> the gaming site will reject the request and prompt the user to make a “verification deposit” of cryptocurrency — typically around $100 — before any money can be distributed
This is called "advance fee" scam. It is hundreds of years old.
> An advance-fee scam is a form of fraud and is a common scam. The scam works by promising the victim a large sum of money in return for a small upfront payment, which the fraudster claims will be used to obtain the large sum.
I have encountered it many times during my life, long before crypto was a thing.
Blatantly stupid takes like this little gem about crypto are part of the reason this site has become something of a joke for anything resembling a nuanced discussion about crypto, in both its cons and pros.
A random website asks me to give them my cryptocurrency, and then they refuse to return it? Why, I thought I had seen the most shocking thing on earth, but this takes the cake!
Large of law numbers. There are a lot of idiots out there. I had a buddy; super nice, super funny guy, late 20's, but financially an idiot.
He sent a $1,000 check as "collateral" to some online "bank" to get a $10,000 "loan". I explained to him that this isn't how any of this works and he just paused and said, "Huh, so should put a stop payment on the second check?" He had sent them another $1,000 as some sort of second round of collateral for the loan or some other nonsense.
I've got a coworker who fell for, "You won a free electric drill from Home Depot! Click here and enter your credit card". I discovered his predicament when he was telling me how he managed to get an overseas vendor to agree to reduce a credit card charge he didn't recognize in half. That got me to pull a bit on the thread and the whole story unraveled. What it came down to, apparently, was simple gullibility. He didn't know if the drill prize was legit, but he just didn't think he would be targeted in a scam, so he figured, "Why not? Worst that happens is I don't get my drill."
It's probably the law of probabilities at play, like with 419 scams. If you cast a sufficiently big net, chances of catching something in it are decent
I'm pretty sure I fell for a phishing scam a couple decades ago — my eBay password was compromised (fortunately there were no significant consequences). Once upon a time I also got tricked by the phone company into ordering stuff I didn't intend to. And while I don't think I've fallen for anything recently and am pretty security focused, it still takes mental energy to avoid all the traps.
I assume that the "people who fall for this stuff" are "people like me". Even the best among us are only statistically less likely to get snookered, not immune.
Im gravitating towards tge 12 year old problem: while theres tons of other demographics, 12 year olds drive a lot of the grift economy. Its easiest to see in gaming with microtransactions and preorders. You can read hundreds of well articulated reasons not to engage these things yet they continue unabated.
As I like to say in some other contexts on HN, you must not underestimate the criminal underground. You should not model it as some hacker alone in his basement trying to run scams. You're probably a lot closer thinking of the industry as at least the equivalent of a Dark Google in size and sophistication. If I can imagine a framework where I have a strong set of modular APIs that we can deploy rapidly and put together some prompts for AIs to customize the frontends and graphics hooks so each site looks different, deploying them just like you'd deploy a k8s cluster of these things (and, heck, for all I know, actually being on k8s), the industry as a whole has more than enough firepower to actually implement it. There's an entire dark economy out there where you can outsource parts of this to specialized businesses and get sketchy cloud hosting of all kinds, there's a rich economy around who is taking what actual risks and who gets compensated for them, everything you can imagine.
Tangentially, I haven't received a Pig Butchering opening text ("hey") in quite a while. A quick scan through my Spam & Blocked doesn't show much either, just a lot of political spam. Did something happen to improve the situation, or am I just lucky?
You can’t call negative things gaming. You can gamify anything, but if it’s negative you can’t call it gaming. Gaming is always good and never causes any problems. Plenty of research shows that gaming is good. Please stop villainizing gaming. Gaming is good. If it’s negative, just call it what it is. Gambling, addiction, radicalization, etc all are just that. They have nothing to do with gaming. Gaming is good. Media has no affect on people.
“We were being spammed relentlessly by these scam posts from compromised or purchased [Discord] accounts,” Thereallo said. “I got frustrated with just banning and deleting, so I started to investigate the infrastructure behind the scam messages. This is not a one-off site, it’s a scalable criminal enterprise with a clear playbook, technical fingerprints, and financial infrastructure.”
This quote does not read like something I'd expect from a 17 year old.
Who exactly is online gambling? And out of that subset, who is doing super shady appearing online gambling? I don’t mean to be flippant, but who exactly is falling for this slop? At some point, permit me to victim blame, the victim is somewhat to blame.
There are a lot of people using the internet with different physical and mental disabilities that make it difficult for them to identify these scams that might seem super obvious to you or I.
