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Scammed
- rdl 13y agoI wish the FBI weren't so picky about irrelevant factors in hiring -- it would make it a lot easier for them to get top-quality talent in technical areas like computer security (for internal use and for computer crime investigations). It's really a two-class system, where people who are full agents (the badge/gun/etc. thing) exist pretty separately from support. There are certainly reasons to want people involved in investigations to be full agents when possible, but it does make hiring a lot more difficult.
- GabrielF00 13y agoWhen I was looking for jobs as a new CS grad a friend who works at the FBI sent me a job description for their computer scientist role. IIRC the starting salary was $45-50k. By comparison I was getting offers from big tech companies for $90k not including signing bonus and stock options.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- xname 13y agoYeah. I did not continue after the third paragraph. I hate this kind of writing style. I know there is a risk of being scammed by "a long read for very little content".
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cr3ative 13y agoA 24 minute read is not "medium" length.
- junto 13y agoI stopped reading when I read this: > His first step is defensive: the creation of a software shield that will hide his identity. He boots up a computer containing a version of Windows that’s cut off from the rest of the machine. It’s a digital Russian doll, a computer within a computer. His sleuthing may attract attention, but any hacker who penetrates the inner realm would probably never know there was a larger doll wrapped around it. And when it’s all done, Mike will delete the hidden computer and any unwanted software that may have slipped into it.
- yuliyp 13y agoI'm sorry that you missed out on the meat of the article, which talks about the lead generation industry and how leads and contact info will get continually re-sold to attempt to extract as much value from the knowledge that someone is looking for something specific which has a high profit margin (or is likely to fall for some specific scams, as the case may be)
- thefreeman 13y agoSeems like a fair (if a bit dramatic) description of a virtual machine for a non technical reader.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jckt 13y agoCertainly you can't expect every article to be written for a tech-literate audience?
- jokoon 13y agoyou don't explain why you didn't like this part
- etfb 13y agoQuite a good description of VMware et al, I thought. I frequently need to explain that technology to non-geeks; this is the description I'll be using from now on. Why on Earth did you find it at all objectionable?
- coldcode 13y agoIt was worth reading. These type of scammers piss me off too. I wish we could generate thousands of fake leads a day and make their lives miserable. Since law enforcement only cares about national security, and only barely ordinary people being ripped off, there has to be a technological solution.
- trumbitta2 13y agoStill reading it, but so far I don't quite like how the following paragraph could make it easy to find Mike's home, 25-foot walls, sushi restaurant and so on: MIKE LIVES IN Fremont, a trendy district north of Seattle’s downtown that’s known as a haven for alternative types. Even there, though, he doesn’t quite fit in. Take his apartment: it isn’t one. From the street, a glass door opens onto a concrete retail space with 25-foot high walls. The windows are covered by blinds. Ceiling-mounted halogen tubes cast a low glow that leaves the corners dark. Delicious smells from a neighbouring sushi restaurant occasionaly fill the space, but Mike’s own kitchen is rarely used; obscure electronic components and dismembered gadgets crowd the counters. The floor is covered in random detritus: a single white sock, a piece of fuzzy green string.
- swdunlop 13y agoI thought the same thing. The journalist is very careful to respect the scammer, "Mr. Smith" but is very eager to dump where Mike lives, what mule fingered him, and the only thing protecting either would be the fact that Mr. Smith would be more exposed if he tried to retaliate directly.
- rdl 13y agoI think they're worried about being sued for accusing Mr. Smith and Jennifer of crimes which they haven't been convicted of, whereas Mike Davis just admits to crimes directly (for a good cause, but it certainly seems like he's exposed to some legal risk here, in the US and especially India, although I suspect no prosecutor in the US would go after him, and no jury would convict, because he's doing it for a good reason.)
- mcv 13y ago> I suspect no prosecutor in the US would go after him, and no jury would convict, because he's doing it for a good reason. I wish I could trust the US justice system that much.
- smsm42 13y agoA lot of prosecutors would gladly go after him - they are regularly going for people for self-defense, "crimes" that hurt nobody, and so on, and so forth. And they can very well succeed in selecting a jury that would know nothing except the letter of the law was violated, so the must convict.
