My wife was taken by a very elaborate and well-crafted scam in November. In retrospect, it all sounds ridiculous... but in the moment, with kids in tow, it was very convincing. It was so traumatizing that when it was over and she finally realized it was a scam, she was relieved! They had convinced her she was going to jail and that was terrifying. Losing the money was less bad than going to jail.
It was also EXTREMELY well scripted with a TON of psychology and clever moments that were well rehearsed. They also had a background track playing with 'police station like' audio and had spoofed the Orange County Sheriff's phone number.
One psychological trick that they employed was a very 'stepped' approach to the scam.
If you say it all out loud, it is obvious, but if you go step by step, each one was somewhat plausible. Lastly, by posing as law enforcement, they tugged on a natural tendency to follow orders and avoid being in trouble. My stomach drops when I think I am getting pulled over... being told you have an outstanding warrant was quite a gut punch for her.
Things to remember:
* ALWAYS hang up and call people on a phone number you enter yourself.
* If someone tells you to check the number by looking it up, they are very likely spoofing it. Hang up and call the police.
* The police don't call you if they are trying to serve a warrant, they show up.
* A judge's 'gag order' does not mean you can't talk to a family member or legal counsel.
* NEVER pull money out of an account for someone you don't know without talking to a friend or spouse.
* ANY change in the situation is a red flag
- bring the money to the courthouse.
- its getting late, we use an after hours processor
- you are running out of time, just wire it
This scam is pretty active right now. My brother in law was called 2 days prior and they called my wife again 2 days later…
Rough scam script:
- <background audio of police station>
- hello, is this XYZ?
- this is Officer Z, do you agree to abide by Judge ABC’s orders?
- we have been trying to reach you by mail about this case. It has to do with a minor.
- the judge has issued a gag order, do not talk with anyone about this
- look up the number from the phone, see I am really calling from the courthouse
== keep you on the phone, my wife actually didn’t pick up when I called in the midst of the scam and followed with a text ==
- someone committed a crime using your name, we don’t think it was you but because you didn’t respond to mail, there is a warrant for your arrest
- you need to post bail
- go withdraw money from the bank and bring it to the courthouse
- where are you? The courthouse is closing
- it’s getting late, use a 3rd party processor setup during Covid
- go to grocery store, use a CoinStar machine
- send money to phone number (using XLM currency)
I don't trust anyone to be a police officer unless there's another police officer present certifying that they are in fact a police officer, and another police officer present certifying that that person is a police officer, and so on, up to a piece of paper listing hundreds of "root" police officers around the world that was prepared in an unspecified way by an unknown programmer involved in making whichever browser I happen to be using, and which I have not even glanced at.
I have absolutely gotten legitimate phone calls from a sheriff/marshal in the stats of texas to let me know I had two warrants out for my arrest (failure to pay wrong left turn ticket, failure to show up at court for said ticket).
I called him back at the published phone number for his division. He let me know he wasn't going to be bothered driving 45 minutes across the metro area to find me and arrest me, and if I just stopped by court and got it taken care of in next three months that would be great.
I really wish there was a certificate authority run by the government. In the past we didn't have the capacity to do a lot of these things but now we can make many improvements, even if incomplete.
Can we not have something like a CA but for, at minimum, officials? Or something like keybase for identity proofs? This seems quite invaluable. Couldn't this even be done within the phone, mail, and email systems? I don't think this should be for everyone, because we should have some anonymity existing, but at least for government officials? What's preventing us from having public/private keys that are verifiable by general citizens? Even if it was as bad as PGP used to be (before tools to make it easier developed) there would be at least some form of verification. But right now it's far too easy to spoof and honestly I don't even know how one would perform verification other than hanging up and calling back. But that doesn't solve your example.
I think the common thread with all such scams is creating a sense of urgency and high stakes. I'd generalize what you said though: if something involves a legal process or supposed pre-existing correspondence, anything crucial will happen in writing or in person and they'll be able to specifically provide you with the dates and details of anything they claim to have on you.
