Just found this in my inbox:
Your score has been released for
Online transfer service in Helsinki Area #JCU8.
If thе email goеs intо уоur spаm fоldеr аnd you can’t сliск thе button, clicк NOТ SPAM, аnd thеn cliсk thе button bеlow
0 / 1851
'Course, I moved it into my spam folder before even opening and didn’t click anything after.
Only $795 to spend in order to get MILLIONS of U.S. Dollars? What a steal!*
While we laugh or shake our heads at people who fall for this kind of nonsense (that e-mail would’ve lost me at “Attention”), there should be a counterbalancing sense of unease at the thought that virtually all of us are susceptible to scams if they’re sophisticated enough and/or catch us at a bad time.
*Haven’t we run into “Mr. Peter Collins” before? As I recall, he’s a very reliable fellow.
I heard an NPR story a while back about how senior citizens, even those who are otherwise sharp as a tack, are more likely to fall for these scams as they get older. Something in our wiring makes us more susceptible to this stuff as we age.
Also, internalizing an “only idiots fall for scams” mindset is probably not best practice for protecting yourself since it precludes active scepticism.
There’s a Mark Rober video that details how some of these work. This one is particularly sneaky and would be, I think, difficult for many people to realize something’s wrong.
I think part of it is that they didn’t grow up with anything like this. Autodialers that can call hundreds or thousands of numbers at once, email servers that can send millions of emails.
This used to be a big problem for my mom, with the phone scams. She never fell for one, but she could never quite grasp that they weren’t phoning her personally. She’d always ask, “How did they get my number?” and never really understood when my sister and I tried to explain that they were dialing almost completely at random, and she was just the first to pick up the phone.
So they see these things as “personal” appeals, and don’t get that they’re going out to millions of people every day.
A relative of mine went to her grave, not just believing, but actively blaming Time Warner Cable for breaking her laptop after a scammer got her to install ransomware. She couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that if you call just about any random US based number, there’s a decent chance the person answering has Time Warner (now Spectrum) as their cable and internet provider.
On another message board I frequent, a guy has been telling us the story of how his father was scammed out of $30,000 (almost everything he had in the bank) a couple weeks ago. It started with a phone call that there was fraud at the father’s bank. The father gave the scammers control of his computer and they manipulated banking site screenshots to show there was a problem. The father took out $10,000 from three different branches of his bank. At the second branch the manager tried to convince him that he was being scammed. The manager showed him a paper laying out the scam, right down to the exact words he was using to justify why he was withdrawing the money. But the scammers had convinced him that all the bank employees were in on the fraud.
At this point, the father had been on the phone with the scammers for 20 hours. He then took the $30,000 dollars to a Bitcoin ATM (for safekeeping) and fed it $100 bills. While employees at the store where it was located watched. The guy flew across the country to try to deal with the fallout but, of course, the money is gone and police and FBI can’t do anything about it. It’s fascinating and horrifying to see the lengths the scammers will go to.
There was an article last year about a woman, an educated person and not old, who withdrew something like $50,000 in cash from the bank and handed it in an envelope to a guy in a passing car, all because she’d been convinced that the FBI was helping her but the local cops could not be trusted and nothing could be documented.
The best approach when dealing with this sort of thing, when you think about it, is to do nothing. Nothing at all. Don’t answer, don’t respond. If the cops or the bank REALLY need to talk to you, they’ll get in touch for real. Nothing like this is life or death.
But the opportunity to make all that money will only pan out if you follow your co-conspirator’s (read “conmen attackers”) guidance to the letter.
Said more clearly …
Once the mark has become convinced there really is a pot of gold for them at the end of the rainbow, they will do anything, including give away significant real money, to keep themselves on the path leading to that pot of gold.
Which suggests the antidote: Don’t become convinced the pot of gold is real and you won’t be inclined to chase it into tragedy.
“Are the Ny Mets your favourite squadron?”
This is quite true. I never fall for the obvious ones, but I think I went through the first step with one that was less obvious (to me, at least) a few years ago. I got a message via LinkedIn from someone allegedly working at some company, inviting me to apply for a job that was quite tempting (part-time remote editing, which is the only thing I would even consider doing for money these days).
The was not unreasonable, as I am regularly notified of such jobs by the LinkedIn algorithm, and on rare occasion I am personally contacted by legitimate companies. But things got weird fast when I clicked on the link included in the PM, which oddly enough took me to an in-house sort of “Microsoft” page that I did kind of recognize, having done some preliminary exploration with Microsoft’s Corporate Social Responsibility arm a decade ago. It asked for a password, I gave it, and then - I don’t recall the details, but it got weird pretty fast, so I exited quickly.
I wrote to LinkedIn to report a potential scam. They never wrote back (I could do a Pit thread about their poor communication vis-a-vis scams and phishing; short version is someone pretended to be my mother just after she died, setting up a Linked In page that seemed to be her but wasn’t; LinkedIn did respond to my first report with questions but then never contacted me again even though I contacted them to ask for updates - the fake CairoCarol’sMom page finally disappeared a year or so later, having done who knows what damage by that time).
After a week or so, the profile of the person who supposedly wrote to me to ask me to apply for a job did vanish. So yeah, it wasn’t on the up-and-up, and I almost fell for it.
That’s the genius of Spanish Prisoner scams. Get past the logic and to EMOTION.
Don’t the forget the GREED of the victim for things like the 419 scams.
Where do people get the amounts of money I hear they get scammed out of? I can understand people having 10s of thousands in the back, but I hear enough of people spending 100s of thousands to millions.
Ref Google, 1 in 15 Americans has a net worth over $1M. That’s 22 million people. There are bound to be a few stupid or senile ones in a crowd that big.
If you think greed or at least a money-oriented mindset is an important part of how someone gets that much money then it’s not too surprising that folks with a money-first mentality will disproportionately fall for hooks baited with greed-flavored bait.
There’s also the fact that a big scam victim is more newsworthy than a small one. Good bet the harpooned whales are overrepresented in the news vs their actual numbers vis a vis the netted minnows, mackerel, and tunas.
If you can talk someone into just handing you 10 or 20 thousand, you can probably talk them into taking out a home equity loan. If I wanted to, I could get at least 200k in cash based on that alone, and I’m not all that well off.
Quite a lot of scams are based around fake charges for renewals/subscriptions/bank errors and have nothing to do with promising wealth. They play on the very real anxiety about automated systems charging you money for things you don’t want and can’t afford.
Helping a Nigerian prince is funny and fantastical, but a lot more people are getting swindled out of hundreds or thousands of dollars because they’re on a fixed income and are successfully convinced into panicking about a supposed institutional error.
I don’t doubt you’re correct. There are always more minnows than whales.
But the OP was about a scam promising riches. The comment I was responding to was about people falling for scams promising riches sufficient that spending $100K+ would seem profitable to the mark. So that’s what I was talking about.
Quoted for truth. Also, ‘obvious’ is very subjective. Everyone has different vulnerabilities and scammers try everything, in huge variety.
It is better to wonder how you might fail, than it is to congratulate yourself on how, in one situation, you didn’t.
It’s possibly worth mentioning that I have encountered people who seemed to believe that advance fee scams were some sort of counterfeit version of a thing that in other instances, is real - they argued that nobody would ever fall for the fake random offer of millions of dollars from a dying widow, unless there were also genuine cases of dying widows desperate to give away real fortunes to random Internet strangers.
One person in particular wanted my help in determining which, out of the multitude of these offers, was the genuine one, and would not be persuaded that they are all scams, because they had apparently accepted it as axiomatic that scams are fake versions of real things.