doesn't etc. This is suffocating but necessary for the kind of reputation that prevents antisocial behavior. Of course that's the other extreme, but the point is, you need 10+ years of living together and interacting, helping out in renovations, knowing the families, regularly sharing dinner etc to get it going. People move too often nowadays for this to be viable. And of course having to stay put has disadvantages for efficiency and adaptability, there's a reason why people are moving around.
    - optimalsolver 1y ago
      > who doesn't cook for his husband properly At least they were forward-looking on social issues.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
- raincole 1y ago
  But trust is necessary for the society to run efficiently. High-trust environments are more efficient. Technically, we can read the banks' financial reports, the executives' background checks, the video recordings of their gold reserves... to decide which banks are less likely to run away with your money. But no one wants to live in such a place.
  - throwaway48476 1y ago
    All the reports and checks are worthless ina low trust society because they are equally as corruptable. It's like the blockchain people trying to push blockchain for inventory management.
- ashanoko 1y ago
  Trust is a tax , which is low in high thrust societies and high in low thrust societies. All you archieve there costs more, more surveilance, more stress , more guards, more fraud in science, products, services. It naturally appeals to the paranoid subset of society which wants to sell itself as a protector service.
  - throwaway48476 1y ago
    Current economic prosperity is coasting on the effects of high trust society. When the trust tax increases the economy reverts like in South Africa.

pohl 1y ago

To those downvoting this: two things can be true.

dgb23 1y ago

That's not the "root" of the problem but just a coping strategy. The root of the problem has something to do with the scammer.

whimsicalism 1y ago
we live in a globalized world of people competing to get money. hoping everyone begins singing kumbaya is nice but far from a practical solution or diagnosis of the problem.
- dgb23 1y ago
  I‘m not against coping strategies, they are useful. I‘m against scamming and dishonesty. I also don’t think ignoring the actual problems is the way to go, on the contrary.
  - nradov 1y ago
    When a problem has no solution then it's not actually a "problem" but rather a fact to be accepted, like gravity. Regardless of new AI tools, there is no conceivable solution to the problem of having millions of scammers operating from jurisdictions without effective law enforcement. Time to start coping.
Ferret7446 1y ago
That's like saying the root of malnutrition is humans needing to eat. Perhaps technically true, but what's the point of pointing out that technicality? It does nothing to help address the problem.

sensanaty 1y ago

I have met multiple cybersecurity experts, and they really were experts and in general very intelligent and knowledgeable people, that have fallen for very obvious scams. One of them was one of those gift card scams which in my eyes is possibly the most obvious one. I myself have almost fallen for a well crafted phishing attack, the only reason I never ended up putting in my card details was that I was technical enough to know that a generic URL with no query params can't possibly have my tracking code pre-filled on a page I've never been to before. Had the scammers just made me enter my own tracking code, or if I didn't know what a query param is, I 100% would've fallen for it. My point is that no one is immune to a momentary lapse in judgement or just plain bad luck. You can be an expert, extremely intelligent, whatever, all it takes is 5 minutes of weakness to get you, whether that's because you slept bad, had something else on your mind, weren't being diligent enough (it's impossible to be diligent 24/7 after all) or any other myriad list of reasons. It's easy to put the blame on the victims here, but with generative AI the line between reality and fabrication is getting thinner and thinner. I'm a massive AI skeptic (just check my comments here), but I'm 100% positive that sooner or later we'll hit a stage where it's quite literally impossible to discern an AI fabrication from a real event unless you witnessed it in person yourself. You won't be able to trust images, or audio or even videos of your loved ones unless you basically see them send it to you, and even then there's no guarantee the final footage isn't doctored by the phone in some way. So sure, people need to smarten up a bit, but we also need to start thinking about these problematic issues with AI sooner rather than later, cause things are only going to get worse, and fast.

SoftTalker 1y ago
What I've observed is that normally cautious people will fall for scams when the scam aligns with something expected. Maybe you've just paid your water bull and you get an email that says there's something wrong with your payment. Could just be random chance but it seems related to something you've just done so your normal instinct of "not giving information if I didn't initiate the process" might not be triggered.
- sensanaty 1y ago
  > What I've observed is that normally cautious people will fall for scams when the scam aligns with something expected. Exactly! In my example for myself, I really was expecting a package, and I was expecting to be paying some extra duties/fees, so the phishing site asking me to enter card details didn't strike me as odd. The website itself looked exactly like how the real one looks, there were no grammatical errors or anything else that would tip you off that you're not looking at a legitimate page. The URL, in hindsight was a bit sketchy, but honestly I've received official legitimate communiques from various large companies from very weird URLs before so even then I didn't question the URL too hard, as it wasn't typosquatting or using the Turkish l instead of the regular l or anything like that, just something like dhl-express.com (I can't remember exactly what the URL was). It even had a proper header navbar that they carefully copied from the real thing. Literally the only thing that tipped me off that it was a scam was that it prefilled the tracking code for me, but the link I had received had no query param as I mentioned and I've never visited the page before (so the tracking code wouldn't be persisted in localStorage or a cookie). I can very, very easily imagine someone less technical falling for it, and hell depending on circumstances I probably would've fallen for it if I was tired after a long day of work or something like that.