Personally I haven't had fake police calls yet (well, except for one Eastern European lady in a call center using a fake mobile number while pretending in broken English to be from INTERPOL, whom I immediately hung up on) but I have had calls about contracts I supposedly agreed to over the phone and was going to have to pay for either way but could now immediately agree to a compromise so I wouldn't have to pay the full amount owed but order (this time for real) something else or some contrivance like that. Of course calling back was not an option because this was already about to hit collections and they had recorded my previous (non-existant) call but couldn't play it back to me right now. It was all a bit ridiculous but I still felt a bit unnerved until I called my lawyer and learned that even if everything they said were true the contract as described would be invalid and any claims would have to be sent in writing before anything actionable even happened on my end.
From one of my family members: if the bank transaction doesn't go through, and you call the bank and they tell you it's probably a scam, don't overrule them.
Also if you're in the EU make sure to check the actual SEPA/IBAN code. The first two letters are the country code and if this is supposed to be an organization/institution in your country then those should match most transactions you've done before. Don't be fooled just because the country code letter combination happens to also be the initialism of something else or a state/city/etc involved.
I've had an accountant fall for a company registration scam and while the letterhead was plausible, the bank account was in an entirely different country, which should have given pause.
A trick I started using was asking the scammer for a challenge code to prove they where who they said they were (from my bank). The scammer was dumbfounded and hung up.
I agree it is always better to just hang up and call the bank yourself but it was pretty humorous.
I don’t get many calls, but a LOT of whatsapp messages. What i usually do is ask them if they know how to trade crypto and if they want to 10x their money - they quit immediately.
Related, a close friend of mine was looking for jobs and in a moment of desperation he got prayed on by someone asking all their personal information. No follow up. Not sure what the end game is there, however it might turn ugly.
I find your strategy - putting them off foot - is a very good deterrent and an effective way to get rid of most scammers quickly.
I am incredibly fascinated by how scammers work and their inventive - many of them would be very successful in a corporate environment, they are clearly very smart and capable, you wonder why they end up doing this for a living.
I’ve received so many of these scam calls from fake authorities that I used to just hang up (now I don’t answer calls ever). One time I didn’t hang up because something felt weird. Turned out it was legit and I owed a $20 traffic ticket from years ago. I’m pretty certain it wasn’t a scam, maybe it was.
Since it's so stepped, the main counter is to break the first step (so hanging up right away is indeed right), but then for the same reasons other pieces won't help (they'll come up with some excuse re. why they call instead of showing up or you won't contact anyone because of the "gag" order)
These situations reveal the true preference toward status over accuracy: People would rather make an effort to preserve their status than to admit having made a mistake.
There are domains where playing games like this will cause you to lose even more status.
However, there are other domains where being loud and denying reality can actually preserve your status: If people are too tired, afraid, or avoidant to challenge the denial then eventually it becomes more or less accepted fact. This is a common feature of toxic work environments, where denying facts or trying to dictate reality can actually work in someone’s favor because the cost of disagreeing with that person is too high.
You see this in bad CEOs who get caught in scandals and then think they can talk their way out of it by writing flowery statements and going on social media to respin the story. These tactics work when you’re preaching to people whose jobs depend on accepting the things you tell them, but they fall apart in the court of public opinion where people have nothing to lose by doubting you.
>These situations reveal the true preference toward status over accuracy: People would rather make an effort to preserve their status than to admit having made a mistake.
This is especially bad if it happens internally, with peoples self image.
I used to recommend to people to just get to grip with how big of a moron they are but this lead to all sort of other problems.
Framing it as managing expectations about ones competence for specific situations and moments and accounting for cognitive bias in the process seems to be much more palpable. With the inability of just taking the moron advice being a good example for what other difficulties you need to compensate for outside competence alone.
