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[KittyTac]

There's a company that sells bots made to troll telephone scammers and waste their time. It's hilarious.

[King Zultan]

So it sounds like you guys are saying that we should set up a phone scam so we can get money for a super computer so we can run Dwarf Fortress with maximum embark size and one thousands dwarves.

[Frumple]

Like, please don't even joke. I have family that's been defrauded by those fucks, and their horseshit literally kills people (by bankrupting folks on the edge, leading to suicide or unpayable healthcare costs causing missed but necessary medical care). Joking about turning to that fucking murderously immiserating shit is actually not funny

[scriver]

Defraud the rich

[ChairmanPoo]

I think you are reacting way out of proportion to a dumb joke. Noone is seriously talking about scamming people

[wierd]

It may seem cynical as hell, but here is my view:

ANYONE that cold calls me, ANYONE AT ALL, trying to offer any kind of sale, service, or otherwise--- (and TRIPLY SO for emails!) is immediately presumed to be a hostile scam artist.


The signal to noise ratio for this is pretty profound.  It's almost to the level of God's suggestion to Lot, that he find a single good man in Soddom to spare the doomination, and Lot coming up empty.



So.  People who get taken in by scam artists--- What are they thinking exactly?  (And I say this as somebody who has had their identity stolen twice now, once by the Sony hack several years back, and once again recently through unknown methods-- the bank caught them both, thankfully, but I DID have to fight several thousand dollars worth of fraudulent transactions. I have told my bank in person to stringently flag all out-of-area transactions and alert me, and they were happy to comply.)  NEVER trust a telemarketer.  NEVER, EVER, EVER.

If you get an unsolicited email, junk it.  End of story.  if possible, set your email to exclusive "known contacts only" mode, and be very selective who you hand it out to. Also, if you are savvy enough, use encrypted email.


I really do not comprehend how people keep falling victim to the Nigerian Prince (and related email scams)-- or how people keep getting pressured into getting phony insurance from cold-call telemarketers.  If you did not solicit the call, do not give them the time of day. If you did not solicit the email, junk it.  If the email came from a seeminly legit entity you have real dealings with (your bank, ebay, et al)-- do not click anything in the email they send to you, and read it with a dumb text-only email client. If there are curious instructions inside it, contact the entity directly through their support website or phone number contact, and do not rely on email.


We arent living in the delicate age of the 80s anymore, where legit business was conducted over the phone and by mail.  Scammers have poisoned the well, then dumped dumptruck loads of salt down it.  It is terrible that people are still being victimized by that toxic bullshit, but by now, the realization that there is nothing good behind those avenues of contact should be so cliche as to be a meme by now. I do not ascribe to a worldview where we keep bailing out people that do not learn from their mistakes.  Getting burned once, from a well crafted con, I can give sympathy and a pass to, but falling for them over and over and over again, and making no efforts whatsoever to avoid falling victim each subsequent time? No. Not so much.   I am totally down with throwing the book down hard on scammers, and putting them in jail for life for the level of damage they have done to the world at large-- but I am not down with eternal-handholding-for-the-gullible.  Adults are supposed to be able to make rational choices, and part of that is learning from past mistakes, to avoid them in the future.  Society is not really helped by shielding the inept from the consequences of their ineptitude. 

[TamerVirus]

Literally every single call that comes through the landline is either:
A. Asking for donations (politics, police, veterans, what have you)
B. A recording going on about auto insurance
C. A Chinese recording saying I got a package at the embassy
D. Tony Smith from Vindows tech support in Bangalore

[wierd]

False comparison.

Inept != Disabled

If the person does have a legit disability, then they need assistance, and should not be conducting business without such assistance (because of their disability.)  For people that are competent, they are by definition, NOT DISABLED.  Bailing them out over and over again for making the same stupid mistakes does not help them in the long run, and imposes only an endlessly recurring deficit to everyone else, who has to suffer from their lack of willingness to accept their circumstances and adapt to them.

(see for example, Trump's insulation from consequences. How has that helped anyone at all?)

Comparing this to railing against ramps for the disabled is wrong.  It is railing against people who keep breaking their hips after sliding down the banister of a 40 story building's flight of stairs, and refusing to learn that doing this is a bad idea.  This is because we are talking about competent people (eg, people that can walk, if we extend your analogy), who refuse to change their behavior after being harmed (breaking their hips after sliding down the handrail.) Nowhere are ramps for the disabled in the picture.


Ignorance I can give a pass to, as I already specified.  If you have never encountered the Nigerian Prince before, I can see how it would make you confused, and if you further had no experience at all about how banking works, might be suckered into the scheme.  BUT ONLY ONCE, because having been so suckered in the past, that past experience means you are no longer ignorant of those things, and thus, should know better.

(and windows has been around for 4 decades, actually. )

[Eschar]

Stairs are not skilled and manipulative. On the other end of the scam interaction is an individual who knows how to adjust their techniques and use people's desires - for money, for companionship, whatever - as bait. Not a stable obstacle incapable of strategy, like stairs. Last I checked, stairs may be the indirect cause of injuries, but they aren't preying.

