I was thinking about it, because wife was telling me story from work, where a woman was scammed with AI generated stuff and her colleague was a little too nonchalant about it ( 'it is on her to do her due diligence' ). And it made me annoyed.
How can you possibly make due diligence when everyone around you is incentivized to lie? We do have a concept of fraud, but advertising seems to be able to move around its edges.
I do get the why. Money talks and whatnot, but we are getting to the point where trust is becoming a hot commodity and that is not good.
And all this before we get to the idea that it actually managed to desensitize people even further.
> You can't and the correct response is a total lack of trust by default because that's the easiest way to protect yourself.
Rather off-topic, but it's funny how this principle applies in the exact same way when it comes to traffic for instance. It is unfortunate it has to be like that, but not trusting any other traffic and assuming they can at any point do the thing you'd least expect them to do is just safer. Especially when e.g. cycling this saved my from injuries or worse more than just a couple of times. And that's even in a country with relatively high numbers of cyclists.
On the other hand you can at least expect that if someone causes an accident they will suffer consequences. Courts and insurance exist as mechanisms to transfer liability including for medical bills, and the criminal system (in many countries) can and does punish people for reckless driving.
Sure, you still need to look after yourself in the moment - but there are incentives in place to discourage drivers from misbehaving and those incentives do help reduce the likelihood that you will be a victim of an accident. They’re not great! Bad drivers get away with a lot, and cyclists are not adequately considered in many mechanisms, but they are better than nothing.
Yet ‘nothing’ is what we have with respect to online fraud, where the situation is more akin to one where driving laws don’t exist or aren’t enforced, nobody drives cars with license plates, you can’t get insurance, and if you are run off the road the police’s reaction is to tell you that roads are inherently dangerous places. Bad drivers will never be caught, and if they drive over you they get to steal your bike and sell it. Entire businesses are set up around forcing cyclists into streets where they can be mowed down with steamrollers, and the police claim to be powerless to stop them.
There are numerous mechanisms that exist that make it possible for us to share roads without inherent trust. And even those are inadequate. Fraudulent behavior online has none of the societal mechanisms that we have created to constrain driving.
There are plenty of countries where driving laws aren't enforced. Using the Internet anywhere is sort of like driving in a corrupt developing country. This creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in people who have spent their whole lives in functional developed countries where obeying the law is the default behavior.
Right. The internet is more like driving in the kind of country where people give you advice like ‘if you come across roadworks and a guy dressed as a cop tries to wave you over, you need to hit reverse and pull a J-turn out of there or you will die’.
There's nothing unfortunate about it, because you don't have perfect information. There's plenty of ways for traffic to behave unexpectedly for reasons that are out of their control (deer running into road, tire blows out, etc).
This is why driving schools teach defensive driving. You can't control anyone else but yourself.
This way of thinking is heavily ingrained into the Swedish traffic laws, where a key point is that there exist no rights in traffic, only obligations. If there is an accident there is generally two parties at fault. One party can be at more fault (which courts/insurance companies cares about a lot), but every driver, cyclist, and even pedestrian are directly responsible to prevent accidents. This also apply to boat captains. People have gotten in legal trouble for strictly following the rules in places where common sense implied that doing so unnecessary caused an accident.
This mind set means that anyone on the roads or on the sea should never assume or trust any other participants, and thus to the best of a person ability communicate intend, verify that everyone is behaving correctly, and apply a defensive posture in order to create margins against unwanted outcomes.
I wouldn’t describe it as the correct response, more like “the best one we can think of right now.”
Living this way is that it’s really exhausting, saps quite a lot of joy out of life and makes people more lonely. It’s far from optimal and a more sustainable option would be to work our way back to the community trust we used to enjoy just ~30 years ago.
You can gain a little bit of it back by living in a low population density area.
I live in a small enough town that if I screw somebody, my name will be hosed until the day of my funeral.
End result is I've left $10s of K of easily pawnable construction materials out for years (sorry any thieves reading, it is gone now) and no one touched it. There are several houses around me that have been abandoned for years, no one has ever touched them, except as a free service to help maintain their road.
If I go into 'town' it's a good bet almost everywhere I go, my wife or I will see someone we know. If you do not hold a door for someone, they will remember. If you cut them off in traffic, they will remember. If we lie to others, it will be known by everyone in short order, and we will never have any halfway decent job here again, unless the money can somehow be made in a trustless service.