- dollaaron 13y ago>The call unsettles him. “I will do anything to ensure that I never have to hear that woman crying ever again,” he tells me later. I get the feeling that, in Mike’s mind, other people’s emotions show up as noise: data that has no apparent purpose, and that his internal software cannot process. I found this a very unfair judgement made by the author. Giving Mike the benefit of the doubt, I get the sense that he cares about her, and wants to stop the root cause of her suffering, not that her crying made him uncomfortable because he "cannot process" it. The author seems to be trying to play up the rational side of Mike and his engineer's mind at the expense of his emotions.
- swdunlop 13y agoYeah. Anyone who knows Mike knows that he isn't some fictional automaton. The journalist is playing the 90's hollywood hacker card here. All we need now is Mike roller blading and some bad CGI to make it complete.
- sarreph 13y agoAnd bottles of Club-Mate strewn across the otherwise empty apartment floors.
- politician 13y agoHear hear, this piece is awful.
- Intermernet 13y agoBut wait... The FBI "has cyber capability in every one of its 56 offices"... It's like terminator!
- smsm42 13y agoI get the feeling that the reporter could not be bothered to understand people can be complex, and that is may not be easy to understand people in a couple of days, so he is just jumping from one stereotype to another, assembling the quick-and-dirty caricature of Mike from an ample set of templates of "hacker types" provided to us by movies and previous reporting of the same quality. I just ignore such writing now, there is very little they tell us anything about real Mike.
- BorisMelnik 13y agoReally great story. Sounds like a really cool hobby although it would really suck if "Mike" got busted for recording phone conversations when he was trying to helpout. One question I have: lets say "Mike" does get together enough evidence to make a decent case in court, would the FBI even listen? Is this even legal what he is doing? I have done a lot of work in Boca Raton and can confirm the town is filled with email spammers, lead gen cons, and fly by night SEO companies. Not only that these lead gen companies constantly steal from one another and pop up / shut down in the blink of an eye: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Acxiom+hacker+sentenced+to+8+years+in+prison.-a0143341593 http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Acxiom+hacker+sentenced+to+8+y... He is right about that Starbucks too tons of shady characters in Mizner Park.
- hayksaakian 13y agoWarning: Meta Note the url: https://medium.com/matter/f4a5d98a4f51/?attempt=2 https://medium.com/matter/f4a5d98a4f51/?attempt=2 seems like someone's gaming HN
- StavrosK 13y agoOr someone just resubmitted it.
- adambenayoun 13y agoSomeone tried to make it clear to everyone that it is the second attempt. At least we're dealing with someone who wants to be honest about the fact he attempted to repost it twice.
- ColinWright 13y agoSubmitted 12 days ago[0] with a few up-votes and no discussion, then submitted 6 hours ago[1] with no up-votes and no discussion. Now submitted again with /?attempt=2 on the end of the URL to avoid the minimal dup-detection that HN does. This submission gets traction. Maybe everything should be submitted again and again until it gets traction. Then again, maybe there's nothing wrong with lots of re-submissions of the same stories over and over, and I'm just grumpy and need more sleep. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7659277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7659277 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725858 Edit: And yes, I've made this point before. Perhaps people are tired of me saying the same thing repeatedly. Well, I'm tired of seeing the same stories repeatedly. I guess I'll just have to take a break for a while. Feel free to vote me up or down as you will.
- dang 13y agoThe criterion is simple: a small number of reposts is ok when an article is solid and hasn't had significant attention on HN. Good stories should have more than one crack at the bat, or sheer randomness would prevent many from ever getting seen. If you pay close enough attention to HN that those two previous submissions counted as already having seen the story, you're way beyond the 99th percentile! That's why we leave the dupe detector so porous. HN's goal isn't to build a database of unique urls—it's to have the most interesting front page possible. This system is easy to abuse, so we ask people not to abuse it. For example, don't delete things and then repost them. But I don't see abusive reposting as a huge problem on HN right now. We catch most of it, and alert users catch nearly all the rest. Edit: I should mention that we're going to be releasing a new approach to /newest that addresses the tendency of good stories to lose their chance at the front page too quickly. Exactly when we release it depends on how much code I get to write in the next month or two.