Did anyone notice that the author talks about scams and cons, but when it actually comes to a list of examples the majority are actually about plagiarism?
Which... I largely don't care about. I understand why it's super important for academics, but in my book it's not a con or scam. It's accurate information. If somebody is giving me accurate information, the fact that they don't have correct citations isn't really a concern to me as a consumer of the data, and I absolutely don't put it in the same category as faking data or lying about results.
> Did anyone notice that the author talks about scams and cons, but when it actually comes to a list of examples the majority are actually about plagiarism?
It’s an article on a .edu written in the wake of one of the highest profile academic plagiarism scandals in a long time (Claudine Gay). It’s not an article targeted at general audiences, you have to read it in context.
The Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal has been difficult for academia because there were many reactionary responses trying to defend her, but after further investigation people are realizing that her plagiarism was something that would have gotten any average student in severe disciplinary trouble. This has refueled the conversation about everything from plagiarism to falsified data that has become a worrying trend in academia: People are getting duped at worryingly high rates and the initial response to uncovering the academic fraud is to deny and defend.
>Which... I largely don't care about. I understand why it's super important for academics, but in my book it's not a con or scam. It's accurate information.
This is not correct on a few levels, at least in the context of science. At the most basic, you're engaging in circular reasoning. You're accepting it's "accurate information" as a truism when the point of science is to discover what is actually "accurate information" in the absence of any oracles. Someone who is plagiarizing doesn't actually know whether what they're plagiarizing is accurate or not, by definition they haven't done the work. They don't know how it all connects together, and not only might what they're copying be wrong, they're more likely to introduce errors of context and omit qualifiers.
Tying into that is the issue of meta-information as well. One of the core foundations of science and assessing whether information is accurate or not is replication. A second/third/fourth/etc researcher independently reaching even 100% identical results is itself new information each time, even if conclusion is the same. More independent replication raises the chance of signal and decreases the chance that it was noise, some unaccounted for variables unique to a given lab or researcher. Everyone makes mistakes, but even with zero mistakes low probability things can happen in any single given experiment/study/place. Diverse distributed replication is a basic way to help discover/dismiss that.
A plagiarist in research is therefore, at a bare minimum, always engaged in a con/scam: they're claiming they have independently produced a result, which then adds to the weight and other people will be more likely to depend on. They have not.
Of course, they've also conned/scammed whatever money/time/resources anyone else contributed to them with the expectation of independent work and thus at a minimum new replication information. They took that, and then didn't follow through. It's fraud. And there is opportunity cost there since those are a zero-sum game, the resources that went to funding a plagiarist could have instead gone to fund someone honest who could produce something with actual ROI as expected.
Every single case of plagiarism can be fixed with some combination of quotation marks, proper citations, and rephrasing of relevant text. It is never a claim to have independently reproduced a result.
If a scientist claims to have independently reproduced an experimental result - and they haven't - that is outright fraud. It doesn't matter if they describe that experiment in original words, with proper citations and quotation marks/blocks.
This isn't really surprising. Cons are literally "confidence tricks", i.e. betrayals of social trust, which can be disorienting and distressing, even traumatizing. We know that rape victims, to use an extreme example, often try to normalize what happened to them - especially when the attacker was a close friend or intimate partner. A common story is a victim being sexually abused by a partner in the evening and making their abuser breakfast the next morning because then it can't have been abuse and must have been consensual because why would a victim make breakfast for their abuser - that'd be absurd.
Nobody wants to be a victim. Some people like to play the victim, sure, and some victims (usually after quite a bit of therapy) try to own their victim status to come to terms with what they've experienced but victims are at least as likely if not more to pretend nothing happened (even when they're traumatized and their denial is perpetuating that trauma) as they are to speak up.