Not at all snarky because I have no idea what the real answer is here, but although this sounds pretty good, it strikes me how in conflict this would be with most peoples' ideals if we tried any sort of system to scale this to larger populations (like a city).
Perhaps we want privacy-but-not-anonymity. Or perhaps society doesn't scale easily.
The real answer is to rebuild the high trust society by relentlessly removing the low trust elements, the same way the high trust society was created to begin with.
That isn't a real answer. There is no effective way to remove the low-trust elements who physically operate in jurisdictions with no effective law enforcement. Like what are we going to do, fire cruise missiles at random Internet cafes in Nigeria and Cambodia?
We are heading for a period of a not-fully-connected internet. Already people are cutting off China and Russia from their sites because their bot traffic is either overwhelming or malignant.
Those are not alternatives. VPNs and botnets already exist. We have minimal practical ability to control Internet traffic or transactions between most foreign countries. All it takes is a single compromised device in the USA for the scam traffic to get through.
Come on, be serious. No one is going to cut any transatlantic cables just to prevent scams. VPNs make a huge difference: as long as you can get a route out somewhere then you can use a VPN (possibly to a compromised host) to make your traffic appear to be coming from another source.
Just to be perfectly clear, "every mistake you've ever made being remembered" is already in place. The only difference is that it is used to profile you and sell you more stuff as opposed building a working community, where 'bad members' can be identified and shamed.
Nah. You're taking too literally something that should only be figurative. Internet advertisers don't remember when you cut someone off in traffic by mistake, or don't wave back one morning when you're feeling grumpy, or you have a disagreement with a customer regarding when work was considered finished.
You are living in the past. I do not mean it in pejorative sense. People are wholesale dumping their entire lives into various llms. Various advertising profiles know much more than you cutting off someone in traffic. More than that, they can infer a lot more. And if they don't, they will be replaced by companies that do..
>People are wholesale dumping their entire lives into various llms.
Not to be dismissive, but that's on them. You can control what you tell the bartender. You can't control what people whisper about you behind your back.
>Various advertising profiles know much more than you cutting off someone in traffic.
They "know" different things. Also, oh no! You mean to tell me advertisers are tracking me to optimize which ads get blocked by uBO? Woe is me! What ever shall I do? Try opting out of having a bad reputation in a small village.
It is.. not a bad argument, but again, a little dated.
<< You can control what you tell the bartender.
Except you are not telling this to a bartender. Sometimes you don't even tell it at all. Can you control what your bank parses this way? Can you control what your insurance throws there? Can you control what data brokers have on you ( and plop there )? I may have given you a wrong impression that individual plop means 1 to 1 impact. It does not.
And that is before I get to the part that a bartender was unlikely to spread your personal stuff in any meaningful way.
<< They "know" different things.
Chuckles. See above. If you think there is no 'fusion' going on, I don't think we should continue this conversation further.
<< ads get blocked by uBO
Man.. I use ubo and noscript, but you have to not want to know to live under the impression that there is no concerted effort to, ideally, remove user's ability to run what they choose to run.
<< Try opting out of having a bad reputation in a small village.
You either move or not be a bad actor to have that kind of reputation.
For that you need repeated interactions and reputation networks. It requires densely networked communities where defection is punished with ostracism and tainted reputation. It works in small communities that have known each other for generations and are expected to rely on each other in the future.
The ability to move into new circles every few years incentivizes defection and low trust interactions.
However tight knit, reputation based groups will tend towards risk aversion and conformity and tall poppy syndrome and nepotism. Low trust enables outlier performance.
Business moves at the speed of trust. Outlier performance can only exist in a high trust environment. Low trust society is highly correlated with low economic activity.
Big city US and entrepreneurial mobility requires formalized interactions that rely less on trust. The high trust environments put a limit to outlier performance. They are clannish, rumor and reputation driven etc.
High trust environments are usually high trust inwards and low trust outwards toward outsiders who show up. They may show great hospitality but won't trust you with their affairs. Outlier entrepreneurial risk taking behavior only works in places that have medium-trust for everyone, by using contracts and other formal things.
High trust is incompatible with high mobility and "fresh starts". High trust is built when there's a way to retaliate and there is a way for reputation to spread. High trust among strangers only works if you can assume that the strangers are embedded in high trust networks that are in some way connected, even if you don't directly know each other.
If you can pack up and go anytime, trust will be lower. But for economic efficiency, being mobile is positive.
