I got sucked into reading this paper, and it has completely changed my perception of these scams. They are incredibly thorough and realistic. Here are some quotes that drove this home for me.
"The bond phase showed that scammers had tremendous patience; this phase lasted anywhere from 3 to 11 months before the scammer moved on to the next stage of the scam."
"When I spoke to her on a video call, it was the same person from the photos. She was even wearing the dress that matched a photo she had sent earlier in the day."
“She did not push me to invest, or ask for money. She seemed genuinely interested in me and we
spoke for nearly 6 months before she even brought up
investments; it all seemed so real and organic."
"It seemed legitimate, there was no reason to think that it could be fake – if she could be a scammer, so could any of my actual friends."
"[the site] was similar to what you would expect on an investment portfolio website; in fact, the prices of stocks and bitcoin also matched..."
"According to recent research [23], these scams have resulted in losses of nearly 75 billion dollars since 2020."
Definitely sympathizes the victims even more. I had been thinking that these were 1-2 month, ham-fisted operations: establish contact and rush to grab the cash from the gullible rube. To string along the target for a year shows dedication completely separate from the pedestrian scams you normally encounter.
I happened across the "Tinder Swindler" video on Netflix the other day, and I was shocked at how elaborate these scams can get. Always thought I'd catch onto this stuff, but...
Imagine: you meet someone online. You talk for a while, and decide to meet up for dinner. They say nothing, but upon googling them (for safety, of course) you discover they're the son of a billionaire - a weapons or diamonds magnate or something to that effect.
Anyways, the day of the date comes around and a brand new Rolls Royce Phantom comes to pick you up, then drops you off at a private jet. You go to one of the highest end restaurants in the continent. You're experiencing a probably $20,000 night between tips, booze, food, and entertainment. You're showered in expensive gifts over weeks and weeks - honestly, where is all this money coming from, if not his pocket? He's a billionaire! You see him checking into hotels all around Europe, but you mention you miss him so he flies in just to get coffee with you for an hour. He's clearly head-over-heels for you.
tl;dr he has a scheme where he's got some photos of his guard roughed up, and a little blood on the "swindler", which aren't shown until the woman is deeply infatuated with him. It's a very urgent problem - some business competitors are out to get him, and they're tracking his cards. Can you please take out a loan for $50,000 and send it? It's okay if the bank won't normally approve that - I'll "employ you" and send over a paystub showing you make over $90,000/month! That loan gets approved instantly. You take out a few more because you want your boyfriend of 6 months to survive of course.
You're simply funding his night out with his next target. It's a rotating scam. Pretty insane to me.
I mean a lot of the investment scams you see on places like Reddit - like the "testing the network" crypto scam - are pretty hamfisted. People still fall for them though.
It was a pretty wild ride, for an arvix paper lol. Easily as good as a provocative work of fiction, It had me questioning my marriage briefly until I rolled over and looked at my toddler, and briefly thought “holy shirt this runs deep!” (And then obviously broke out of the spell of the story lol)
Still, it’s a testament to the level of emotional damage that these scams must levy on their actual victims.
I saw a YouTube who had planted a mole inside one of these farms. Each guy ran something like 10 WhatsApp on his PC and when needed they had girls in a waiting room “on call” to do FaceTime.
3 to 11 months is long enough. I wonder if higher level scaammers spend even longer for even higher rewards, years instead of months for the momey. At that point it should be a much higher purpose/agenda but I guess these timespans must be happening too.
Most motorcycle gangs require a 1 year hang around, plus the introduced person has to be known for at least a year.
The conventional wisdom is to wait 2 years to marry someone, and 1 year at the absolute bare minimum if you are old or at the edge of the fertility window or in some extenuating circumstance.
This seems somewhat confirmed by the fact it outlives the measure of these long-running scams. Perhaps the conventional wisdom is correct.
Our clandestine services will spend years getting people into the right places. I mean at at certain point the difference between the two blurs, and the social engineering entirely overlaps.
> "It seemed legitimate, there was no reason to think that it could be fake – if she could be a scammer, so could any of my actual friends."
Which isn't that far from the truth, eh.
Tupperware and Amway might be legit MLMs (there is a product attached, after all), but there are sooo many "side hustles" preying particularly on women that are outright scams - and inevitably the victims of these lose almost all of their friends and even family because they're all sick sooner or later from them constantly attempting to shill whatever supplements, insurances, shitcoins or kitchen gadgets they're currently dealing. It's truly heartbreaking to see people you know fall for that bullshit and get sucked into the vortex with no way of pulling them out.