With cons that are scams there's of course also the chance to play hot potato: you may have been the mark but that only makes you a victim if you are the end of the chain. If you can still con someone else to make your money back, you didn't get fooled, you just got inconvenienced at worst and you're not really at fault for conning the next person because after all you wouldn't have done it if you hadn't been conned to begin with. Crypto, one might argue, might be one such example.
Throughout the 1960s to the mid-1980s it used to fashionable because it was so helpful to reconstitute manufacturing corporate culture around a three axis orientation of quality through SPC, of customers, and profit. This was done to avoid the distortions that ruin companies in the medium and long term including bankruptcy, layoffs, junk products, and all the related human BS that comes with it: corporate politics, in-fighting, lying, and so on. Think Ishikawa's tunnel analogy in his "What Is Total Quality Control?: The Japanese Way." Some organizations included additional emphasis on responsibilities to society.
I miss those days.
I've run into too many individuals in corporate American that:
* manage up/down
* think that if you're not hustling all the time actively managing your rep -- because everybody is doing it -- you're a chump
* A particularly ripe scenario to see this play out in tech sectors is cloud migration in companies that previously had large private data centers. The amount of BS and mid to upper level management cowardice that enables the in-fighting over capex, headcount, and control is truely disheartening.
Here in my backyard --- the US --- I sometimes seriously wonder if "American Management" is euphemism for political players in soap operas.
Can you elaborate why you think managing up/down is bad? Maybe we differ in definition, but I take it to mean customize how you communicate (zoom in / zoom out) based on the intended audiences typical scope and responsibilities.
I don’t want to tell my skip super in depth technical details they don’t need to know. It’s my job to process it for them.
What you write sounds fine. "It’s my job to process it for them" has truth in it too.
However, it takes street smarts, experience, and being burned a time or two to know when it's two guys (associates) talking trying to get it right and when you're being played by a player.
Flailing individual trust precedes the decline in institutional competency. And once that happens the prospect for legit corrective action is largely gone. In-fighting will dominate.
Clues that maybe something is off (not exhaustive) based on some guys I worked with a few years ago:
* The boss talks with team individuals only then brings the team together to report what everybody said, and what everybody agreed to. Actually, no individual knows what anyone else said and didn't have a chance to ask questions.
* You're afraid to bring something up, or notice privately team members complain or share concerns but never say anything to decision makers or in a team setting
* You're encouraged to make changes because of "reputation," team image or other nebulous sounding reasons. Change may indeed need to happen. But those are not reasons
* You're instructed to remain technical to not engage or discuss issues that seem more pertinent to management, organizational values. Being boxed in is a bad sign.
* Being brow beat into doing things out of guilt or entitlement are bad signs.
* Putting internal politics or good light on the boss' project ahead of customer satisfaction even though the work will not satisfy intended customers is a bad sign.
* Abusing through manipulation internal service supplier status is bad. One guy I knew slickly sold his team's capability knowing once tied in they were practically married. The code was implemented such that the customer had no insight or control to it. By running around the floor and vacuuming up as many internal teams as he could, he parlayed his position to "take over the floor, but taking over the data." Guess what? It failed in a spectacular fashion; he never took over control of that system and never gave his "customers" a better solution. He treated his customers as suckers.
* The above point has a corollary: internal service suppliers get implicit management support, and it's implied internal customers have no choice but to work with them. This is NOT how it works on the outside. I choose my roofer and if I am not happy payment may not be given or is disputed or I fire the roofer. The hole in my roof is my motivation to treat the roofer right. My checkbook is why the roofer needs to treat me right. Either can walk away if the other is a jerk. But not in large corporations. That's why, for example, deprecating private data centers for the cloud are horror shows. The internal service suppliers are used to being in charge even entitled no matter how crappy or expensive their service is. And when they find out they might be replaced, they fight it all the way.
I think this is what Robert Jackall refers to as "morall mazes", company cultures that are so far removed from practical reality and ethical behavior that it's impossible for a good-faith actor to navigate them.
