Spiegel International has a fascinating article about a sprawling international network of con artists on the internet.

Golly gosh gee, whoever would have thought that some things you read on a computer screen might not be true?

So you're suggesting that because everyone knows there are crooks on the internet, there shouldn't be any stories about it? If people go on falling for these scummy tricks, society has to go on warning them. Otherwise we are just making it easier for the rogues.

What I find most interesting about this article is that it's not just a lot of small scale criminals doing this, as I had assumed, but a very large international company based in Dubai. Surely it should be possible for Interpol or somebody to take them down.

Hi,

It's sad that people have to take advantage of others. It's said that it is only good people who prevent bad people from doing vile things when aware. Gullibility is a trait for persons who can be tricked into anything.
Stupid is as stupid does!

My experiences with that type of person when they asked my about something of the sort and I would tell them it is bad or false then continue on to convince themselves to do that action.

I was at Walmart one day long ago, it was in my home town in Illinois. An older man came to the service desk and said he needed a cashier check for $5000. Fortunately the clerk knew his family and tried to convince it was fraud. He kept saying he had to get the money to his Grandson that he had spoken too. The clerk tried to call the man's daughter who was a friend but could not connect so she called the local police who had a service office at that Walmart. The policeman also knew the family and fortunately was able to convince the man that it was a fraud. Authority and familiarity helps to solve a lot of issues.

I do miss that small town community support and care. You say 'Hi' to everyone and they usually return the greeting. That Walmart serviced several communities that are close. Here in Florida if I say 'Hi' to someone most just look at me as if I'm a weirdo. My wife asked one time why I said 'Hi' to people I didn't know, I told her that I was raised that way and you never know if that other person would become a friend.

Unfortunately this kind of thing can function in reverse too. I live frugally so I can make small monthly savings on my pension that build up over the year. For many years now, I have put those accumulated savings into a tax-free savings bond. We call that an ISA over here; I'm sure there's an American equivalent. Until this year, I was able (without any problems) to write out and post cheques for £10,000 to what is a very respectable financial company.

Now suddenly, my bank will not let me do this. They stop the cheques and refuse to honour them because I am nearly eighty and they fear it could be a scam. The fact that I have been doing this for years and have never reported a payment going astray means nothing to them. The first time it happened, I thought it was a one-off and went in to explain the situation to some very friendly and helpful clerks; then I wrote a replacement cheque and posted it. And that one bounced too! I had naively assumed that my in-person explanation would cover the second cheque but a clerk explained to me that their rules require them to "reset to zero" each time.

So I asked them how I could transfer the money (given that I do not on principle do this kind of thing online) and they said I must come into the bank and have them carry out a money order on my behalf, approving it with my bank card and PIN. And that finally was what we did. The funny thing is that I felt a lot less safe doing this than I felt writing a cheque, because a cheque can always be stopped if it goes astray whereas once a money order has gone through, that's it! You can never get the money back again. But it wasn't about whether I felt safe or not. It was about following the rules and covering their asses.

Hazel,

I can understand that situation. I wanted to make a transfer between accounts and my credit union limited my transfer to $2000. I found out it is a security protection to stay the maximum withdrawal transfer was limited so no one could drain my account. Any larger amounts had to be made in-person. I like the availability of online banking because I do make online purchases and the credit card on my credit union is very useful.

Sometimes convenience can become a hassle!

Criminals are abundant on the Internet. I regularly get sketchy text messages asking me to click on links and enter my banking information. I keep a landline active in my house in the unlikely event that cell service is down. I get calls on my landline saying "press one" to deal with a problem with my credit card. It is a tragedy that some people fall for these types of criminal activities.

Dirty tricks like violating the GDPR by forcing people to either pay or consent to spyware to read an article?

My signature is partly joking, but only partly.

Tech things like "GPU tesselation" that was touted as so cool some like one decade ago or so have been theorized in the like 40s or something equally really early...they just didn't have the hardware.

I don't consider it impossible that the sanitation of online stuff on the backs of some 'minority groups' was planned by some people.
Not only can't you say letter words (which is fun), but your grandma also coughed up her life savings cause she thought it was you writing that email, or facebook post, or synthesized voice call.

Keep a passphrase at the very least. "If you ever receive communications from me, ask me about the password."
The idea of swearing up and down the code of conduct banlist to say AI proof is a lot more amusing though, to me, anyway.