The podcast Scam, Inc details all if this and is very interesting and worthwhile. Talks about the big cases and the people who perpetrate the scams. It has surprising detail.
Eh. While it's surprising to see someone string along someone through the internet for so long, it's not a really a new thing in the physical world. It happens once in a while that someone marries someone much richer just to file for a divorce a bit later. Heck, it's actually socially acceptable to be nice to people just because you want something from them.
I recently received a DM on Twitter, this person claimed to have known me growing up and had a surprising amount of personal information some of which I don't recall ever having posted online. I have a very good memory of my childhood and know for a fact that I never knew this person.
The persons profile was strangely convincing, it was hyper-local to my neighborhood growing up. This account had existed for something like 4 or 5 years and had posts going back at least a few. It was almost convincing. The tell was just that their posts were too targeted, all "Hey, local event is going on" "Hey, local politics thing" with no other thoughts expressed. Their replies section was just littered with replies to people about how things were "awesome" or "great news" without any critique or thought.
The whole thing was very unsettling. It was the first scam where I really felt like it would have been easy to fall for with a standard amount of critical thinking. If I had a hazier recollection of my childhood I might have.
I can't imagine this bot was made specifically for me, I'm not that important, but certainly people in my area. I genuinely wonder if this is part of some larger network of hyper-local bots. I don't look forward to the attacks to come as AI progresses.
Scammers tend to create ecosystems of fake accounts in large cities or communities, such as the expat community in Paris.
These are easy to fabricate and maintain, and consist of a social network of individuals who are either loosely connected or constantly changing.
They use these accounts to collect data about key people, events, meet-ups and news events.They have developed a full lifecycle for these accounts. Creation, enrichment, data collection, then consumption and end of life when they are used for scams.
Couple months ago I got message from random woman on Telegram, I'm sure from the account photo it self is AI generated, and start play along. After I got some photo of her, I start reverse search the photos and found some Russian forum [1] that some people share their experience about pig-butchering scam
I get presented with one or two of these a month. It’s easy to be calloused until you remember that these people are also victims, often in worse ways than you could ever be as one of their targets.
The best thing is just to ignore completely. If you engage at all, you risk worsening their situation by wasting their time, while if you do engage you might be saving someone else at their expense…. It’s lose/lose to engage in any way.
I’ve settled on just saying, hey, I’m sorry that they are in the situation they are in, and I hope they find the strength to make it out someday. That makes it clear that there is nothing to be gained while offering a tiny bit of hope and empathy, which I’m sure is in short supply.
> If you engage at all, you risk worsening their situation by wasting their time, while if you do engage you might be saving someone else at their expense….
I don't understand what you are arguing for here? That they need to be allowed to scam someone else to avoid worsening their situation?
I'd say wasting their time is the best solution. It avoids giving the bosses info on what approaches works with who and helps makes runnning these sorts of operations uneconomical.
I have a family member falling for these on a regular basis. In their case it’s possibly tied to mental health issues. They are able to drive, converse, care for self, but are sending money to groups that are clearly not real (example: fundraiser for a celebrity supposedly in the hospital, when news shows they weren’t. Was convinced actually conversing with the celebrity). Rest of the family has taken some steps but does feel at a loss. How do you prevent them from being seriously hurt emotionally and financially while respecting their autonomy and dignity? Even when they “come anround” to the fact they have been scammed, that adds insult to injury. The vector is definitely social media and sms/phone.
Any tips would be appreciated. Locking down phone hasn’t really helped, and finances are already segregated to hopefully avoid giving away total life savings.
Sounds like some form of guardianship/conservatorship is in order. Talk to a lawyer, if you haven't already (maybe that's what you mean by finances are already segregated).
The related tragedy of this crime is that hundreds of thousands of people are recruited and trafficked into scam centres - particularly in SE Asia. People are then forced to conduct the scams. Although it's possible AI advancements might eventually lead to fully automated scam processes resulting in reduced trafficking into scam centres.
The interviews with the victims are heartbreaking. There's one dad/daughter pair where the dad has lost almost literally everything, is on camera being interviewed about everything that happened, and is still flipping between "it was a total scam" and "maybe if I just send them another fee payment I can get at least some of my money back" and the daughter saying, "No, dad! It's a scam, and you are not sending them anymore money!"
I'm surprised that so many of the 26 participants in the paper's study were young and well-educated, with a mean age of 48. I would have guessed a much older group of victims.
