Cryptocurrency enables a big part of this. Not saying that there weren't any wire scams before crypto, but crypto has made it much easier for average people to make anonymous international money transfers that can't be reversed.
Not to start a big argument, but to my eyes the main usecases of cryptocurrency are to bet on them as a speculative asset or to use them for various forms of crime. Someone will probably tell me about some theoretical situation where it is a positive force, but I still think those are by far the two most common daily uses.
Totally agree, I think crypto is cool from a technological standpoint, but I don't think I've seen one common genuine use of BTC, etc.
And before someone comes in with very specific, anecdotal examples - notice I said "common", ie not buying your indie music from a retro-Serb band that plays using the concept of instruments as instruments and from abandoned sewers; but only on Mondays.
I definitely feel like the majority of crypto traffic is primarily due to bubbles/moneymaking/bets/pumps+dump and then the secondary/next closest use case is for criminal activity. And then after that perhaps the myriad of much smaller use cases like people paying for Proton using crypto.
Oh, it's making a comeback, repackaged and repurposed just the way the key players want it. BTC, NFTs etc. introduced groundbreaking new ideas, but faceless entities and lots of press outlets shunned and butchered them in every way possible. This clearly delineated the current state of affairs.
It's not a coincidence that a guy who was found liable for financial fraud is reducing regulations around crypto currency and then launched a meme coin.
The banks here have said that if you get scammed and money has been transferred (no cryptocurrency involved), there's nothing they can do. It was a bit surprising to hear since you only hear cryptocurrency transactions being irreversible.
The (dumbass) finance department in my last company was phished out of about $50k. They received an email "from another company", that we happened to do business with, that was asking to update the account information. The FD didn't do any verification cause it was over a weekend and it was 'urgent'. Basically ignored all the classic signals.
The bank refused to return the funds. The concept that just because it is a bank and it must be irreversible, is totally wrong. Another very good example of this is the whole corrupt Zelle service.
The difference is, crypto makes irreversibility a fundamental part of the system, making it impossible for any party to unilaterally reverse a payment without having to first take over the entire chain. With regular fiat money and banks, such reversals are perfectly possible on a technical level. The banks are usually unwilling to do them, and an individual may not be able to force them to in practice, but it's still possible in a way it's not possible with crypto.
Whether you see international money transfers outside of the government control as a positive or negative force largely depends on how much you trust your government. How much it should limit things for your own safety?
I suspect that for majority of the earth population the trust level is rather low, even though in some countries it could be different.
For the majority of the earth population, this is not a concern. Yes, things may get fuzzy around an inflection point, but for most people, their concerns fall way short of that.
If I had to throw out a number describing how many more times I trust the FDIC than I trust some cryptobro, the first thing that comes to mind is "ten billion".
And my trust in the current administration is rather low.
> Someone will probably tell me about some theoretical situation where it is a positive force
Challenge accepted. My positive use case for cryptocurrency pertains
to someone like me being over sixty and worried about being swept up
into the guardianship system. With most of my assets in crypto and
assuming decent opsec, they would be inaccessible to the guardian. If
a judge ordered me to grant access, could I be cited for contempt by
refusing to comply given that I had already been legally ruled
incompetent? If I were cited regardless, would the threat of
incarceration carry any weight given that I would be already
incarcerated in an old age home? Unless there's some principle the
guardian is trying to uphold, the rational course would be to choose
a different victim.
> With most of my assets in crypto and assuming decent opsec, they would be inaccessible to the guardian.
The flip side of this is that there’s also a decent chance of your assets becoming completely inaccessible to anyone, including you or any of your successors (if applicable), unless you’ve made careful preparations involving time locked contracts or similar.
And yes, you’re probably safer against the enforcement of court rulings you might disagree with, but you are extremely vulnerable to blackmail or cyberattacks compared to traditional bank accounts.
Elder abuse is certainly a real problem, but the guardianship/conservatorship system also does address a real problem: many seniors actually do become mentally unable to manage themselves.