- tripzilch 13y agoIt seems like you guys (dang and .. I forgot the other one's name) added a feature to tag "meta" comments so they appear all the way down the bottom of a comment thread? Because that's clever. I really like that solution, because "meta" comments usually do not deserve the downvotes they can get to move them away from the top part of the discussion. I'm generally quite impressed by the new and improved job you are doing at moderating HN. I don't pay close enough attention to tell if it's improved the quality of discussion so far (it probably did, definitely did not get worse). I can say, however, the changes you made and especially the openness about most things, really improved the atmosphere and general feeling of "fairness" of this place. And that counts for a lot! Well done :) BTW did that whole /pending experiment go anywhere? That page is always empty to me. I'm still not very sold on the idea, but just wondering.
- nickstinemates 13y agoI have honestly never heard of a bedroom-cum-office. Can someone explain?
- wavefunction 13y agoA bedroom that is also "nominally" an office by virtue of its usage as such.
- solutionyogi 13y agoIt means the person using the given room as both bedroom and office. The usage of word 'cum' is very common in India. When I first arrived in US, I used to get lot of weird looks from people, I have finally stopped using it. See: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26488/how-does-one-use-the-latin-word-cum-in-a-sentence http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26488/how-does-on...
- georgemcbay 13y agoAs a 40 year old who has always lived in the US, the use of -cum- in this manner was never widely used in speech during my lifetime, but it did used to be pretty common in writing. Not so much anymore, though.
- mindcrime 13y agoAs another 40 year old who has always lived in the US, that exactly jibes with my experience as well. As far as I can tell, the expression is common in written English, but almost unheard of in spoken English. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm trying to think of other examples of "things that are sometimes (or often) written, but almost never spoken".
- Intermernet 13y agoThe word "Regards".
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
- krrishd 13y agoI just find it quite interesting that writing like this that is so journalistic and written by more than one individual is finding success on Medium. Not necessarily in a positive or negative way though, I've yet to see this become a common phenomenon.
- jtheory 13y agoI've been curious about how to track down scammers -- just a few days ago I got a quite convincing call supposedly from Bank of America; they appreciate my reliable payments and would like to lower my interest rate... they'd just need to verify a few bits of info, then pass me off to an account manager to handle the rate change. First, do I have the card with me? Can I confirm the expiration date, so they know this is the current card? Next, they just needed the card number, starting after the (here he listed the first 4 digits accurately). This was when I belatedly realized this was of course a scam attempt -- the initial digits of a credit card number just identify the bank, so he could pretend to be confirming that he was legit while at the same time collecting my entire credit card number. What if I hadn't known that? I know perfectly well I shouldn't trust an incoming caller's identity as a general rule... but he called in the middle of my workday, I was wrapped up in other things, and just thought "eh, I can take a minute and accept a lower rate" without even paying enough attention to realize he hadn't even addressed me by name. Embarrassing, really.... Once the game was up it didn't last much longer -- though I played it safe and pretended I didn't realize it was a scam. But what can I do now? The incoming number was reported as 703 237 2680; but I have no other info on who the caller was beyond that, and I believe caller-ID is fairly easily spoofed. I wish I'd had a honeypot credit card to give him; that would have been at least somewhat useful, though tricky to really use. From what I understand, stolen CCs are tested first (via a small purchase from any online service), then good ones are sold. A honeypot cc (generated by someone with the power to investigate its data) could be used to attempt to track down the people testing it, and whoever buys it, but the former use could be useless (if the scammer can cover their tracks), and the latter only gets the downstream bad guy, not the original scammer. And... the honeypot cc would need to pass the test to be sold, which would cost money. A chargeback (to that initial test) would of course be possible, but the whole testing process is already brutal for whatever merchant they're using for that. I'm curious about other ideas on the most useful action I can take in response to this kind of thing.
- __david__ 13y agoI've been getting phishing attempts to my cell phone in the past few months. They leave message that say, "to collect your $100 AT&T rebate, go to www.phishingwebsite.com", which looks like a standard phishing site. They always come from different phone numbers and list different variants of the web site. It's odd because I've seen plenty of phishing emails, but this is the first time I've gotten them via phone.
- joshdance 13y agoThis makes me sad for the people who get scammed. Wonder why we can't do more to help them.
- politician 13y agoI hate this article. It's about some fine reporter who opens with some tear-jerker piece about pay-day loan scams, then transitions to "Mike" who, in so many deliberately picked words, is a loner hacker character with no credibility just in case this article doesn't pan out, and then... "Mike casts his hands over the keyboard, and makes like God." Seriously. That happens in the post. Unfortunately, as I page down, I noticed that author mentions "lead generation." Which most of us can relate to, so I read, nay, struggle onwards. (this is parody) Mike turns into a criminal phishing character in pursuit of an elusive quarry. The article tapers off into a stalemate. 86 points?
