6 ms·

"If people in the U.S. aren’t suspicious of free money, PayPal payments that look fake, the absence of a payment in their account, fake emails from PayPal’s FBI

"If people in the U.S. aren’t suspicious of free money, PayPal payments that look fake, the absence of a payment in their account, fake emails from PayPal’s FBI department or just Nigerians in general, then they deserve to have their money taken from them." I could easily see my parents falling for this. I don't think they deserve to have their money taken. Although, to be fair, I doubt my parents could set up and use a Paypal account. So they've got that going for them.

sliverstorm 14y ago
Agreed on all counts. To many people, the internet and all are so new and unfamiliar, they have absolutely ZERO context to recognize fake-looking PayPal payments or emails from PayPal's FBI department. To them, they are still completely lost- you can't expect them to recognize a scam. As for being suspicious of free money, I think most people generally would be, but relax their misgivings when something appears to be legitimate- that is to say, any escapes they are aware of appear to be covered. The scammer, therefore, takes advantage of the victim's lack of knowledge of the escapes in an electronic age.
- enraged_camel 14y ago
  The Internet has been around for fifteen years, and PayPal has been around for more than ten. I don't think either of them qualify as "new" anymore. Most people get scammed not because the technologies are new, but because they have been using those technologies irresponsibly, i.e. without educating themselves about their dangers first. They simply want to reap the benefits, and end up losing their money.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    > The Internet has been around for fifteen years WWW has been around for 20 years. But it's only recently that people have always on cable modems and active content. > without educating themselves about their dangers first. HN is full of stories of well funded, international businesses, with considerable sums of cash at risk, who do stupid insecure things. If they can't get it right why should Joe Sixpack be expected to do any better? Email inboxes are full of hoaxes about supposed dangers - most of them are garbage. I'm interested to see what kind of help there is for people who want to learn how to protect themselves on the Internet. (http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/Internet-Fraud.shtml http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/Internet-Fraud.shtml) That site has comprehensive information. It's lousy. Look how much stuff people have to wade through.
    - enraged_camel 14y ago
      >>I'm interested to see what kind of help there is for people who want to learn how to protect themselves on the Internet. What kind of help is there for people who want to learn to protect themselves in real life? Does the fact that there is no comprehensive resource somehow remove one's burden to learn anyway?
      - RegEx 14y ago
        You're extremely grumpy. Blaming the victim is not some brave, heroic concept. People can imagine what it looks like to be in physical danger, and instinct can help them avoid the situations to some degree. It's hard to imagine what it's like being in an unsafe situation on the internet.
        enraged_camel 14y ago
        >>Blaming the victim is not some brave, heroic concept. Blaming the victim is bad only if you believe that blame is a zero sum game. Unfortunately, it is not. If you walk down a dark alleyway in New York at night alone and get mugged, the mugger is guilty of mugging you, but you're also guilty of being a silly goose. You don't gain immunity to blame simply because you were the victim.
        sliverstorm 14y ago
        How 'bout if you just moved to New York from backcountry Idaho?
        jlgreco 14y ago
        I would say that a criminal is equally guilty if they commit a crime in a dark alley NYC or if they commit a crime in backcountry Idaho. If I replace my bicycle u-lock with a nice hefty rope and start lashing my bike to whatever object seems solid at the time (this is a concept that actually appeals to me), then I should receive some blame when my bike gets inevitably stolen. However the bicycle thief is no more nor less a thief.
  - RegEx 14y ago
    How would you know that responsibility is needed without proper education about the dangers?
sharkweek 14y ago
I used to work as a bank teller while in school. About once or twice a month someone would come in with checks from these types of scams. The spectrum of who was falling for it was a lot wider than I would have ever imagined. We were trained pretty extensively on stopping these checks from being deposited, but it sure broke my heart being the bearer of bad news so often. I remember one guy who didn't believe me that it was a scam, asked that I at least try to clear the check (we'd put it on hold for about a week). Lo and behold, he came back in a week later to tell me it turned out to be fake.
- esrauch 14y ago
  Did you ever have the opposite, where you thought something was a scam check but it turned out to be legit?
  - sharkweek 14y ago
    Many times -- they made you pretty paranoid about fraud at training with horror stories of people who got fired for letting checks get through too loosely, so I was always proactive about it. After about four years of it, you got really good at being able to analyze every deposit in under 30 seconds or so before the customer even knew what was going on.
DanBC 14y ago
God help us if the scammers ever find someone who can write correct English. I know many people get caught by these scams, and I suspect that the numbers would increase if the wording was improved a bit. There's a metaphor about conversions and copy-writing and startups in there somewhere.
- mitjak 14y ago
  They have already. I regularly get properly phrased phishing emails from "PayPal". A few times I even got some from the banks that I use. I'm not sure if it was a coincidence or not, but the only thing that gave it away was the phishy URL.