And it might actually work for art. People are putting big tech advancement into AI poisoning. When in reality, plastering it with "spicy watermarks and symbols" would do the trick, too.
But that'll get you banned, even though it would work. So, yeah. My conspiracy theory holds.

And you'd get banned even without that actual reason, the fear of being ostracized for enabling that kind of conduct sits on top of it. Which would make it genius.

Anyway, it's funny to me that a potentially legitimate flavor of 'cyberpunk' would be using terminology 'real punks' would call you a fascist for, but if you don't use it, your works get pulled into the plagiarism abyss.

That is VERY funny to me. Either swear, or get absorbed into meta. You know, do not pass go, do not collect the bux.
It goes straight into their data corpus with little processing on their part.

So, most likely people will have to pay AI poisoning services, which will be fine at first until they enshittify it and make it predatory.
When you could have "and as usual, hail the führer"'d all over your regular correspondence, so to speak, which is a something no tech support scammer wants in his or her automated scambot.
Nooses, drugs, KKK hoods, swastikas, runes, etc. None of that they want in their databases, but they're all natural symbols, it's not AI poison noise...and since there is legitimate worship of those things, well.
If an AI is instructed to trawl through images but weed out the nazi glorification, then yeah, I can see it working, especially if the depictions are in any way positive.

Which is a type of noise in itself, no? You know, when you use encryption for your emails, it's good practice to sometimes just send encrypted nonsense to muddle things up.

But this is such a non allowed approach that ...yeah, I find this amusing. You could just be a rude c-word for AI poisoning purposes, but you really couldn't, so, your art and prose and comms are just slurped up unless you pay up or maybe get some open source poison leftovers the big tech folk throw down to you.
Like some sort of anti AI mcaffee antivirus lol

Amusing.

And speaking of nefarious individuals Kamala Harris sent me a friend request yesterday on FB. I'm sure this is the real Kamala Harris, former Vice President, and that she wants to be friends with a retired teacher. Hahahahahahaha.
I always assume these weird FB friend requests are criminals that have dark intentions. Does anyone fall for this rubbish?

In Dubai? The sheikh almost certainly protects anyone who can get away with this in Dubai, and we protect the sheikh because he's wealthy.

We don't let the victims of scams end up living on the streets: they become public charges. Putting the blame on them and not doing anything about it redounds against the general welfare.

This happened to me once. I decided that it was a fair precaution that I would have to work around, that it may save more by protecting others from scams than it costs the competent. Parents and friends devolved into mental incompetence; fortunately they've been spared major scams. I'd rather the inconvenience. You can imagine becoming incompetent eventually, can't you?

I've read a few articles about people who give all their money away to callers, before the Internet.

Yes. We're better off, as a society, with some protections.

First one would have to know if what they are doing is even ILLEGAL in Dubai, and if the local government supports addressing them directly. If they are active enough, and it would seem they are, then Interpol SHOULD be interested! (On the other hand, Interpol has a HUGE list of targets. There is a waiting list to get their attention!)

Very sad, but, true. There are always people who trust strangers without question.

Agreed. I set an alert on my credit cards to warn me when there's a transaction in excess of $100.00. Unfortunately scams are getting very sophisticated.

I got a message from a provider alerting me to bogus transactions. They had automatically deleted my account and mailed me a new card. The transactions were for 11¢ and 17¢ from a .il address, apparently notorious for huge amounts of tiny transactions they hoped would go unnoticed.

I get by assuming that everyone on the internet is honest, but 50% live in a different reality and 50% are totally insane, and the final 50% are sane and live in this reality but are terminally stupid. (I often suspect I am in that last group!)

I believe nothing from the internet unless it conforms with my reality and facts I can confirm, and even then I doubt.

PS. I have come to treat Radio, Television, and the local Newspaper the same way. Some of those people are NOT living in the same reality!!!

And that was precisely what I thought when the first cheque bounced. It was the bouncing of the second cheque that offended me. You would have thought, wouldn't you, that once I had reassured them in person that this was a genuine transaction and one that I made every year (which was something they could have checked up on themselves immediately from their records), they would have let the second cheque through. After all, you can't forge a face (not IRL, though I understand this can now be done easily enough in a video).

I also don't understand why I was better protected from scams by having to sit in the bank while they carried out an irreversible electronic transaction on my behalf.