There are tradeoffs here. People didn't just become low trust randomly.
Usually clanish and highly nepotistic societies are classified as low trust. High trust is related to "I trust my neighbors to do the right thing" not "I trust them because they are of my clan".
There are always ingroups and outgroups. And the ingroup can't expand in an unbounded way if there's high mobility.
Also,marriage patterns are relevant here. Clannish behavior is most prevalent in high-cousin-marriage societies, and you have a more expanded circle of trust when the familial relatedness is more distributed.
High trust is quite unstable either way. You need something to connect you. It's far from automatic. We'll have to rediscover a lot of this stuff that was just thrown out with all the rational Homo oeconomicus theories about people being fungible cogs in a machine and that you can just shred communities and shuffle around the pieces in an atomized way and expect things to go on with trust as before, because this sort of stuff is less measurable.
There is an alternative. Remain open - cautiously, but open.
This may mean you get scammed. (I mean, be more careful with larger amounts...) But when you get scammed, remain open anyway. Yeah, you can lose some money that way. But the alternative is "really exhausting, saps quite a lot of joy out of life and makes people more lonely", so even losing some money could be a net win overall.
Yeah, I'm pretty cynical online but in real life I actively choose to err on the side of trust.
It just makes things easier.
I've had some annoying incidents from it, but surprisingly few terrible consequences.
If you spend your time with people who don't value honesty, then you'd probably need to be less trusting. If you weren't great at spotting subtleties, vibes, norms etc, same. If you or the people around you had a reputation for being distrustful, if you looked unusually threatening / objectionable, if people had a specific distrust of you, then it could cause more trouble. Even in big cities, low-trust / high crime societies, dangerous circumstances or new environments, probably best to dial up the caution.
But in everyday life in a medium-large western European city?
Your bag probably won't get stolen. The dodgy looking guy asking about your phone probably does just want to see the model. The pack of teens probably don't realise they're being so loud, and the acquaintance complaining about their bank glitch probably will pay you back the money if you loan it.
'Probably' isn't much consolation when you're being stabbed to death, but then, we assume that we 'probably' won't get hit by a runaway car or choke on this sandwich or slip on that ice, life is a series of calculated risks and in my opinion, most humans in real life are far nicer than one might think, from the internet.
We will look back on this age as the one of the uncanny valley before smart screens and speakers arrived that auto-detect and warn about AI generated content.
That’s a nice thought - but I think that screen and speaker makers will be incentivized to explicitly NOT do that through their partnerships with the AI and other conglomerate companies that will be building these tools. (If not flat-out be purchased by AI companies under the guise of safety for those that want it while they quietly nerf the technology)
>> You can't and the correct response is a total lack of trust by default because that's the easiest way to protect yourself.
This has slowly eaten away at the idea that we used to live in a high trust society that has now completely transformed into a society where you cannot trust anything, ever, in any capacity.
I felt like I had kind gained back some control from not clicking on any links in emails and using my phone sparingly. But with this new crop of AI tools, you're right, it makes it a lot easier to separate you from your money and the criminals are becoming way more sophisticated and persistent in their attacks.
Communities used to be smaller, even in big cities, so the number of scammers you encountered was fewer.
Now that long distance calls are free, the Internet connects you to everyone else on it, and paperwork is digitalized across entire populations, the reach - and therefore statistical likelihood of encountering- scammers is much higher.
Scammers have more incentive to reach widely than anyone else (well, except advertisers, but that's something of a fine line). So the ratio of scams to non-scams went way up.
That's no way to live. The optimal amount to get scammed is >0, because to 100% avoid it you have to cheapen and weaken your life to an unreasonable extent.
It's like how the only 100% secure system is offline, off, unplugged, wiped, and slagged. Or how the only way to be 100% safe from communicable disease is to be the last living human.
And that's what makes our tolerance for grift and scams so obnoxious. It's one thing when dishonest people lie and cheat and steal, it's another entirely when our institutions and leaders forgive, excuse, enable, and even embrace it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Were they really "cybersecurity experts" though? Cybersecurity has been a gold rush field lately which has attracted a lot of grifters and people who are only in it for the money. I've met cybersecurity "though leaders" who talked a good game but were really zeros. A lot of people confuse confidence and fluency for expertise.
You should be distrustful of every emotion generated by a mass media campaign. They're all artificial, and generated for the benefit of the person running the campaign, not you.