  - akldfgj 14y ago
    Those are different. Phishes strive for perfection, because they win as soon as you log in to the fake site. These "long con" 419 scams need to rebuff intelligent/savvy people and only attract rubes.
- RegEx 14y ago
  The poor spelling probably increases the conversion rate from people who make the first reply. The nigerian prince and poor-spelling spammers are dead giveaways to a spam. If you filter out people who know about these cliches, you increase the likelihood that the responder will give you money.
  - weaksauce 14y ago
    Could you imagine how many emails that they would have to field if they were, at a first pass, a convincing forgery? It's almost certainly used as a low pass filter to only prey on the ones likely to fall for it in the long run.
- chc 14y ago
  I've heard that for many scams it's actually the opposite: They intentionally throw in huge warning flags so that the people who initially "bite" are less likely to have second thoughts later on, and thus the scammer wastes less time chasing false leads. They're basically prequalifying you as a good mark. (There is a good lesson about marketing here too — theoretically "perfect" copy or design may not be ideal for your market, so test and see what provides the best ROI.)
astral303 14y ago
+1. Plenty of people in the US have a subpar grasp of English (and yet are not retarded). For example, my dad was not born in the US, but has a Masters in Electrical Engineering and used to work on power grid systems. He's a smart guy. However, it took him a good amount of time to recognize phishing e-mails, some of it requiring my guidance. For example, it's not easy to identify Misused Capitalizations, or to pick up on missed article in email, or to recognizing verbs not agreed with time. Furthermore, it is completely plausible to an inexperienced person that PayPal might enlist FBI to enforce shipment of paid-for goods. It takes some experience in this country to realize that 1) this sort of matter is not referred to FBI unless it's super grave, 2) and not referred to any enforcement entity so fast (less than 30 days), 3) and not referred to any separate enforcement entity without at least several resolution attempts from the original business. In fact, IMO, it's quite arrogant, on the part of the OP to say this. Unfortunately, this is a typical attitude in the geekdom: if something that's obvious to us isn't obvious to you, you're stupid.
- graue 14y ago
  I'd still think paying $100 more than the asking price (with no explanation as to why) would be a strong clue something is amiss in this case. But you're probably right that the use of English and the FBI enforcement letter are obvious only to a subset of people who grew up in a Western, Anglophone culture.
  - DrStalker 14y ago
    I only skimmed the article; I'd assumed that was part of the scam (forward the extra $100 on via western union, or paypal it back to me on this different account, etc)
    - tvladeck 14y ago
      Isn't that graue's point though, that it looks like it would be part of the scam and thus should throw alarms?
    - sliverstorm 14y ago
tammer 14y ago
I concur. My parents were recently duped by botspam sent from an estranged aunt's hacked aol account. The message was one sentence, two words of which were CLICK HERE. My mother spent a whole day researching the reality content farm it linked to, thinking something was happening to some family real-estate. Maybe there needs to be some sort of Internet-wide PSA about this kind of thing?
drumdance 14y ago
My nephew got stung in a Paypal + eBay scam a few years ago. Long story short, they lured him in with a few bonafide transactions, then took big by "selling" a fake antique on eBay but making it look like he was the seller.
Kelliot 14y ago
I provide technical support for Americans from the UK. +1 for understanding some of my audience.
jamesmcn 14y ago
> I could easily see my parents falling for this. Sometime in the mid '90s, not long after my dad got email, I decided to warn him about Nigerian scams. Instead, he ended up telling me about how these these kind of scams started popping out of the first fax machine he turned on, back in the early '80s.
gadders 14y ago
Saw a new type of phishing email the other day - a fake order confirmation page from Amazon saying someone in Florida had ordered a widescreen TV on our account. Obviously, first reaction of a non-techy user would be to click on the Amazon link in the email and enter their account details to check their order history. And that's how they get your Amazon account details. I think this works because the "OMG my account has been hacked!!!" panic overrides you're natural caution about phishing emails.
flyinRyan 14y ago
I hate this sentiment so much. No one "deserves to have their money taken from them". Victim blaming 101. One of the reasons we have to waste so much effort fighting this kind of crap is this moronic idea that if you get scammed you deserve it.
kahawe 14y ago
To further add to this: there are quite a few gangs here in euroland who are successfully scamming older citizens with nothing but randomly calling them up, pretending to be a grandchild in trouble and in desperate need of some money and then that "grandkid" sends over a friend to collect the money. They are taking literally thousands from the elderly that way, you keep reading about it in the papers. So I can see how these emails seem totally real and threatening to the average computer-illiterate who sells something for the first time ever. Remember, good scams are about that initial shock, that initial mental blow you deal on your victim to completely catch them off-guard and disable their logical thinking. Flashing a shiny batch or pretending it is an "emergency" is a very good angle.
- bladecatcher 14y ago
  There's a con scene in a movie, Nine Queens[0], in which a grandkid sends a friend to con his aunt. The movie is quite awesome btw.. [0]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247586/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247586/