In other words, knowledge of stairs is learn-once-accurate-forever. Knowledge about human beings, especially malicious ones, are distinctly not.

And falling prey to a scam once is not, as you say*, an antidote to ignorance. It only means the person isn't ignorant of the existence of scams. It does not mean they aren't ignorant of the probabilities of scams in general. "What are the odds of this happening again," the thinking goes. "Surely scams are usually something that happens to someone else. So it's unlikely that I'm a target again, even if [or "especially if" when the mark has particularly wrong ideas about statistics] I was last time. Maybe this is the real deal!" AND the benefits the scam "offers" can seem well worth the possible risk if the person is desperate - such as the very people that scammers target. Knowledge of a single scam can't be expected to imply knowledge of statistics.

* The quote I'm drawing that from is:

BUT ONLY ONCE, because having been so suckered in the past, that past experience means you are no longer ignorant of those things

[wierd]

Again, the simple ruleset is:

Did I solicit this call in any way? (Y/N?)

if Y, Listen politely to the operator. If they ask for any kind of account details, hang up. (A legit operator has all that information on hand on their end already.)
If N, Hang up immediately. They are a scammer.


Further-

If they preface this with some kind of doomy emergency situation, their odds of being a scammer just went up 90000%. Take note of the doom they mention but hang up immediately. Fact check the doom. If (through some miracle) the doom is real, use the LEGITIMATE contact number of the organization they represent (look it up yourself), and initiate a dialog.  This is potentially dangerous, as social engineering is indeed a thing.  If you have any concerns at all, contact the organizations you have legit contact dealings with at their support number, and inquire.


Email:

Unless it is the result of a communication that YOU initiated, (or unless it is from an entity that you have legit dealings with**), DISCARD IMMEDIATELY. It is a scam.
** If in this circumstance, you get such an email-- DO NOT CLICK ON ANYTHING. Forward it to the abuse contact for that organization, (with headers intact if you know how), then contact that organization by phone, using the legitimate contact number, and get further details. Do not transact it via email from a cold-message. EVER.


Again-- this well has been polluted so much that it is glowing and radioactive. Expecting anything but mutants from it is just astounding--- BUT, again, if you have never seen a proper well before, and thus have no source of comparison by which to evaluate the glowing radioactive superfund site with a bucket hanging over it--- Getting cancer the first time should teach you about that pretty fast.

[Eschar]

Except that someone could well reason that was a fluke, and decide not to make what they think is a hostile generalization. It's precisely the same phenomenon that happens with gamblers, for instance. Knowing that I lost last time doesn't mean I understand the ways the system is rigged as a whole.

Your checklist is something you know. Great. Useful. Don't expect someone to grasp it out of nowhere unless they hear about it from someone else or unless they have already fallen prey several times - you know, the very thing that marks them as inept in your book.

[MaxTheFox]

When I get called by obvious scammers I usually say something snarky or insult them and then hang up.

[wierd]

@eschar

Incorrect assertion--

Re-read what I wrote.  The defining element is when they make no attempt at all to adjust their behavior to their circumstances.  Making an attempt and still failing, is not a sign of being willfully inept, and thus gets sympathy from me. It means that they will respond favorably to good and helpful advice, because they actually do in fact want it.

When they fail to make any changes at all in how they behave, and continue in the same exact patterns that made them a victim each and every time, and make no effort at all to understand how this happened, why it happened, or how to prevent it from happening again in the future-- but instead just expect other people to bail them out-- THOSE people are inept, and no good comes from bailing them out over and over again; It sends the wrong message to them-- Namely, that there is no real consequence to them, other people will always deal with it for them, and so they can continue doing what they were doing before without any changes.


People who make honest mistakes, but TRY-- I have lots of sympathy for.  People who don't want to try at all, but expect people to always just bail them out (out of endless sympathy, and if you don't give it, you are a monster!), can go fuck themselves.  I worked support too many years to have any heart there anymore.  If your addiction to a specific porn site that hosts malware always leads to your computer becoming a part of their botnet, and your bank account information being stolen--- The lesson there is to stop using that porn site, because it is designed to compromise your computer, so they can steal your bank account information. NOT that there will always be a generous soul to come repair your compromised computer for you, and then magically wave away all the fraudulent transactions on your bank account.

[King Zultan]

I didn't think when i made that stupid joke it would lead to an angry argument, also I'm not a shitty enough person to try one of those scams.

[Eschar]

@wierd

Right, but a change in behavior requires a change in attitude. As I have mentioned, getting burned once is not necessarily going to provide the information necessary to create that attitude shift. "A scalded cat fears cold water;" but humans are often a bit more desperate. They need to learn in order to adjust their behavior. To learn, they must understand. To understand, they must encounter a phenomenon several times or have prior knowledge to predict/expect it. People generally have an abysmal knowledge of statistics and probability. That is the block, the core problem that lets them keep getting scammed.

We are familiar with websites and malware. These repeat victims are less so. They must learn before they will change. Learning is not always gained after one experience.