You're worried about falsely being forced into a guardianship, but what happens if you actually do develop Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia and your family legitimately needs access to your assets to care for you? It's easy to say you'd just give them access before it gets really bad, but an insidious part of the problem is that someone suffering from such a decline either doesn't, or refuses to, recognize it happening.
youre going to be incarcerated in an even worse kept old folks home, and anything you actually try to spend on will be both spied upon - you getting a nurse to type in the secrets for you, or confiscated an sold before yoy could enjoy the results.
i think you'd be better off trying to tackle the problem directly, and get legal changes to how guardianship works, since itll still screw over your crypto assets
> worried about being swept up into the guardianship system.
Functionally speaking you'd have to be incapable of calling a lawyer on your own, which means you'd already be under someone's care. Even if you're being scammed dry, the absolute last thing you want in that situation is a lack of funding.
Find someone who understands end of life financial planning and set up whatever trust-like scheme they recommend.
The biggest impact cryptocurrency has had on my life is the ability to pay criminals after they've taken your data hostage. It's awesome that we've invented a way to make creating and distributing malware profitable.
> main usecases of cryptocurrency are to bet on them as a speculative asset or to use them for various forms of crime. Someone will probably tell me about some theoretical situation where it is a positive force
When you don't agree with the laws that are being broken in a particular case.
I use crypto often. I am Russian, I left Russia when Putin started the war.
For me, it is quite hard to open a bank account. So I use crypto. I work remotely for a Singaporian company.
Now I'm in Vietnam, I can pay for my groceries with crypto using QR code. I can cash USDT crypto with a rate better than paper bills.
I have two bank accounts in Kazakhstan. Both card credentials were stolen after I used a popular hotel booking website, which, by the words of reddit, shares my card details with hotels. Some money was stolen. Seems like 3D-security only affects my payments, and theifs have a freedom to choose a website without 3D.
Now I have to keep that cards always locked. Unlocking them for a short moments, when I need to make a card payment. Like booking an hotel, or buying an airline ticket.
In the past they might have asked you to mail them USD. Same risk there. Not like the post office is funded sufficiently to open all mail. And once that money is out of your bank account and out of your hands it is also gone.
Keep in mind that most of the world doesn't live in a perfectly functioning country with proper rule of law. Being able to use crypto to commit a crime in those countries is a feature. You never know when you will need this feature in your own. (Stupid example: tomorrow Trump wakes up and decide to block all bank accounts of non-citizen until they prove that they are in the US legally: will being able to make crypto transfers be good or bad ?)
But even assuming that all criminal use of crypto is bad, as our money become more digital, we are more and more dependent on a small number of payment processors that get to decide what is good and what is bad, regardless of the legal status (or decide that the legal status that matters is the one of the US, even if you live in Nigeria). This is particularly true for businesses that handle anything sex-related.
For an example of the latter, just a few days ago a payment processor suspended its services to Civitai [1] because it lets people to make ai-generated porn.
"The company that had been processing credit card payments for Civitai made the decision to cease processing payments beginning May 23, 2025, due to their discomfort with enabling AI-generated explicit content."
Reason of most scams is the absurd level of trust existing in Western countries.
When i first saw Upwork where hours were paid by the tracker in a guaranteed manner and people SIGNED for it, i knew West was doomed. I still find it hard to believe people can be that easy to dupe.
Level of trust in the Western societies needs to be radically reduced through government propaganda, church and other channels. The world has become global. Westerners are now a small minority in an ocean of people where the manner of relationship that will be seen as sociopathic in the West, is the everyday norm and always have been. If they won't adapt, they will cease to exist. The cozy world where one could trust another because they all shared fear of God and had a reputation to lose, is gone.
A high trust society is actually a good trait, not a bad one. It’s rather easy, lazy even, for a culture to devolve into a low trust minima. That’s basically the default state that people have endeavoured to evolve out of.
I think it’s also the kind of thing that can easily overwhelm anxious minds. The kind where “what if it’s a scam?” leads them to never taking a risk, donating to a cause, doing someone a favour.
Not that there isn’t a fight to be fought here. But waving the surrender flag on fostering a trusting society is a very weak move.
There's little societal trust in e.g. Russia, and yet they're getting massively scammed by Ukrainian call centers every day. People selling their only housing, sending all their savings for “safekeeping” overseas, are daily news. Not just old ladies (but them too), but also middle-aged intellectuals who were supposed to know better.