- neumann 13y agohear hear. I hated it too. It felt like he wanted to recreate a William Gibson short story. The description of the method maded it sound like voodoo, Mike was turned into a character trope, and the story ended in nothing. Give me a wired article to read. They have some amazing investigative journalism that is far more thrilling.
- prawn 13y agoWho's really doing anything effective about spamming, scamming, phishing, etc? Any successful government efforts? I report spam and so on with little effect. The web is a mess.
- Intermernet 13y agoIt seems most efforts are being taken by the private companies who are affected by it. In the phishing and spamming arena you have Google doing a fairly sterling job of eliminating spam from most people's inboxes, and many banks and insurance companies have online crime investigation departments that try to crack down on phishing etc. It is good to see the occasional prosecution for spam/scam/phishing but I don't think we see enough of them. How are you going to prosecute someone who you can trace to an IP in Eastern Europe, but which may just be a Tor exit node. I think that higher reporting rates would be a good first step, and I'd implore anyone who has been targeted by these pricks to report it to the local authorities. The more details that can be collated, the easier it will become to follow the money.
- prawn 13y agoI imagine a lot of people don't bother reporting because nothing happens. Spam filtering won't stop spammers. They need to be hit in the pocket. Here in Australia, I report Australian companies spamming me to the ACMA but can't imagine they ever do anything about it. I get spam from Chinese businesses posting galleries of their products on Picasa (Google property) and then using share buttons to spam people. I mark it as spam in Gmail (Google property) every time, but still every Picasa email makes it through despite that consistent mix of Picasa template and Chinese characters.
- gcb0 13y agoMy bank fraud dpt calls me, and want me to confirm information. I ask them to confirm, they sound puzzled. I school then. The Indian guy doesn't care. I ask for the case n and call the number on the back of the card. I usually gets the same Indian guy...
- dredmorbius 13y agoDon't school the guy on the line. Write the CEO. Seriously. It'll get passed on to the appropriate dept., but that's one of the jobs of the office of the CEO. Point out the problem with their procedures. And if they don't fix it, move to a bank with a clue (or a credit union). True story: as the housing bubble was building to its inevitable bust, I started hearing home loan ads from my financial institution on the radio (they generally don't advertise a whole lot). I wrote off a concerned but stern letter asking what the hell they were doing pitching for more housing loans in what was obviously a massively overheated market. No idea if my contact had any impact, but the ads stopped very shortly afterward. The crash not much longer thence.
- wazoox 13y agoThe article doesn't really seem to question the mere existence of payday loan, which is the sort of actual usury I thought existed only in the most undeveloped nations and in medieval times. Crazy stuff, really.
- dredmorbius 13y agoA journalistic and literary trope I increasingly despise: creating an elaborate and evocative metaphorical description of something without naming what it actually is, often with the side-effect of making a rather mundane technicality sound all gee-wiz and confusing rather than enlightening the reader. E.g., Mike's booting up a copy of Windows in a VM: His first step is defensive: the creation of a software shield that will hide his identity. He boots up a computer containing a version of Windows that’s cut off from the rest of the machine. It’s a digital Russian doll, a computer within a computer. Yeah, OK, we get it. Windows running in VirtualBox or Parallels or VMWare or whatever. Yeah, it's a security measure. But if a guy's engaged in laboriously sculpting mother earth with an implement of ancient design comprised of planar forged ores fastened to the end of a sylvan shaft, just call a fucking spade a spade and tell us he's digging a hole in dirt. The language doesn't serve to inform, it conceals. And in this case, the security isn't necessary to protect the identity of the VM, unlike the elaborate description of Mike's apartment silo.
- zachinglis 13y agoAgreed. I had to skip paragraphs and hope I didn't miss anything. And in the end, I just had to give up.
- lesingerouge 13y agoI think you are missing the point of the whole article. This writing is not a piece of news that tells you something you did not know. Rather it works as a "short novel" whose purpose is to create a story around a modern-day phenomenon. If you look closely you can see the age-old patterns of stories worldwide: the low-key individual that takes the path of the hero, the cause, the ruthless enemy, the obstacles to overcome, the relentless fight. Overall I found it to be an entertaining read, the key here being the "entertaining" part. I do believe that the target of this piece was never the "enlightment" of the audience but rather the "sentimental engagement" of the audience. After all, this has been the point of storytellers since the break of mankind, keep us fearing the night and happy to have lived another day.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
- wisienkas 13y agoWould be fun to feed those scammers with their own card info and see if they would recognize it ? Of course you'd have to track them down first.
