I participate in r/Scams on Reddit and it’s a daily deluge of people falling for scams, in every which way.
Lots of people are falling for tasks scams lately. They want a remote job that pays well. A scam company connects with them and says they saw a resume on Linkedin and they are ready to hire them for a fully remote position that pays $1000/week for a few hours of work. The victim will then be instructed to buy some computer equipment from a fake vendor. And/or they’ll be given some tasks to do (such as leaving reviews or solving captchas) and be shown an account where their earnings go up and up and up. Then when they want to cash out their earnings they have to put in some money to “unlock” it. People come on Reddit to report the thousands of dollars they’ve “lost” - if it’s a GOOD case, they haven’t put any money in to get their “thousands of dollars” out. It’s a terrible case if an already out-of-work person has been wasting their time “working” for weeks and paid in some money to get some of their “earnings” out.
Jobs are scams. Almost all shopping links on social media are scams. People are desperate, people are not doing well economically, people are sucked in by the bit of joy that material things bring them. They are really, really easy prey.
The above scenarios are just two small ways people are getting scammed every day. I am honestly surprised the scam industry is only $50bb a year. But that’s just in the USA and this shit is global so I’m sure it’s much much higher.
I don’t even know how to counsel people about scams anymore because almost everything can be a scam.
It requires making international cooperation and enforcement a priority. The majority of these operations are based in India and Pakistan with other in the Philippines, Eastern Europe, etc. The bar to motivation for police in Romania to storm a scam call center and prosecute the people there is pretty high. It’s not something they’re just going to do without pressure. A lot of these societies are still operating on a nested tribal model where morality towards a seventh-degree outgroup like Americans is nonexistent. To the average person in India the idea that there is something “wrong” with defrauding your grandmother in Kansas is an absurd concept. It’s just a job like any other. If you are not willing to threaten serious economic or even military consequences to foreign governments to get them to act about operations within their borders, then this will continue forever.
The estimates are estimates. It’s really just a number to throw around.
This is a possible opening. If scam skepticism starts impacting the bottom line of corporations, this problem will attract greater elite interest. Maybe. “Don’t use Facebook marketplace for anything,” would be noticed for example.
Or maybe anti-scam social media websites like this one should receive greater attention and support:
I’m dubious about this recommendation of mine, but we’re at the try everything stage now. 20, 30, 40, or 50 years ago, the US Congress would have already set up a task force. That’s not where we are today.
It does require this prong, though it won’t be sufficient to solve the problem. I don’t see it happening any time soon unless organized by the UK/EU/Canada/Australia/NZ.
Over the long run, is this problem hopeless? No. The US drastically reduced organized crime during the 1970s and early 1980s after Hoover died. But it would require a great deal of effort. Personally I’m creeped out by the pig butcherers infesting twitter-X and even Bluesky now. I’m at a loss about what to do about it. Maybe this guy has some ideas: https://conspirator0.substack.com/
I make sure for my mom that she knows I will never shame her for asking me if something is a scam, or be frustrated with her for asking, or be mad at her for falling for something.
She just fell for something last month where she went to sign up to pay her bill for our new city trash vendor, and she managed to instead sign up for a service that charges her $5.99/payment to pay her bill (and also paid it monthly, instead of quarterly). I don’t know how exactly she got roped into it, as she says she just followed the directions on the bill. I suspect maybe she googled it and ended up there.
I did the work to cancel it and reassured her that it’s only $12 gone and a pre-payment credit for next quarter. I told her it is probably going to happen to a lot of people, and everything is a scam.
I feel so bad because she was just trying to be independent and take charge of something in her life and it wasn’t even really a SCAM but also it was shady and scammy.
I feel bad for other folks in our “sandwich generation” who are having to fend off scammers coming for both their older relatives and their kids. It’s hard enough to keep them all healthy and clothed and fed. Now we gotta fix their money scams too. Exhausting.
Yeah, I see a truly phenomenal number of people who argue things to the effect ‘anyone dumb enough to fall for [some scam] deserves to be scammed’. This is an incredibly toxic, unproductive attitude, even if ‘stupidity’ (whatever that actually means) was the root cause.