It's all using the same schemes that have been explained in the news over and over again, there's little innovation on that front. You have to be living under a rock the for past few years to fall for them, and yet people do. I think there's simply a certain amount of marks in every society, regardless of how its members trust each other, and the only reliable way of protecting them is managing everybody's lives DPRK-style.
Trust is necessary for social development & advancement, and low trust countries & societies are also low on the development index. The development of advanced economies is predicate on the "absurd level of trust" in western countries.
The cost world you describe didn’t emerge because of fear of god (which has been prevalent for milleniums, mostly everywhere) but the abondance of cheap energy and goods, basically since oil starts getting processed but other minor factors helped too. Democracy and peace emerges when peoples aren’t scared to miss food anymore.
I think the underlying concept you're looking for is corruption versus rule of law. Blaming the victim versus expecting consequences for the perpetrator etc.
>Not to start a big argument, but to my eyes the main usecases of cryptocurrency are to bet on them as a speculative asset or to use them for various forms of crime.
What argument can even be had? This is factually true. Whatever other use cases were hoped for when it was invented, they have failed to materialize.
The idea that someone could just beat you with a lead pipe until you open up your bitcoin wallet and surrender all the bitcoins and then there is nothing you can do about it in any kind of legal system or even cryptographically should terrify anyone into boasting about having any kind of bitcoin assets.
I wouldn't recommend boasting about owning bitcoin either but why couldn't you involve the legal system? They can go after the criminals who beat you with the pipe just as they could if they beat you to get to your cash/luxury car/art/jewelry/other valuable stuff.
I know a friend who told me about a loved one getting scammed. Dude meets some girl from a foreign country online. Next thing you know he thinks she got him into some great cryptocurrency, and nothing anyone can tell him will make him realize he is getting scammed.
It happened to my father. I told him he was getting scammed. My mom (divorced) told him. So did my sister. It didn’t matter. He lost all of his savings - 300k+. I wish I had taken his phone away, changed his passwords, etc. My mom didn’t want me to take drastic action because she was concerned that if he knew how much I knew he wouldn’t keep telling her things. It doesn’t matter once they’ve lost everything, of course.
To anyone reading this thinking it wouldn’t happen to your parents, don’t be so sure. I thought he was smarter than that, and at some point he was, but age dulls things.
He was a construction worker. That money didn’t come easily; he ruined his body to get it. I think these scams work in part because it’s hard for the rest of us to imagine so many people being so cold-hearted. It’s almost inconceivable.
Sorry to hear that. Makes me angry just reading it, I can't imagine how it makes you feel.
I've mentioned before here wondering if there is a name for this phenomenon, it's similar to sunk cost fallacy, but more emotionally charged. Like, the thought of having been scammed makes you put on blinders and keep going hoping you weren't. It doesn't make a ton of sense to me, but it happens all the time, to people of all ages.
This guy was only 53 and fell for the same traps, rather famously -
I experienced the same thing in my family. It sucks. I still haven't fully forgiven them (the supposed victim).
As much as I agree it's partially mental decline, it's hard for me to imagine it's not at least also partially a character flaw that would get you into this situation
One should not hesitate to attempt to obtain a conservatorship if they can when this happens. It’s the only thing that will stop someone from losing it all. Unfortunately, if a court deems them mentally fit, there’s nothing to stop them.
I hear you. Same with my dad. Found out after he gave his old phone to my mom without logging out. Tried to show him he was falling for MS-clipart certificates and bossofbigbank@gmail.com but to no avail.
After tracing 250k wired in just 6 months, we detangled my mom out of potential liability and reported him. He was put into financial stewardship (= personal finances done by an attorney). He appealed and the court ruled he seems normal, so he could also be in charge of his finances with only a monthly checkup. We still had his email access. He contacted his scammers the day after promising more money soon...
Fast forward to today, he's broke, likley evicted from his auctioned off appartment in a couple of months at age 79 and dividing his pension between wiring it to scammers and eating just enough to stay alive. Lost all his friends (many borrowed him money), doesn't see his wife or grandkids grow up. The opposite of a happy end.