sliverstorm 14y ago

Agreed on all counts. To many people, the internet and all are so new and unfamiliar, they have absolutely ZERO context to recognize fake-looking PayPal payments or emails from PayPal's FBI department. To them, they are still completely lost- you can't expect them to recognize a scam. As for being suspicious of free money, I think most people generally would be, but relax their misgivings when something appears to be legitimate- that is to say, any escapes they are aware of appear to be covered. The scammer, therefore, takes advantage of the victim's lack of knowledge of the escapes in an electronic age.

enraged_camel 14y ago
The Internet has been around for fifteen years, and PayPal has been around for more than ten. I don't think either of them qualify as "new" anymore. Most people get scammed not because the technologies are new, but because they have been using those technologies irresponsibly, i.e. without educating themselves about their dangers first. They simply want to reap the benefits, and end up losing their money.
- DanBC 14y ago
  > The Internet has been around for fifteen years WWW has been around for 20 years. But it's only recently that people have always on cable modems and active content. > without educating themselves about their dangers first. HN is full of stories of well funded, international businesses, with considerable sums of cash at risk, who do stupid insecure things. If they can't get it right why should Joe Sixpack be expected to do any better? Email inboxes are full of hoaxes about supposed dangers - most of them are garbage. I'm interested to see what kind of help there is for people who want to learn how to protect themselves on the Internet. (http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/Internet-Fraud.shtml http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/Internet-Fraud.shtml) That site has comprehensive information. It's lousy. Look how much stuff people have to wade through.
  - enraged_camel 14y ago
    >>I'm interested to see what kind of help there is for people who want to learn how to protect themselves on the Internet. What kind of help is there for people who want to learn to protect themselves in real life? Does the fact that there is no comprehensive resource somehow remove one's burden to learn anyway?
    - RegEx 14y ago
      You're extremely grumpy. Blaming the victim is not some brave, heroic concept. People can imagine what it looks like to be in physical danger, and instinct can help them avoid the situations to some degree. It's hard to imagine what it's like being in an unsafe situation on the internet.
      - enraged_camel 14y ago
        >>Blaming the victim is not some brave, heroic concept. Blaming the victim is bad only if you believe that blame is a zero sum game. Unfortunately, it is not. If you walk down a dark alleyway in New York at night alone and get mugged, the mugger is guilty of mugging you, but you're also guilty of being a silly goose. You don't gain immunity to blame simply because you were the victim.
        sliverstorm 14y ago
        How 'bout if you just moved to New York from backcountry Idaho?
        jlgreco 14y ago
        I would say that a criminal is equally guilty if they commit a crime in a dark alley NYC or if they commit a crime in backcountry Idaho. If I replace my bicycle u-lock with a nice hefty rope and start lashing my bike to whatever object seems solid at the time (this is a concept that actually appeals to me), then I should receive some blame when my bike gets inevitably stolen. However the bicycle thief is no more nor less a thief.
- RegEx 14y ago
  How would you know that responsibility is needed without proper education about the dangers?

sharkweek 14y ago

I used to work as a bank teller while in school. About once or twice a month someone would come in with checks from these types of scams. The spectrum of who was falling for it was a lot wider than I would have ever imagined. We were trained pretty extensively on stopping these checks from being deposited, but it sure broke my heart being the bearer of bad news so often. I remember one guy who didn't believe me that it was a scam, asked that I at least try to clear the check (we'd put it on hold for about a week). Lo and behold, he came back in a week later to tell me it turned out to be fake.

esrauch 14y ago
Did you ever have the opposite, where you thought something was a scam check but it turned out to be legit?
- sharkweek 14y ago
  Many times -- they made you pretty paranoid about fraud at training with horror stories of people who got fired for letting checks get through too loosely, so I was always proactive about it. After about four years of it, you got really good at being able to analyze every deposit in under 30 seconds or so before the customer even knew what was going on.