Agree! The human element book I referenced above deals with those issues in a very practical way as does Ishikawa's TQM. One thing Schutz points out in a particularly striking way: issues of trust and openness are often the last thing to ever get dealt with in an organization.
Players are a side effect of this. They work from a cynical base that a lot of office stuff is BS and as a professional --- not a naive nube --- they gotta hustle too . And that is what makes them savy; a pro who's seen it all. Instead they further erode climate.
It's the office equivalent to news headlines:
"The dirty secret behind ..."
"What you where never told about ..."
"The real truth about..."
"The official ____ about ____..."
The implication is clear: you are repeatedly lied to; you can't trust what you see or hear.
A friend (he was experiencing psychosis, so that played a big part) fell prey to some bog-standard love scam when some bot added him on facebook. He ended up sending his life savings to the scammers. Everyone around him were warning him, trying to intervene - but to no avail. In the end he got mad at everyone trying to show the warning signs. Started ranting about people trying to ruin his love life.
Older family acquaintance that suddenly started to purchase gift cards. Gets all fired up when someone say that this is a scam. (The scam was crypto investments, and scammers would only take gift cards, yeah...)
The person was convinced it was legit, and got frustrated and pissed off that people were trying to hinder investments.
The article calls out the reason why this happens in academia: administrators need to perform the thorough investigations even if things appear obvious in order to protect themselves against a lawsuit. See what’s happening with Francesca Gino for example: she’s suing Harvard and the four scientists who uncovered her fraud for $25 million, and you can bet that she would win (or at least make it very expensive for the defendants) unless the evidence is very strong. Institutions are obviously incentivized to not prosecute misconduct strongly, or at least not until the misconduct is so blatantly obvious it cannot be ignored.
Most of the people who have defended Claudine Gay are not administrators, and all of them had the option to simply stay silent if they were worried about getting sued. There is really no defense for the buffoons who defended her.
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My wife was taken by a very elaborate and well-crafted scam in November. In retrospect, it all sounds ridiculous... but in the moment, with kids in tow, it was very convincing. It was so traumatizing that when it was over and she finally realized it was a scam, she was relieved! They had convinced her she was going to jail and that was terrifying. Losing the money was less bad than going to jail.
It was also EXTREMELY well scripted with a TON of psychology and clever moments that were well rehearsed. They also had a background track playing with 'police station like' audio and had spoofed the Orange County Sheriff's phone number. One psychological trick that they employed was a very 'stepped' approach to the scam.
If you say it all out loud, it is obvious, but if you go step by step, each one was somewhat plausible. Lastly, by posing as law enforcement, they tugged on a natural tendency to follow orders and avoid being in trouble. My stomach drops when I think I am getting pulled over... being told you have an outstanding warrant was quite a gut punch for her.
Things to remember:
* ALWAYS hang up and call people on a phone number you enter yourself.
* If someone tells you to check the number by looking it up, they are very likely spoofing it. Hang up and call the police.
* The police don't call you if they are trying to serve a warrant, they show up.
* A judge's 'gag order' does not mean you can't talk to a family member or legal counsel.
* NEVER pull money out of an account for someone you don't know without talking to a friend or spouse.
* ANY change in the situation is a red flag - bring the money to the courthouse. - its getting late, we use an after hours processor - you are running out of time, just wire it
Rough scam script:
- <background audio of police station> - hello, is this XYZ? - this is Officer Z, do you agree to abide by Judge ABC’s orders? - we have been trying to reach you by mail about this case. It has to do with a minor. - the judge has issued a gag order, do not talk with anyone about this - look up the number from the phone, see I am really calling from the courthouse
== keep you on the phone, my wife actually didn’t pick up when I called in the midst of the scam and followed with a text ==
- someone committed a crime using your name, we don’t think it was you but because you didn’t respond to mail, there is a warrant for your arrest - you need to post bail - go withdraw money from the bank and bring it to the courthouse - where are you? The courthouse is closing - it’s getting late, use a 3rd party processor setup during Covid - go to grocery store, use a CoinStar machine - send money to phone number (using XLM currency)
Not saying I wouldn't be taken in by this or other scams in the heat of the moment, but from my armchair position, that redlined my suspicion.