If you find yourself in such a situation:
- I received a lot of valueable advice from the local anonymous addiction hotline (how to react, where to seek help). Best call you can make.
- In Switzerland, the KESB (govt authority for protection of elderly and children) can help you. They had a neurological assessment made and a court put him financial stewardship. It would have saved him from himself if not for his appeal.
- Think ahead and have one person act as "bad guy" - everything I tried was in consensus with the whole family, but I played bad guy. Of course my dad broke with me, but he keeps sporadic contact with everyone else - his only social contacts - priceless.
I see legislation improve hereabouts - my bank (in France) now requires to watch a screen for 3 seconds and confirm you're sure to wire X to Y and you are sure Y is Y before oking a transaction. Far from enough. We infortunately won't convince our dads that they are getting scammed, but better consumer (and boomer) protection is something we can lobby and vote for.
My mother is exceptionally vigilant, which is great, but her partner ... I've never met anyone who gets targeted so much, or who needs it spelling out to him so much that he doesn't really have $2m in a crypto wallet somewhere he forgot about that a helpful person can send him. I think it's a fixed personality trait. If they split up, and doesn't have her watching him like a hawk, I worry he's toast.
I think in a world where slitting someone’s throat for few thousand dollars (in some countries for few hundreds to just few) isn’t unheard of, I don’t know in what way people would find such scams inconceivable. I think the reason squarely is people being naive, or stupid, greedy, desperate (for love, better X times returns etc) etc - or a combination of these. And yes, they are victims, yes.
This is horrifying. From your perspective, what's the hook that gets a person to hand over the money? Is it to make return on investment, or is it because they think the scammer loves them, or some other reason?
I'm a big fan of YouTube anti-scammer vigilantes. They bait scammers, expose their tactics, humorously waste their time, or even manage a counter attack.
I believe these guys can be a big part of the solution. YouTube creates a financial incentive for individuals to go down this route, and apart from being entertaining to viewers, it broadens awareness of scammer tactics, which hopefully means more people detect scams early.
I wish these guys success and hope to see more anti-scam YouTubers appear.
> YouTube creates a financial incentive for individuals to go down this route
No, YouTube creates a financial incentive for individuals to produce videos where they seem to do this. The problem of this is obvious, and if, as you hope, more of this content appears, there will not be enough people to check them all and keep them honest.
Pig butchering gets additionally horrible when you consider the other side. People who actually handle the chatting are kept in inhuman conditions and physically cannot leave. Laundered profits go to criminal bosses at the top (corrupting various local governments, given they constitute a significant percentage of their economies at this point).
See Number Go Up by Zeke Faux for a glimpse into that (and how cryptocurrency, in particular stablecoins, in particular Tether, facilitate it). True, much of book is largely about the weird cryptobro culture and FTX collapse, but research into pig butchering and personal travel to scam compounds was the most visceral part for me.
i think the degree to which this is fully true is overstated from when i've looked into it. a lot of it is not the best working environments, but people are still scamming people for pay and are largely not forced to do so.
The US does not do enough in this space to punish companies. It feels like such low hanging fruit too that would significantly help the elderly population.
Reported to Vercel a bank phishing site weeks ago, no response still. It’s amazing how little companies care.
Forcing telecos to authenticate phone calls would probably be the single most important change.
But instead of forcing them, we have been letting them drag their feet while while regular people are losing billions to scams.
The whole phone system is ancient and long deprecated. When I get a call from my bank I should see their name and a badge of authentication. Not a random phone number.
Imagine you could register irs.gov and start sending e-mails from that domain. That is pretty much the current state of the phone system.
Un-fucking-believable no one is forcing change here.
Telcos have systems in place that are specifically to allow international phone calls to appear as if they're local calls. This is to "facilitate business".
They have these services and continue to offer them because they get paid for having them, despite the double decker bus sized hole this provides for scammers.
I agree 100% that there should be much tighter regulation on telcos.
What I'm not sure of is actually whether it's possible without having to rebuild a lot of their networks almost from scratch.