DanBC 14y ago

God help us if the scammers ever find someone who can write correct English. I know many people get caught by these scams, and I suspect that the numbers would increase if the wording was improved a bit. There's a metaphor about conversions and copy-writing and startups in there somewhere.

mitjak 14y ago
They have already. I regularly get properly phrased phishing emails from "PayPal". A few times I even got some from the banks that I use. I'm not sure if it was a coincidence or not, but the only thing that gave it away was the phishy URL.
- akldfgj 14y ago
  Those are different. Phishes strive for perfection, because they win as soon as you log in to the fake site. These "long con" 419 scams need to rebuff intelligent/savvy people and only attract rubes.
RegEx 14y ago
The poor spelling probably increases the conversion rate from people who make the first reply. The nigerian prince and poor-spelling spammers are dead giveaways to a spam. If you filter out people who know about these cliches, you increase the likelihood that the responder will give you money.
- weaksauce 14y ago
  Could you imagine how many emails that they would have to field if they were, at a first pass, a convincing forgery? It's almost certainly used as a low pass filter to only prey on the ones likely to fall for it in the long run.
chc 14y ago
I've heard that for many scams it's actually the opposite: They intentionally throw in huge warning flags so that the people who initially "bite" are less likely to have second thoughts later on, and thus the scammer wastes less time chasing false leads. They're basically prequalifying you as a good mark. (There is a good lesson about marketing here too — theoretically "perfect" copy or design may not be ideal for your market, so test and see what provides the best ROI.)

astral303 14y ago

+1. Plenty of people in the US have a subpar grasp of English (and yet are not retarded). For example, my dad was not born in the US, but has a Masters in Electrical Engineering and used to work on power grid systems. He's a smart guy. However, it took him a good amount of time to recognize phishing e-mails, some of it requiring my guidance. For example, it's not easy to identify Misused Capitalizations, or to pick up on missed article in email, or to recognizing verbs not agreed with time. Furthermore, it is completely plausible to an inexperienced person that PayPal might enlist FBI to enforce shipment of paid-for goods. It takes some experience in this country to realize that 1) this sort of matter is not referred to FBI unless it's super grave, 2) and not referred to any enforcement entity so fast (less than 30 days), 3) and not referred to any separate enforcement entity without at least several resolution attempts from the original business. In fact, IMO, it's quite arrogant, on the part of the OP to say this. Unfortunately, this is a typical attitude in the geekdom: if something that's obvious to us isn't obvious to you, you're stupid.

graue 14y ago
I'd still think paying $100 more than the asking price (with no explanation as to why) would be a strong clue something is amiss in this case. But you're probably right that the use of English and the FBI enforcement letter are obvious only to a subset of people who grew up in a Western, Anglophone culture.
- DrStalker 14y ago
  I only skimmed the article; I'd assumed that was part of the scam (forward the extra $100 on via western union, or paypal it back to me on this different account, etc)
  - tvladeck 14y ago
    Isn't that graue's point though, that it looks like it would be part of the scam and thus should throw alarms?
  - sliverstorm 14y ago

tammer 14y ago

I concur. My parents were recently duped by botspam sent from an estranged aunt's hacked aol account. The message was one sentence, two words of which were CLICK HERE. My mother spent a whole day researching the reality content farm it linked to, thinking something was happening to some family real-estate. Maybe there needs to be some sort of Internet-wide PSA about this kind of thing?

drumdance 14y ago

My nephew got stung in a Paypal + eBay scam a few years ago. Long story short, they lured him in with a few bonafide transactions, then took big by "selling" a fake antique on eBay but making it look like he was the seller.

Kelliot 14y ago

I provide technical support for Americans from the UK. +1 for understanding some of my audience.

jamesmcn 14y ago

> I could easily see my parents falling for this. Sometime in the mid '90s, not long after my dad got email, I decided to warn him about Nigerian scams. Instead, he ended up telling me about how these these kind of scams started popping out of the first fax machine he turned on, back in the early '80s.

gadders 14y ago

Saw a new type of phishing email the other day - a fake order confirmation page from Amazon saying someone in Florida had ordered a widescreen TV on our account. Obviously, first reaction of a non-techy user would be to click on the Amazon link in the email and enter their account details to check their order history. And that's how they get your Amazon account details. I think this works because the "OMG my account has been hacked!!!" panic overrides you're natural caution about phishing emails.

flyinRyan 14y ago

I hate this sentiment so much. No one "deserves to have their money taken from them". Victim blaming 101. One of the reasons we have to waste so much effort fighting this kind of crap is this moronic idea that if you get scammed you deserve it.

kahawe 14y ago

To further add to this: there are quite a few gangs here in euroland who are successfully scamming older citizens with nothing but randomly calling them up, pretending to be a grandchild in trouble and in desperate need of some money and then that "grandkid" sends over a friend to collect the money. They are taking literally thousands from the elderly that way, you keep reading about it in the papers. So I can see how these emails seem totally real and threatening to the average computer-illiterate who sells something for the first time ever. Remember, good scams are about that initial shock, that initial mental blow you deal on your victim to completely catch them off-guard and disable their logical thinking. Flashing a shiny batch or pretending it is an "emergency" is a very good angle.

bladecatcher 14y ago
There's a con scene in a movie, Nine Queens[0], in which a grandkid sends a friend to con his aunt. The movie is quite awesome btw.. [0]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247586/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247586/