People get scammed for a wide variety of reasons - but essentially, because humans of all varieties have all varieties of weaknesses, blind-spots and vulnerabilities, and scammers are trying every variety of scam, very aggressively and en masse.
People who get scammed deserve support - not scorn or blame or derision. There are probably exceptional cases where greed and criminal intent is exploited by scammers and I suppose it could be argued that scam victims acting with those motives got what they deserved, but even in these cases, I think we’re probably just talking about a deeper root cause that it would be better if we tried to fix it.
I actually got a legitimate one last year through a company called Outlier. I thought it was a scam but researched it and it was real. It was through LinkedIn, and offered $40/hr to help train AI. I worked on it on and off for a few months (like about three) and cleared just north of $11K working no more than 20 hours in a week. (I timed it for a number of incentive bonuses, so that 11K includes about 1-2K in bonus money).I’m still with the program, but haven’t had the urge to go back (and they lowered the pay to $35/hr). They targeted me based on my English degree and the school I went to, apparently. So in rare instances, they can be real.
Frankly I don’t know how the victim can’t be blamed here. At some point we have to allow adults to have personal agency. We can’t lock up people for their own good.
How many times? When they keep falling for it, over and over and over, good money after bad, all down the rabbit hole…they they get scammed by someone that promises to get their money back…for a small fee. And why not - they’ve already got a track record as an easy mark.
Scammers send their scams out far and wide to locate people who, for whatever reason, are in a mindset that allows them to be scammed. Like the toll scams, they’re hoping to luck into someone not familiar with the system, or who has had issues with their account and thinks it’s the company reaching out to get it fixed. I use EZPass multiple times a week, they have my phone number and text me whenever I autofill my account, if I get an EZPass text that says something is wrong and to access my account, I have to actively avoid clicking the link because it’s a scam. That’s a burden on me. I’m required to actively watch for scams from people pretending to be companies I work with. A pox on scammers houses.
And when that person says “I am TOO capable of taking care of myself. You just want to steal my money you ungrateful kid!” Then what? They go to court. And grandma proves she is of sound mind, and she goes back to giving her money to Johnny Depp without any input from her kids.
Because mental competence isn’t an all or nothing, black or white situation. We either allow adults to make their own choices, or we bring back involuntary commitment for the rest of their lives. And who makes those decisions?
You going to wrap them in bubble wrap for the rest of their lives?
But no. I think in a lot of cases - probably the majority of cases, if someone keeps on needing help to avoid scams, it’s because the help is not good enough.
Even when we fail, it’s still our duty to keep them safe.
Yes, competence is not all or nothing, and the solutions aren’t all or nothing either. When someone can’t feed themselves, it doesn’t matter if it’s because they can’t physically put the spoon in their mouth or because they have given all their grocery money away. We need to keep them safe.
Ideally, we let our loved ones make these decisions, but the courts are there as well.
I had a toll scam text come a day before I got a letter from the IL toll folks saying that I DID owe money. I paid that online by navigating to the website myself and seeing that it was legitimate but, had the two events been reversed or happened on the same day, I might have been lured into “paying online” via the text. I don’t remember how legit the link looked though. While I assume the timing was a coincidence, it was a pretty good one for them.
But I’m not for declaring what appears to be a large percentage of adults legally incompetent and taking away their rights. Because that way lies madness.
Not everyone taken in by these scams are old feeble grandmothers. Do we declare 20-somethings legally incompetent because they invested in crypto scams? Lock them up and make them take classes on critical thinking? It would be better for them, but not for society.
I don’t think I said anything about taking away people’s rights. Sure, there are, I suppose, some people who refuse help and keep failing, and I think I would be OK to respect their expressed desire to continue failing, if that is their informed decision.
But I don’t think that’s the majority case; there are people who need and desire help, and people who turn out to need help repeatedly, probably because the quality of help is poor.
At least part of the idea is locking up the scammers, putting actual effort into finding them and punishing them for ongoing fraud. Part of the idea is to make it legitimately harder for scammers to find victims in an anonymous way.
We don’t have to jump right into locking up well meaning law abiding people because scammers prey upon them.
If outrage over Indian scammers preying on Indians gets loud enough, maybe it’ll have an effect on the police indifference and corruption that permit it to exist on a large scale.