I got a call with the caller id of my (credit union) credit card company. They had my name and address, knew I had a card, and were claiming they were investigating fraudulent charges. It sounded more official than my actual credit card company. The only real things to tip me off was that the list of fraudulent charges kept changing, and they were super keen on me reading the entire credit card number back to them.
There were never any fraudulent charges, and the actual fraud department didn't seem to care.
Until we put people in prison, the cyber crimes will continue.
Declaring states that do nothing about these criminals as harboring terror is a good start. This is the same legal principle that resulted in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars which stopped Barbary pirates enslaving US sailors.
But this would interfere with freedom of entrepreneurship! And since no amount of government regulation can reduce fraud to zero anyhow, the current amount of it is economically optimal. Besides, every person has the unalienable right to ruin their life, gosh darn it. /s
Don't fall into the trap: Government penalizing private parties without due process can be appealing when it's a private party you don't like, but even those people deserve due process - that's the point, everyone does. Also it's arbitrary, unchecked power that is used for corrupt purposes, and by supporting it in a situation where you like to see it, you are legitimizing that power in every case.
Edit: It's tough to give due processs to foreign individuals, especially those who don't want to be found. But there are many ways, including via their own government, or via the fact that American company resources are used for these crimes - everyone in the US connects through an ISP operating on US soil.
Do you mean, if the government 'sanctions' you, your remedy is to sue the government?
The government can't sanction you without due process. Executive branch agencies have internal legal processes, with administrative judges, that can be appealed to the courts.
Also, you can't sue the government in most cases due to sovereign immunity.
The process is that they need to be designated by specified cabinet members based on published criteria. If Funnull believe that they weren't lawfully designated (e.g., because they're actually in Peoria or whatever), they can hire a lawyer and sue.
They are a foreign company. They have no due process rights. We could hit their data center with a cruise missile tomorrow and it would be perfectly legal.
Listened to the whole show, and I am very disappointed that they don't put enough effort into stressing how much cryptocurrency facilitates all these. They talk about cryptocurrency as if it's just a way to transfer money, and it happens that bad people use it for scams. No, it's almost the sole reason pigbutchering works so effectively these days and works as the perfect tool for scammers in obscure corners in the world.
While I agree that cryptocurrency can make the process much easier for scammers, I am wondering what exactly is the proposed solution? Something like 28% of adults in the US own cryptocurrency, and that number increases every year. A few years ago I could see path to some kind of global crackdown on crypto by governments around the world, but it now seems to me that cryptocurrency has reached terminal velocity and it's now too late for something like that to happen. Coinbase is in the S&P500, Circle is floating an IPO, and there are dozens of ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum sitting in the 401ks of average Americans.
Perhaps the solution is trying to better understand how victims are acquiring and transferring their funds? Perhaps we need to regulate centralized exchanges to better protect their customers. In the U.S. it's necessary to pass some simple online questionnaire before trading advanced financial products like options/futures. Perhaps we need something like this for cryptocurrency? I'm just throwing out ideas, because I don't know the solution. But even if you think regulating it out of existence is the ideal outcome, that is simply not going to be possible at this point.
Related: Interpol urges to stop using "Pig Butchering":
> INTERPOL argues that the term ‘pig butchering’ dehumanizes and shames victims of such frauds, deterring people from coming forward to seek help and provide information to the authorities.
They still used AWS servers in the USA to avoid some blocking. Baader Meinhof but just heard this episode https://www.npr.org/2025/05/23/1253043749/pig-butchering-sca... where they tracked down organization in Cambodia that specialized in targeting USA and China citizens for pig butchering and explained the mechanism of the scam using Tether cryptocurrency.
From a glimps of Funnull website it looks like an anti-DDoS provider.
Many of the less-known providers are doing shady business, they provide shield for cracked MMORPG servers in the 00s, the most infamous one was "Legend of Mir" and was quite popular in East Asia underground market especially those Internet pubs.
Readit News
Not to start a big argument, but to my eyes the main usecases of cryptocurrency are to bet on them as a speculative asset or to use them for various forms of crime. Someone will probably tell me about some theoretical situation where it is a positive force, but I still think those are by far the two most common daily uses.