It's still possible to function, it's just that you have to go out and seek information, and usually seek information through channels where the organization is not delivering it to you. Every non-profit files a Form 990 with the IRS, and every public company files a form 10-Q/K with the SEC. There's a wealth of information there for figuring out what the company is doing, but they usually like to obfuscate it in some extremely boring text and financial figures, because they want you to buy into the narrative they deliver to the press and not the facts they deliver to the government. They usually will not outright lie on these, though, because doing so is a crime that can put the CEO, CFO, and Board of Directors in jail.
Same for consumer stuff. Ruthlessly seek out back-channel information about products, whether it's word-of-mouth from friends, online reviews (though these are increasingly easily gamed these days), product tests from independent organizations (though again, many companies provide free products to review in exchange for favorable reviews), etc. I've found that keeping an online subscription to Consumer Reports has been well worth it because they're one of the few review sites where you pay them to review, the company doesn't pay them to get reviewed. Advertisements are worthless; treat them as such. Same goes for random cold calls; it's probably a scam, unless you can corroborate it otherwise.
<< You should be distrustful of every emotion generated by a mass media campaign.
I would like you to think through this statement and then carefully apply it what today's publicly facing technology can do. If TikTok proved anything, it is that masses of people can be influenced to do feel, think and act in accordance with desired goals.
One could argue that if it is already this bad, maybe it should e reined in a tiny wee bit?
<< They're all artificial, and generated for the benefit of the person running the campaign, not you.
Oh no man. The feelings are real. They are generated under false pretenses, but the feelings are real. Honestly, I am not sure if people running those campaigns realize that all those feelings may eventually be turned against them.
And the stuff is getting really really good. Like, sometimes I have really thought this is AI, but then it turns out it is real and many times I'm unsure. It's really a different world now. And a lot of these frauds are things that could happen in the past, but only if you were a really valuable target, meaning that someone would invest a lot of time and resources on tailoring something just for you. But these days it's getting so cheap that anybody is that target now.
> her colleague was a little too nonchalant about it ( 'it is on her to do her due diligence' ).
I’m always fascinated by victim blaming culture, which has been pervasive long before generative AI.
You see it most frequently in cases where the victim is thought to be a safe target: Someone wealthier, an office rival, a corporation. On HN it appears in every thread about someone being scammed, but it was most obvious in the recent threads where JPMorgan was defrauded by a startup they acquired. Seemingly 1/3 of the comments were from people commenting that JPMorgan was actually at fault for allowing themselves to be scammed. Some even declaring that the fraudster shouldn’t be prosecuted because JPMorgan was entirely to blame for allowing themselves to be scammed.
I don’t know what drives it. The victim blaming people always seem to believe they would not fall prey to similar scams. They also seem to see the world as full of faceless scams everywhere and that allowing yourself to fall victim to them is a moral failing. Many of them just like to be contrarian, snide, and judgmental, so heaping scorn on the victim they know checks more of those boxes than going along with the obvious consensus that the party who committed the crime is the one to blame.
This happens with every new generation of scams. The victim blamers read the news and think it would never happen to them because they’re too smart, therefore any victims deserve blame.
The problem is that we're using "blame" to mean two different things:
1. In an ideal, fair world, which parties should have to change to make the outcome not happen? Scammers shouldn't scam, murderers shouldn't murder, etc.
2. With a reasonable understanding of the world, which parties could have predicted the outcome and changed their behavior to mitigate the problem? JPMorgan not doing due diligence on a deal of that magnitude is pretty negligent. I don't carry open bags full of cash walking around the city either, and I don't comment negatively about our new glorious leader and all of his kingly power. Yes, if I had my savings stolen or were murdered on my next boat trip to the Caribbean that'd be somebody else's "fault" via definition (1), but as a practical matter my life is a hell of a lot better on average if I avoid those activities regardless.
The courts sometimes agree with point (2) to an extent as well. If JPMorgan's negligence caused harm to others, the criminals involved would still have full responsibility to JPMorgan, but the harmed parties might have a civil claim against JPMorgan. By way of analogy, what happens if your local bank's safe is found out to be an unmonitored cardboard box? The fact that somebody would eventually break in is predictable, and the bank would be liable to its customers.
It could also be a more charitable "I make significant efforts to fight against this and spent years/months of my life trying to convince others to do the same only to be ignored, so fuck them".
Like that RMS meme where the world is finally getting the pointy end of the proprietary software trap and cries for help and he just whispers "Gno".