The cons play the statistics, and usually target people that have other issues in their life. One kind lady we knew had early Alzheimer's disease, and they still ran a crypto investor scam and fake police funds recovery con. Yes, the scams actually work on smart people too sometimes...
It is not about education or IQ level, but rather if cons target someone currently vulnerable. Note: the 7 spear-phishers on YC are rather obvious in an attempt to avoid IT people. =3
This. I am a senior software dev, living in Switzerland. Few years ago there was an issue with my residence permit renewal, process that should have taken few weeks took more than a year. No way to contact that Geneva immigration office, and you can't visit them personally, emails ignored. Official phone contact is just a single phone that often rang few times and then dropped the call, 19 out of 20 times. Few times it was picked up clearly annoyed and couldn't-be-bothered woman who just told me to wait, no further info. My boss applied for same after me, got the papers in 3 weeks.
Me and my kids (who have same permit as me) were basically living in Switzerland semi-illegally, while sporting high paying permanent banking job and wife is a doctor.
One day a call came which introduced themselves as Swiss police, a very elaborate scheme, stating that my ID was used in fraud and I am being investigated. They caught me in this period of fear of getting deported, ruining efforts of past 15 years and my whole family lives. I followed through, they were very clever, pulled just the right strings.
But then came the moment when all this could be solved if I just went to the shop and bought... Apple gift card. LOL. But man I felt extremely vulnerable and under tremendous stress during those few hours.
I know an engineer in his 30s who had a “girlfriend” somewhere in Asia and he would send her money regularly. They had been “together” for 2 years but never met. He even knew that something was probably wrong but did it anyways out of desperation.
These are mostly cryptocurrency investment scams. More crypto regulation would help, but the so-called crypto industry doesn't want to see that happen because their product has no other utility than enabling this stuff.
I doubt that, it seems the investment websites used are entirely fake, they probably just use crypto because it's well known and sounds good to many people. They might however just as well promote fake investments in stocks or something else.
Yeah, the crypto is the hook. They don't have to do any trading once you've moved the money (but they do obviously want to show via UI that you're making bank and that you could/should go bigger)
Readit News
"The bond phase showed that scammers had tremendous patience; this phase lasted anywhere from 3 to 11 months before the scammer moved on to the next stage of the scam."
"When I spoke to her on a video call, it was the same person from the photos. She was even wearing the dress that matched a photo she had sent earlier in the day."
“She did not push me to invest, or ask for money. She seemed genuinely interested in me and we spoke for nearly 6 months before she even brought up investments; it all seemed so real and organic."
"It seemed legitimate, there was no reason to think that it could be fake – if she could be a scammer, so could any of my actual friends."
"[the site] was similar to what you would expect on an investment portfolio website; in fact, the prices of stocks and bitcoin also matched..."
"According to recent research [23], these scams have resulted in losses of nearly 75 billion dollars since 2020."
presumably this is where the name comes from, no?
you spend a year fattening the pig, before you butcher it, hence pig butchering schemes.
Imagine: you meet someone online. You talk for a while, and decide to meet up for dinner. They say nothing, but upon googling them (for safety, of course) you discover they're the son of a billionaire - a weapons or diamonds magnate or something to that effect.
Anyways, the day of the date comes around and a brand new Rolls Royce Phantom comes to pick you up, then drops you off at a private jet. You go to one of the highest end restaurants in the continent. You're experiencing a probably $20,000 night between tips, booze, food, and entertainment. You're showered in expensive gifts over weeks and weeks - honestly, where is all this money coming from, if not his pocket? He's a billionaire! You see him checking into hotels all around Europe, but you mention you miss him so he flies in just to get coffee with you for an hour. He's clearly head-over-heels for you.
tl;dr he has a scheme where he's got some photos of his guard roughed up, and a little blood on the "swindler", which aren't shown until the woman is deeply infatuated with him. It's a very urgent problem - some business competitors are out to get him, and they're tracking his cards. Can you please take out a loan for $50,000 and send it? It's okay if the bank won't normally approve that - I'll "employ you" and send over a paystub showing you make over $90,000/month! That loan gets approved instantly. You take out a few more because you want your boyfriend of 6 months to survive of course.
You're simply funding his night out with his next target. It's a rotating scam. Pretty insane to me.
Still, it’s a testament to the level of emotional damage that these scams must levy on their actual victims.
[0]: https://youtu.be/vu-Y1h9rTUs
[1]: https://youtu.be/vu-Y1h9rTUs?t=342
The conventional wisdom is to wait 2 years to marry someone, and 1 year at the absolute bare minimum if you are old or at the edge of the fertility window or in some extenuating circumstance.