When I had cancer and I was in the hospital getting chemo I fell for a scam for the first time. It was an instagram ad for a cool steampunk looking keyboard with a price that was too good to be true. It was almost christmas, and I had felt guilty for not shopping, but my brain fog made it difficult to reason about. I ordered it and forgot all about it until it was too late to challenge. It was only $60, but it made it very clear to me how easy it would be to fall for something like this for a significant part of the population.
I think it's better to think of these things as relative. Not that I personally am absolutely invincible against scams, but that there is some scam of some level of sophistication that would get me, there's some threshold.
And that threshold will move over time, and as you say, depending on conditions. Even our personal defenses should not be predicated on being perfect all the time, and that's completely impractical at a societal level. And I worry about AI making it practical to target more people directly at scale and raise the sophistication on their end over the next 10-20 years.
Today I think I can say with a straight face that I'm quite sophisticated against this sort of scam. But the day will come, unless something gets me earlier, when my children will have to take my email account away if they want to inherit anything. Old age makes fools of us all. And who knows if something will get me earlier some other way. Unfortunately, invincible confidence in the here and now won't protect me.
who is doing super shady appearing online gambling?
At a guess, mostly people who for various reasons aren't allowed to gamble on more 'legit' sites, either because of their age or other local laws and jurisdictions. If you 'need' to gamble and are forbidden to gamble legally, then you will find a way to gamble illegally. Just look at the 'offline' world, before sports gambling became basically legal, lots of people would place bets with very shady operations.
I would hazard a guess is that a generation of youth has been addicted to gambling by mobile game companies and even some desktop game companies like Valve (which has worked to limit it, but only when it was forced to by bad publicity.)
Gambling is a dangerous addiction for some people. I don't think victim blaming is an effective response.
>a generation of youth has been addicted to gambling by mobile game companies
I think you nailed it. I made a comment about the new "religion" of games in the current youth in another discussion a while back. It really seems to me that there is an incredibly strong illogical loyalty to game companies in the current youth. So much that they ignore bad actors assuming that they must be just another game company, even after they get scammed. I'm guessing it has something to do with zero real value nature of loot box and skin gambling that is prevalent.
Readit News
This is called "advance fee" scam. It is hundreds of years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam
> An advance-fee scam is a form of fraud and is a common scam. The scam works by promising the victim a large sum of money in return for a small upfront payment, which the fraudster claims will be used to obtain the large sum.
I have encountered it many times during my life, long before crypto was a thing.
He sent a $1,000 check as "collateral" to some online "bank" to get a $10,000 "loan". I explained to him that this isn't how any of this works and he just paused and said, "Huh, so should put a stop payment on the second check?" He had sent them another $1,000 as some sort of second round of collateral for the loan or some other nonsense.
And I've known dumber people than him.
I assume that the "people who fall for this stuff" are "people like me". Even the best among us are only statistically less likely to get snookered, not immune.
The technology behind the scenes and UI design are all well made.
This quote does not read like something I'd expect from a 17 year old.
When I had cancer and I was in the hospital getting chemo I fell for a scam for the first time. It was an instagram ad for a cool steampunk looking keyboard with a price that was too good to be true. It was almost christmas, and I had felt guilty for not shopping, but my brain fog made it difficult to reason about. I ordered it and forgot all about it until it was too late to challenge. It was only $60, but it made it very clear to me how easy it would be to fall for something like this for a significant part of the population.
And that threshold will move over time, and as you say, depending on conditions. Even our personal defenses should not be predicated on being perfect all the time, and that's completely impractical at a societal level. And I worry about AI making it practical to target more people directly at scale and raise the sophistication on their end over the next 10-20 years.
Today I think I can say with a straight face that I'm quite sophisticated against this sort of scam. But the day will come, unless something gets me earlier, when my children will have to take my email account away if they want to inherit anything. Old age makes fools of us all. And who knows if something will get me earlier some other way. Unfortunately, invincible confidence in the here and now won't protect me.
At a guess, mostly people who for various reasons aren't allowed to gamble on more 'legit' sites, either because of their age or other local laws and jurisdictions. If you 'need' to gamble and are forbidden to gamble legally, then you will find a way to gamble illegally. Just look at the 'offline' world, before sports gambling became basically legal, lots of people would place bets with very shady operations.
Gambling is a dangerous addiction for some people. I don't think victim blaming is an effective response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling
I think you nailed it. I made a comment about the new "religion" of games in the current youth in another discussion a while back. It really seems to me that there is an incredibly strong illogical loyalty to game companies in the current youth. So much that they ignore bad actors assuming that they must be just another game company, even after they get scammed. I'm guessing it has something to do with zero real value nature of loot box and skin gambling that is prevalent.