> I make significant efforts to fight against this
More powerful people, the ones profiting from economic crimes, are fighting to keep scams legal. And they are the ones that create confusing laws that blame victims for falling for scams in the disguise of "personal responsibility". When lawmakers are the scammers, scams become legal and the victims will not see justice.
> On HN it appears in every thread about someone being scammed, but it was most obvious in the recent threads where JPMorgan was defrauded by a startup they acquired. Seemingly 1/3 of the comments were from people commenting that JPMorgan was actually at fault for allowing themselves to be scammed.
I find that awful. JPMorgan should be held accountable, like many similar firms, for all the money that they themselves have stolen. But one crime does not justify the other. The people that scammed JPMorgan will not use the money to pay off JPMorgan's victims.
What it seems that in the USA nobody believes in justice anymore, as even the Supreme Court is just another partisan agency helping the rich. Americans may justify getting money thru crime because it is so normalized. Blaming victims helps to feel good about it.
The real answer is to have stronger institutions that see everybody equally under the law, and to have better laws that punish all type of criminals including economic crimes.
Blame directed towards the Supreme Court is misplaced. While some decisions have always seemed partisan, the real fault lies with Congress. The higher courts only come into play when the law is ambiguous or contradictory because Congress did a bad job. At that point any legal decision becomes something of a toss up, and even if the Supreme Court issues the "right" decision today they might reverse themselves tomorrow. Unless voters hold Congress accountable then nothing will improve.
For example, maybe a future President will nominate Supreme Court justices who will overturn the notorious Citizens United v. FEC decision. But ultimately the only stable solution will be to follow the defined process and amend the Constitution rather than trying to patch around it. Yes, that will be difficult but nothing else can really work.
Sadly, a large number of people seem to think "caveat emptor" is some kind of optimal default way to live and organize a society. Like, anyone should be able to do or say anything, and if the counterparty doesn't do their due diligence, they're gullible and deserve to lose.
> You see it most frequently in cases where the victim is thought to be a safe target: Someone wealthier, an office rival, a corporation.
That must be a representation of your own social circle because I can assure you that poor people are commonly blamed for all the bad things that happen to them.
I don't know about that. Regarding that particular example, anyone willing to interview with a "blockchain" company is very likely a scammer (or at least scammer adjacent) themselves. I mean there might be some legitimate use for blockchain technology but so far it's 99.9% scams and anyone unaware of that simply hasn't been paying attention for the past decade.
I think you're making my point -- is the fact that the putative job offer is for a blockchain company truly relevant to that story? What would stop them from making it an "AI company" or whatever else is the hot topic du jour?
I concede that the relevance is perhaps that if you're going to try and steal cryptowallets, you would want to select for people more likely to be crypto-adjacent, but still. It was a novel attack vector that I'm glad I didn't have to learn about the hard way
How is that relevant? If I get a fake offer from a fake company claiming to solve world hunger, does that mean I don't need to be careful about this previously unknown attack vector?
Do you think scammers can only leverage dodgy industries?
You picked a bad example. JPMorgan Chase has itself violated the law many times: for example, they willfully violated the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in thousands of cases. So fuck those guys for being scammers themselves. There are no clean hands here and in that instance I absolutely blame the "victim". Like if an armed robber steals cash from a drug smuggler, the smuggler shouldn't expect sympathy from anyone.
My comment is specific to JPMorgan Chase. While I know that I would not fall prey to similar scams, I am not endorsing victim blaming in general.
There are multiple services that verify and rate NGOs and nonprofits. The key is to look them up on the service website and not just Google the name. Personally I use Guidestar, but that's for U.S. orgs.
I was recently thinking about this. One of the only benefits of this AI slop is that maybe it will teach the generations growing up with it not to trust anything they see on the internet without verifying it. If you're older and not technologically savvy, I understand why it's so easy to get scammed. Hopefully younger generations will learn the lesson that you need to assume everyone is lying on the internet, that pictures, and more importantly, video are no longer reliable without verifying the source.
This is too simplistic. There are varying levels of trust for myriad interactions.
You can trust someone to drive properly and not hit you.
You can trust someone to not rob you as you walk by them.
You can simultaneously not trust them enough to give them money if they ask for it without sufficient proof. Or not trust them enough to invite them into your home.
I think there's a problem with the way the word "trust" is used altogether. I trust certain people to drive badly, I trust them to forget appointments, and I trust them not to offer to pay the bill.