EDIT: heart -> heat
But be aware that the converse isn't true: someone who shows up at your door claiming to be law enforcement with a warrant isn't necessarily legitimate. E.g.: https://madison.com/news/local/crime-courts/jack-mcquestion-...
I called him back at the published phone number for his division. He let me know he wasn't going to be bothered driving 45 minutes across the metro area to find me and arrest me, and if I just stopped by court and got it taken care of in next three months that would be great.
Can we not have something like a CA but for, at minimum, officials? Or something like keybase for identity proofs? This seems quite invaluable. Couldn't this even be done within the phone, mail, and email systems? I don't think this should be for everyone, because we should have some anonymity existing, but at least for government officials? What's preventing us from having public/private keys that are verifiable by general citizens? Even if it was as bad as PGP used to be (before tools to make it easier developed) there would be at least some form of verification. But right now it's far too easy to spoof and honestly I don't even know how one would perform verification other than hanging up and calling back. But that doesn't solve your example.
Note: I am not a security expert.
The step by step at the time vs the "in hindsight" really is a powerful persuasion tool/learning tool.
e.g. the below is a real situation that happened at work:
- I run a SRE team
- We do a short term embed of an SRE member to do some one off dev work for a migration
- Dev Mgr to my team member: "oh, since you are touching that code, you should probably also work on this tiny business feature that depends on it"
- DM: "Oh, since you worked on that, you should also work on this other feature"
- DM: "Oh, since you worked on the above, just take over the whole feature"
- DM: "Oh, since you did all THAT, can you talk to the business and figure out the next features??"
Again, totally ridiculous overreach but spread out over 6 months in a fast moving, high stress environment, it can go unnoticed.
Personally I haven't had fake police calls yet (well, except for one Eastern European lady in a call center using a fake mobile number while pretending in broken English to be from INTERPOL, whom I immediately hung up on) but I have had calls about contracts I supposedly agreed to over the phone and was going to have to pay for either way but could now immediately agree to a compromise so I wouldn't have to pay the full amount owed but order (this time for real) something else or some contrivance like that. Of course calling back was not an option because this was already about to hit collections and they had recorded my previous (non-existant) call but couldn't play it back to me right now. It was all a bit ridiculous but I still felt a bit unnerved until I called my lawyer and learned that even if everything they said were true the contract as described would be invalid and any claims would have to be sent in writing before anything actionable even happened on my end.
I've had an accountant fall for a company registration scam and while the letterhead was plausible, the bank account was in an entirely different country, which should have given pause.
I agree it is always better to just hang up and call the bank yourself but it was pretty humorous.
Related, a close friend of mine was looking for jobs and in a moment of desperation he got prayed on by someone asking all their personal information. No follow up. Not sure what the end game is there, however it might turn ugly.
I find your strategy - putting them off foot - is a very good deterrent and an effective way to get rid of most scammers quickly.
I am incredibly fascinated by how scammers work and their inventive - many of them would be very successful in a corporate environment, they are clearly very smart and capable, you wonder why they end up doing this for a living.
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That's why they drill them into you in public school.
There are domains where playing games like this will cause you to lose even more status.
However, there are other domains where being loud and denying reality can actually preserve your status: If people are too tired, afraid, or avoidant to challenge the denial then eventually it becomes more or less accepted fact. This is a common feature of toxic work environments, where denying facts or trying to dictate reality can actually work in someone’s favor because the cost of disagreeing with that person is too high.
You see this in bad CEOs who get caught in scandals and then think they can talk their way out of it by writing flowery statements and going on social media to respin the story. These tactics work when you’re preaching to people whose jobs depend on accepting the things you tell them, but they fall apart in the court of public opinion where people have nothing to lose by doubting you.