And before someone comes in with very specific, anecdotal examples - notice I said "common", ie not buying your indie music from a retro-Serb band that plays using the concept of instruments as instruments and from abandoned sewers; but only on Mondays.
I definitely feel like the majority of crypto traffic is primarily due to bubbles/moneymaking/bets/pumps+dump and then the secondary/next closest use case is for criminal activity. And then after that perhaps the myriad of much smaller use cases like people paying for Proton using crypto.
One of my favorited comments/threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410
*: until I convert it to fiat
It's not a coincidence that a guy who was found liable for financial fraud is reducing regulations around crypto currency and then launched a meme coin.
The bank refused to return the funds. The concept that just because it is a bank and it must be irreversible, is totally wrong. Another very good example of this is the whole corrupt Zelle service.
If you feel wronged, you can take appropriate legal recourse.
Crypto offers no such thing.
I suspect that for majority of the earth population the trust level is rather low, even though in some countries it could be different.
And my trust in the current administration is rather low.
Challenge accepted. My positive use case for cryptocurrency pertains to someone like me being over sixty and worried about being swept up into the guardianship system. With most of my assets in crypto and assuming decent opsec, they would be inaccessible to the guardian. If a judge ordered me to grant access, could I be cited for contempt by refusing to comply given that I had already been legally ruled incompetent? If I were cited regardless, would the threat of incarceration carry any weight given that I would be already incarcerated in an old age home? Unless there's some principle the guardian is trying to uphold, the rational course would be to choose a different victim.
The flip side of this is that there’s also a decent chance of your assets becoming completely inaccessible to anyone, including you or any of your successors (if applicable), unless you’ve made careful preparations involving time locked contracts or similar.
And yes, you’re probably safer against the enforcement of court rulings you might disagree with, but you are extremely vulnerable to blackmail or cyberattacks compared to traditional bank accounts.
You're worried about falsely being forced into a guardianship, but what happens if you actually do develop Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia and your family legitimately needs access to your assets to care for you? It's easy to say you'd just give them access before it gets really bad, but an insidious part of the problem is that someone suffering from such a decline either doesn't, or refuses to, recognize it happening.
There are greater protections against elder abuse today, but often by the time their broker or finance manager finds out, the damage has been done.
youre going to be incarcerated in an even worse kept old folks home, and anything you actually try to spend on will be both spied upon - you getting a nurse to type in the secrets for you, or confiscated an sold before yoy could enjoy the results.
i think you'd be better off trying to tackle the problem directly, and get legal changes to how guardianship works, since itll still screw over your crypto assets
Functionally speaking you'd have to be incapable of calling a lawyer on your own, which means you'd already be under someone's care. Even if you're being scammed dry, the absolute last thing you want in that situation is a lack of funding.
Find someone who understands end of life financial planning and set up whatever trust-like scheme they recommend.
When you don't agree with the laws that are being broken in a particular case.
Of course, the opposite argument is "what about north korea", but it's a package deal is my point.
I have two bank accounts in Kazakhstan. Both card credentials were stolen after I used a popular hotel booking website, which, by the words of reddit, shares my card details with hotels. Some money was stolen. Seems like 3D-security only affects my payments, and theifs have a freedom to choose a website without 3D. Now I have to keep that cards always locked. Unlocking them for a short moments, when I need to make a card payment. Like booking an hotel, or buying an airline ticket.
Nothing more annoying than having your largest bill be worth about $20 and having to carry stacks of them around for things like just paying rent.
That sounds great. What do you use?
Interesting panel discussion on the state of crypto today at the Regan National Economic Forum event.
I believe it is the third panel in the stream:
https://www.reaganfoundation.org/events/videos/2025-reagan-n...
Deleted Comment
Keep in mind that most of the world doesn't live in a perfectly functioning country with proper rule of law. Being able to use crypto to commit a crime in those countries is a feature. You never know when you will need this feature in your own. (Stupid example: tomorrow Trump wakes up and decide to block all bank accounts of non-citizen until they prove that they are in the US legally: will being able to make crypto transfers be good or bad ?)