"Trust" being something defined as both exclusively positive and a virtue in the person that gives it is just meant to soften up marks, and is probably instilled into us by marketing and advertising. It's certainly not taught by any religion, who concentrate on being worthy of trust, not trusting.
You trust people because you know them well, and you know what they will do when confronted by certain situations because you have seen them react to similar situations before. Before you know them well, you're just operating from stereotypes and comparisons with other people you've known who have similar mannerisms. Or you're projecting your own thought processes into their heads. A "level" of trust is just a confidence level in a prediction.
If you don't have a friend who has had to sacrifice something for you, you don't know if you have any friends at all. That's the real reason it's hard to make friends as an adult. But after you've been through stuff with people, you'd be a fool not to know they'll come through in this new, far-less grave circumstance.
I honestly think the problem is that we're trying to make people fungible in a weird secular market religion, and they're not. Trust is not a credit score.
Good approach, and was valuable and necessary prior to AI.
I learned this lesson in my early 20s. Nearly every entity that you interact with is trying to transact with you, in a way that benefits themselves. Whether that's a legitimate transaction (money exchanged for a product/service exactly as advertised), a misrepresented transaction (the product/service is not as advertised), taking your money for nothing, or simply taking away your time and attention (advertising).
Even before AI, if you were unable to get a good sense of legitimate transactions, you'd lose all your money on misrepresented transactions to scammy used car salesmen, door-to-door salesmen, and whole life insurance salesmen. These parasites and their ilk prey on people who are trusting by nature, and people who will say "yes" to avoid disappointing a stranger. It's unfortunate that the world has come to this, but you need to be untrusting of others' motivations by nature to not be taken advantage of financially.
I honestly hate that idea. I am slowly adjusting, but I got used to the idea that you can at least trust the other party not to outright lie ( although I was already expected omission, and other 'normal selling tactics' ).
I posit that what we need is heavily enforced truth in advertising laws.
It depends on the level of risk. I generally accept what people say as truth, but if you start asking me for money I require evidence. And the more money you ask for, the more evidence is needed.
This is not easy. I help pay the school fees for a few students in East Africa. But, I have been to these students homes. I know their situation first hand. Now I am in a different country, and I can no longer verify if they still need help. All I can do is trust that their situation hasn't changed. And even if they are lying and they can actually afford the school fees, I know they are poor enough that helping them will still make a difference.
But anyone helping me to do this needs to take my word for it. Unless they travel here and get their own first hand impression.
I heard from one organization that was helping an orphanage, and then they found out that half the kids weren't even orphans. It was effectively a boarding school for some of the children. The people were at the location and saw the children in person, but they were fooled about the status of the children, or they didn't pay attention. Maybe it was a translation error, or some misunderstanding.
It doesn't actually matter. The important part is that these children needed help either way. So the money was not misused, just the true reality of these children was misrepresented.
The problem of course on the side of the givers is that you can't tell the difference between a genuine mistake and an intentional deception. You have to assess the risk, and, you have to decide for yourself how much you'll be hurt if it turn out to be a deception.
I don't give money to people I meet on the street, because I know enough people who also need help that I can't help everyone, so I limit my help to people I know well enough to trust them.
We only do have such a concept when it's about an individual lying to a company for profit.
When companies lie to individuals it's just business as usual, or worst-case scenario a "mistake" that the company pinky-promises will not happen again.
Because people don’t respect that which they feel they have no connections to or shared community with. The Kumbaya of multiculturalism only goes so far. Assimilation is a requirement, not just a nice thing.
Empathy is a hackable interface- those that are exposing it, are in this attention economy civil war zone- lesser beings by default.
They once where protected by the state- but the state, as policeman- has been continuously reduced in its protector role, by those, who found hackable political interfaces, the ticks on the state wave through the fleas on the people. The pent-up backlash to all this results in a militant vote for anti-parasitic and exposure limiting institutions.
Fascism promises to remove those attackers, by fire-walling away the exterior and prosecuting perceived attackers on the inside of the nation.
Every successful scam, every allowed exploit, is a advertising for the totalitarians who promise to restore order.
How can you possibly make due diligence when everyone around you is incentivized to lie? We do have a concept of fraud, but advertising seems to be able to move around its edges.
I do get the why. Money talks and whatnot, but we are getting to the point where trust is becoming a hot commodity and that is not good.
And all this before we get to the idea that it actually managed to desensitize people even further.