This is especially bad if it happens internally, with peoples self image.
I used to recommend to people to just get to grip with how big of a moron they are but this lead to all sort of other problems. Framing it as managing expectations about ones competence for specific situations and moments and accounting for cognitive bias in the process seems to be much more palpable. With the inability of just taking the moron advice being a good example for what other difficulties you need to compensate for outside competence alone.
Which... I largely don't care about. I understand why it's super important for academics, but in my book it's not a con or scam. It's accurate information. If somebody is giving me accurate information, the fact that they don't have correct citations isn't really a concern to me as a consumer of the data, and I absolutely don't put it in the same category as faking data or lying about results.
It’s an article on a .edu written in the wake of one of the highest profile academic plagiarism scandals in a long time (Claudine Gay). It’s not an article targeted at general audiences, you have to read it in context.
The Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal has been difficult for academia because there were many reactionary responses trying to defend her, but after further investigation people are realizing that her plagiarism was something that would have gotten any average student in severe disciplinary trouble. This has refueled the conversation about everything from plagiarism to falsified data that has become a worrying trend in academia: People are getting duped at worryingly high rates and the initial response to uncovering the academic fraud is to deny and defend.
This is not correct on a few levels, at least in the context of science. At the most basic, you're engaging in circular reasoning. You're accepting it's "accurate information" as a truism when the point of science is to discover what is actually "accurate information" in the absence of any oracles. Someone who is plagiarizing doesn't actually know whether what they're plagiarizing is accurate or not, by definition they haven't done the work. They don't know how it all connects together, and not only might what they're copying be wrong, they're more likely to introduce errors of context and omit qualifiers.
Tying into that is the issue of meta-information as well. One of the core foundations of science and assessing whether information is accurate or not is replication. A second/third/fourth/etc researcher independently reaching even 100% identical results is itself new information each time, even if conclusion is the same. More independent replication raises the chance of signal and decreases the chance that it was noise, some unaccounted for variables unique to a given lab or researcher. Everyone makes mistakes, but even with zero mistakes low probability things can happen in any single given experiment/study/place. Diverse distributed replication is a basic way to help discover/dismiss that.
A plagiarist in research is therefore, at a bare minimum, always engaged in a con/scam: they're claiming they have independently produced a result, which then adds to the weight and other people will be more likely to depend on. They have not.
Of course, they've also conned/scammed whatever money/time/resources anyone else contributed to them with the expectation of independent work and thus at a minimum new replication information. They took that, and then didn't follow through. It's fraud. And there is opportunity cost there since those are a zero-sum game, the resources that went to funding a plagiarist could have instead gone to fund someone honest who could produce something with actual ROI as expected.
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If a scientist claims to have independently reproduced an experimental result - and they haven't - that is outright fraud. It doesn't matter if they describe that experiment in original words, with proper citations and quotation marks/blocks.
If plagiarizing is bad because the copied info might be wrong, then original research is bad because it might be wrong.
Nobody wants to be a victim. Some people like to play the victim, sure, and some victims (usually after quite a bit of therapy) try to own their victim status to come to terms with what they've experienced but victims are at least as likely if not more to pretend nothing happened (even when they're traumatized and their denial is perpetuating that trauma) as they are to speak up.
With cons that are scams there's of course also the chance to play hot potato: you may have been the mark but that only makes you a victim if you are the end of the chain. If you can still con someone else to make your money back, you didn't get fooled, you just got inconvenienced at worst and you're not really at fault for conning the next person because after all you wouldn't have done it if you hadn't been conned to begin with. Crypto, one might argue, might be one such example.
I miss those days.