But even assuming that all criminal use of crypto is bad, as our money become more digital, we are more and more dependent on a small number of payment processors that get to decide what is good and what is bad, regardless of the legal status (or decide that the legal status that matters is the one of the US, even if you live in Nigeria). This is particularly true for businesses that handle anything sex-related.
For an example of the latter, just a few days ago a payment processor suspended its services to Civitai [1] because it lets people to make ai-generated porn. "The company that had been processing credit card payments for Civitai made the decision to cease processing payments beginning May 23, 2025, due to their discomfort with enabling AI-generated explicit content."
[1] https://www.laweekly.com/civitai-ditched-by-credit-card-proc...
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
When i first saw Upwork where hours were paid by the tracker in a guaranteed manner and people SIGNED for it, i knew West was doomed. I still find it hard to believe people can be that easy to dupe.
Level of trust in the Western societies needs to be radically reduced through government propaganda, church and other channels. The world has become global. Westerners are now a small minority in an ocean of people where the manner of relationship that will be seen as sociopathic in the West, is the everyday norm and always have been. If they won't adapt, they will cease to exist. The cozy world where one could trust another because they all shared fear of God and had a reputation to lose, is gone.
I think it’s also the kind of thing that can easily overwhelm anxious minds. The kind where “what if it’s a scam?” leads them to never taking a risk, donating to a cause, doing someone a favour.
Not that there isn’t a fight to be fought here. But waving the surrender flag on fostering a trusting society is a very weak move.
It's all using the same schemes that have been explained in the news over and over again, there's little innovation on that front. You have to be living under a rock the for past few years to fall for them, and yet people do. I think there's simply a certain amount of marks in every society, regardless of how its members trust each other, and the only reliable way of protecting them is managing everybody's lives DPRK-style.
Dead Comment
What argument can even be had? This is factually true. Whatever other use cases were hoped for when it was invented, they have failed to materialize.
I know a friend who told me about a loved one getting scammed. Dude meets some girl from a foreign country online. Next thing you know he thinks she got him into some great cryptocurrency, and nothing anyone can tell him will make him realize he is getting scammed.
Sad stuff.
To anyone reading this thinking it wouldn’t happen to your parents, don’t be so sure. I thought he was smarter than that, and at some point he was, but age dulls things.
He was a construction worker. That money didn’t come easily; he ruined his body to get it. I think these scams work in part because it’s hard for the rest of us to imagine so many people being so cold-hearted. It’s almost inconceivable.
I've mentioned before here wondering if there is a name for this phenomenon, it's similar to sunk cost fallacy, but more emotionally charged. Like, the thought of having been scammed makes you put on blinders and keep going hoping you weren't. It doesn't make a ton of sense to me, but it happens all the time, to people of all ages.
This guy was only 53 and fell for the same traps, rather famously -
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/21/cryptocurrency-shan-hanes-pi...
As much as I agree it's partially mental decline, it's hard for me to imagine it's not at least also partially a character flaw that would get you into this situation
After tracing 250k wired in just 6 months, we detangled my mom out of potential liability and reported him. He was put into financial stewardship (= personal finances done by an attorney). He appealed and the court ruled he seems normal, so he could also be in charge of his finances with only a monthly checkup. We still had his email access. He contacted his scammers the day after promising more money soon...
Fast forward to today, he's broke, likley evicted from his auctioned off appartment in a couple of months at age 79 and dividing his pension between wiring it to scammers and eating just enough to stay alive. Lost all his friends (many borrowed him money), doesn't see his wife or grandkids grow up. The opposite of a happy end.
If you find yourself in such a situation: - I received a lot of valueable advice from the local anonymous addiction hotline (how to react, where to seek help). Best call you can make. - In Switzerland, the KESB (govt authority for protection of elderly and children) can help you. They had a neurological assessment made and a court put him financial stewardship. It would have saved him from himself if not for his appeal. - Think ahead and have one person act as "bad guy" - everything I tried was in consensus with the whole family, but I played bad guy. Of course my dad broke with me, but he keeps sporadic contact with everyone else - his only social contacts - priceless.
I see legislation improve hereabouts - my bank (in France) now requires to watch a screen for 3 seconds and confirm you're sure to wire X to Y and you are sure Y is Y before oking a transaction. Far from enough. We infortunately won't convince our dads that they are getting scammed, but better consumer (and boomer) protection is something we can lobby and vote for.