- roymurdock 13y ago"TrustedPayday has gobbled up Mary’s information and is alerting other sites, with names like clicks.cashadvance.com. Somewhere in the machinery that processes payday loan applications, decisions are being made. In just a few minutes, loan offers begin falling into Mary’s inbox. We’ve just watched Mary’s identity get turned into profit before she’s even taken out a loan." Is there a way to fight fishing with spam? Perhaps if the loan request market was saturated with enough fake requests, the price for leads would fall as leads would become increasingly unreliable and time-wasting for the fishers. Margins would decrease for the sites who sell the loan request information, as their info becomes less and less reliable (valuable). Margins would decrease for the scammers as they invest more time and money in due diligence and verification of the loan requests. The irony of the situation would be priceless. Could spam be the way to fight scams?
- srazzaque 13y agoIn theory I think this would work. However, the risk is that Lead Flash cannot be linked to any of the illegal activity that happens a few points after initial sale of the leads. So they'd probably have grounds for legal recourse against such activity.
- roymurdock 13y agoPerhaps you are right. It seems like the environment is murky enough that a sufficiently motivated individual (or organization) with Mike's drive and skill set could set up a fake identity dumping program while avoiding detection, just as scammers can mask their activities. There would be the inevitable question of incentives: Who benefits from this service and who pays for the service? Mike tracks these guys down (unsuccessfully) in his free time, as a hobby. His only reward is the feeling of justice he gets from cornering a scammer and making him squirm. There is no data to support this in the article, but it seems as if the majority of the scamming targets lower-income, misinformed, and vulnerable people. So it would make sense that the taxpayers would pay to rectify this situation and rid the general public of this predatory nuisance. The failure here is with the government - they have the resources and the incentive to fix this situation. Seems kind of ass-backwards that our legal system would protect a company such as Lead Flash. But hey, capitalism isn't perfect is it?
- keithpeter 13y agoUK: payday loans http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26539569 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26539569 http://www.oft.gov.uk/shared_oft/Credit/oft1481.pdf http://www.oft.gov.uk/shared_oft/Credit/oft1481.pdf [pdf, March 2013] https://www.getsafeonline.org/protecting-yourself/payday-loans/ https://www.getsafeonline.org/protecting-yourself/payday-loa... Action is mainly around regulation and caps on APR. Scam searches topping out around 2010. Hope 'Mike' gets to stay private!
- amagumori 13y agothis is the worst writing style ever!!!
- jongraehl 13y agoThis piece helped me understand that a popular medium.com piece of non-fiction probably isn't "non-". Reddit with pretensions.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- yes-that-mike 13y ago.. wow.. isn't this whole thread disturbing to read.. frankly i regret ever talking to danny, while hes a nice guy and all; it was my goal to highlight the issues with lead generation.. i didnt know it was his intention to make me a part of the story until the fact checker called me sigh i'm not a "vigilante" nor am i "errant", yes.. its my hobby to make it harder on people who would try to swindle me out of money.. yes i get paid to do this for my customers and yes i was doing it for "free" in the case of the victim we stumbled on.. if we would like to talk questionable ethics.. when i presented danny with everything i had, he continued to push me to go further.. at one point offering to pay some of my expenses (tough i declined, voip numbers are cheap).. no matter what info i had, danny would follow up months later asking for more.. asking if i had followed up here and or there.. lastly i'm pretty saddened that my privacy was less important then those of the criminals i was looking for :/ they even missed a really funny point about fact that the scammer was using my name "mike davis" as his alias; because they wanted to protect his fake name.. anyway.. thanks for the positive comments from the folks who apparently know me.. https://soundcloud.com/user228267080/call-recording https://soundcloud.com/user228267080/call-recording https://soundcloud.com/user228267080/92512-3-37-18-pm https://soundcloud.com/user228267080/92512-3-37-18-pm https://soundcloud.com/user228267080/82012-11-32-48-am https://soundcloud.com/user228267080/82012-11-32-48-am <-fun!