I've run into too many individuals in corporate American that:
* manage up/down
* think that if you're not hustling all the time actively managing your rep -- because everybody is doing it -- you're a chump
* A particularly ripe scenario to see this play out in tech sectors is cloud migration in companies that previously had large private data centers. The amount of BS and mid to upper level management cowardice that enables the in-fighting over capex, headcount, and control is truely disheartening.
Here in my backyard --- the US --- I sometimes seriously wonder if "American Management" is euphemism for political players in soap operas.
I don’t want to tell my skip super in depth technical details they don’t need to know. It’s my job to process it for them.
However, it takes street smarts, experience, and being burned a time or two to know when it's two guys (associates) talking trying to get it right and when you're being played by a player.
Flailing individual trust precedes the decline in institutional competency. And once that happens the prospect for legit corrective action is largely gone. In-fighting will dominate.
Clues that maybe something is off (not exhaustive) based on some guys I worked with a few years ago:
* The boss talks with team individuals only then brings the team together to report what everybody said, and what everybody agreed to. Actually, no individual knows what anyone else said and didn't have a chance to ask questions.
* You're afraid to bring something up, or notice privately team members complain or share concerns but never say anything to decision makers or in a team setting
* You're encouraged to make changes because of "reputation," team image or other nebulous sounding reasons. Change may indeed need to happen. But those are not reasons
* You're instructed to remain technical to not engage or discuss issues that seem more pertinent to management, organizational values. Being boxed in is a bad sign.
* Being brow beat into doing things out of guilt or entitlement are bad signs.
* Putting internal politics or good light on the boss' project ahead of customer satisfaction even though the work will not satisfy intended customers is a bad sign.
* Abusing through manipulation internal service supplier status is bad. One guy I knew slickly sold his team's capability knowing once tied in they were practically married. The code was implemented such that the customer had no insight or control to it. By running around the floor and vacuuming up as many internal teams as he could, he parlayed his position to "take over the floor, but taking over the data." Guess what? It failed in a spectacular fashion; he never took over control of that system and never gave his "customers" a better solution. He treated his customers as suckers.
* The above point has a corollary: internal service suppliers get implicit management support, and it's implied internal customers have no choice but to work with them. This is NOT how it works on the outside. I choose my roofer and if I am not happy payment may not be given or is disputed or I fire the roofer. The hole in my roof is my motivation to treat the roofer right. My checkbook is why the roofer needs to treat me right. Either can walk away if the other is a jerk. But not in large corporations. That's why, for example, deprecating private data centers for the cloud are horror shows. The internal service suppliers are used to being in charge even entitled no matter how crappy or expensive their service is. And when they find out they might be replaced, they fight it all the way.
See:
https://www.amazon.com/What-Total-Quality-Control-Japanese/d...
https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Estee...
https://www.amazon.com/FIRO-Three-Dimensional-Theory-Interpe...
and any work from Deming, Crosby, or Drucker which do far better at integrating business, profit, people, and customers.
Players are a side effect of this. They work from a cynical base that a lot of office stuff is BS and as a professional --- not a naive nube --- they gotta hustle too . And that is what makes them savy; a pro who's seen it all. Instead they further erode climate.
It's the office equivalent to news headlines:
"The dirty secret behind ..."
"What you where never told about ..."
"The real truth about..."
"The official ____ about ____..."
The implication is clear: you are repeatedly lied to; you can't trust what you see or hear.
A friend (he was experiencing psychosis, so that played a big part) fell prey to some bog-standard love scam when some bot added him on facebook. He ended up sending his life savings to the scammers. Everyone around him were warning him, trying to intervene - but to no avail. In the end he got mad at everyone trying to show the warning signs. Started ranting about people trying to ruin his love life.
Older family acquaintance that suddenly started to purchase gift cards. Gets all fired up when someone say that this is a scam. (The scam was crypto investments, and scammers would only take gift cards, yeah...) The person was convinced it was legit, and got frustrated and pissed off that people were trying to hinder investments.
cognition-disrupting disorders are so frustrating and scary!