I believe these guys can be a big part of the solution. YouTube creates a financial incentive for individuals to go down this route, and apart from being entertaining to viewers, it broadens awareness of scammer tactics, which hopefully means more people detect scams early.
I wish these guys success and hope to see more anti-scam YouTubers appear.
Examples:
https://www.youtube.com/@NanoBaiter
https://www.youtube.com/@KitbogaShow
No, YouTube creates a financial incentive for individuals to produce videos where they seem to do this. The problem of this is obvious, and if, as you hope, more of this content appears, there will not be enough people to check them all and keep them honest.
Deleted Comment
See Number Go Up by Zeke Faux for a glimpse into that (and how cryptocurrency, in particular stablecoins, in particular Tether, facilitate it). True, much of book is largely about the weird cryptobro culture and FTX collapse, but research into pig butchering and personal travel to scam compounds was the most visceral part for me.
I think there might be a word for this.
Reported to Vercel a bank phishing site weeks ago, no response still. It’s amazing how little companies care.
But instead of forcing them, we have been letting them drag their feet while while regular people are losing billions to scams.
The whole phone system is ancient and long deprecated. When I get a call from my bank I should see their name and a badge of authentication. Not a random phone number.
Imagine you could register irs.gov and start sending e-mails from that domain. That is pretty much the current state of the phone system.
Un-fucking-believable no one is forcing change here.
They have these services and continue to offer them because they get paid for having them, despite the double decker bus sized hole this provides for scammers.
I agree 100% that there should be much tighter regulation on telcos.
What I'm not sure of is actually whether it's possible without having to rebuild a lot of their networks almost from scratch.
I got a call with the caller id of my (credit union) credit card company. They had my name and address, knew I had a card, and were claiming they were investigating fraudulent charges. It sounded more official than my actual credit card company. The only real things to tip me off was that the list of fraudulent charges kept changing, and they were super keen on me reading the entire credit card number back to them.
There were never any fraudulent charges, and the actual fraud department didn't seem to care.
I'm guessing it was due to the Experian leak.
Declaring states that do nothing about these criminals as harboring terror is a good start. This is the same legal principle that resulted in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars which stopped Barbary pirates enslaving US sailors.
Edit: It's tough to give due processs to foreign individuals, especially those who don't want to be found. But there are many ways, including via their own government, or via the fact that American company resources are used for these crimes - everyone in the US connects through an ISP operating on US soil.
FBI investigated a bunch of scams and found somebody assisted scammers. It's not like they pulled a name out of a hat and sanctioned them.
Do you mean, if the government 'sanctions' you, your remedy is to sue the government?
The government can't sanction you without due process. Executive branch agencies have internal legal processes, with administrative judges, that can be appealed to the courts.
Also, you can't sue the government in most cases due to sovereign immunity.
Dead Comment
That is part of my point; there needs to be due process.
> We could hit their data center with a cruise missile tomorrow and it would be perfectly legal.
That is false. It is illegal to take military action against another country without a declaration of war.
Perhaps the solution is trying to better understand how victims are acquiring and transferring their funds? Perhaps we need to regulate centralized exchanges to better protect their customers. In the U.S. it's necessary to pass some simple online questionnaire before trading advanced financial products like options/futures. Perhaps we need something like this for cryptocurrency? I'm just throwing out ideas, because I don't know the solution. But even if you think regulating it out of existence is the ideal outcome, that is simply not going to be possible at this point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg
> INTERPOL argues that the term ‘pig butchering’ dehumanizes and shames victims of such frauds, deterring people from coming forward to seek help and provide information to the authorities.
"Romance baiting" is proposed instead.
https://www.interpol.int/News-and-Events/News/2024/INTERPOL-...
"Pig butchering" is more apt as the long con is like fattening up an animal before slaughter.
Many of the less-known providers are doing shady business, they provide shield for cracked MMORPG servers in the 00s, the most infamous one was "Legend of Mir" and was quite popular in East Asia underground market especially those Internet pubs.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/polyfillio-ja...