This seems somewhat confirmed by the fact it outlives the measure of these long-running scams. Perhaps the conventional wisdom is correct.
If any of the scam farm worker failed they will get physical punishment or even capital punishment...
Which isn't that far from the truth, eh.
Tupperware and Amway might be legit MLMs (there is a product attached, after all), but there are sooo many "side hustles" preying particularly on women that are outright scams - and inevitably the victims of these lose almost all of their friends and even family because they're all sick sooner or later from them constantly attempting to shill whatever supplements, insurances, shitcoins or kitchen gadgets they're currently dealing. It's truly heartbreaking to see people you know fall for that bullshit and get sucked into the vortex with no way of pulling them out.
Wow, this really makes me think. You see, I have this president that ...
Deleted Comment
The persons profile was strangely convincing, it was hyper-local to my neighborhood growing up. This account had existed for something like 4 or 5 years and had posts going back at least a few. It was almost convincing. The tell was just that their posts were too targeted, all "Hey, local event is going on" "Hey, local politics thing" with no other thoughts expressed. Their replies section was just littered with replies to people about how things were "awesome" or "great news" without any critique or thought.
The whole thing was very unsettling. It was the first scam where I really felt like it would have been easy to fall for with a standard amount of critical thinking. If I had a hazier recollection of my childhood I might have.
I can't imagine this bot was made specifically for me, I'm not that important, but certainly people in my area. I genuinely wonder if this is part of some larger network of hyper-local bots. I don't look forward to the attacks to come as AI progresses.
These are easy to fabricate and maintain, and consist of a social network of individuals who are either loosely connected or constantly changing.
They use these accounts to collect data about key people, events, meet-ups and news events.They have developed a full lifecycle for these accounts. Creation, enrichment, data collection, then consumption and end of life when they are used for scams.
They are playing the long game.
[1] https://pikabu.ru/story/temu_neponyatnyiy_razvod_11302944
The best thing is just to ignore completely. If you engage at all, you risk worsening their situation by wasting their time, while if you do engage you might be saving someone else at their expense…. It’s lose/lose to engage in any way.
I’ve settled on just saying, hey, I’m sorry that they are in the situation they are in, and I hope they find the strength to make it out someday. That makes it clear that there is nothing to be gained while offering a tiny bit of hope and empathy, which I’m sure is in short supply.
I don't understand what you are arguing for here? That they need to be allowed to scam someone else to avoid worsening their situation?
I'd say wasting their time is the best solution. It avoids giving the bosses info on what approaches works with who and helps makes runnning these sorts of operations uneconomical.
Any tips would be appreciated. Locking down phone hasn’t really helped, and finances are already segregated to hopefully avoid giving away total life savings.
The interviews with the victims are heartbreaking. There's one dad/daughter pair where the dad has lost almost literally everything, is on camera being interviewed about everything that happened, and is still flipping between "it was a total scam" and "maybe if I just send them another fee payment I can get at least some of my money back" and the daughter saying, "No, dad! It's a scam, and you are not sending them anymore money!"
It is not about education or IQ level, but rather if cons target someone currently vulnerable. Note: the 7 spear-phishers on YC are rather obvious in an attempt to avoid IT people. =3
This. I am a senior software dev, living in Switzerland. Few years ago there was an issue with my residence permit renewal, process that should have taken few weeks took more than a year. No way to contact that Geneva immigration office, and you can't visit them personally, emails ignored. Official phone contact is just a single phone that often rang few times and then dropped the call, 19 out of 20 times. Few times it was picked up clearly annoyed and couldn't-be-bothered woman who just told me to wait, no further info. My boss applied for same after me, got the papers in 3 weeks.
Me and my kids (who have same permit as me) were basically living in Switzerland semi-illegally, while sporting high paying permanent banking job and wife is a doctor.
One day a call came which introduced themselves as Swiss police, a very elaborate scheme, stating that my ID was used in fraud and I am being investigated. They caught me in this period of fear of getting deported, ruining efforts of past 15 years and my whole family lives. I followed through, they were very clever, pulled just the right strings.
But then came the moment when all this could be solved if I just went to the shop and bought... Apple gift card. LOL. But man I felt extremely vulnerable and under tremendous stress during those few hours.
These are mostly cryptocurrency investment scams. More crypto regulation would help, but the so-called crypto industry doesn't want to see that happen because their product has no other utility than enabling this stuff.