Big Picture Discussion: are we losing the war?
Jan 31, 2023 12:43:43 GMT
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Post by musicalneptunian on Jan 31, 2023 12:43:43 GMT
I will start off by sharing yet another article that shows the sophistication that scams have evolved to:
www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-31/record-number-of-west-australians-fall-victim-to-scams-2022/101911182
It's only going to get more convincing. Deep fakes and AI will be the new tools of the scam call centre. I was watching a video about the "virtual hostage" scam; the scammer and an accomplice send a text message that sets up a fake "your relative is being held hostage" scenario and "give us payment" to release them. Sometimes the relative's voice is grabbed off social media to sound more convincing. Imagine adding AI to this; the screaming "relative" could be a totally convincing "hostage". Or add a deep fake hostage video. If I can think of it they can.
Scambaiters are great. But it's like a front line of a war where we advance 1 yard each time we bait someone. The scammers are getting better. What has to happen over the next 5-10 years to give people a fighting chance to not be victims? Some people might say scammer education. But to me that is a losing battle. I would like to see scammer education as part of financial education/literacy at schools. Scams are now so bad that it could be a subject. But as a realist I don't see that happening. The political class doesn't have to care about being scammed; they have so much money that it's meh to them. So the political class has no incentive to change the education system to reduce scamming. There are also practical issues: an old demographic of school teachers who don't know about scamming at all, and the exigencies of a crowded curriculum.
Anyone can be scammed. If you don't believe that I will share this. Last year my Aunt in Manchester sadly passed away. The lawyers dealing with her will hired some genealogists to track down her relatives. I got their email; they had tracked down me, her relative, on the other side of the planet in salubrious Melbourne, Australia. It was a real email. It was NOT a scam. But it COULD have been. Luckily the email contained many things that no scammer would have known or been able to find out. That made it a safe bet. But in this Sherlock Holmes never ending saga of working out what emails are scams, I could always get it wrong.
I don't have a mobile phone. I've never had one. At some point I'll probably have no choice. But the amount of scamming through mobile phones scares the Bejesus out of me. It's a scamming opportunity that I'd rather avoid. If that makes me a troglodyte so be it. Yes, I can hear some people reading this saying "why don't you DO something instead of writing this?" If I weren't busy already narrating books from the 1600s in topic areas that very few people can narrate. I wish that I had the time to take down websites by scammers. But the competition for my time bucket was already filled before I heard about scamming. Nobody else can make the audio books that I make. Mixtures of 1600s English, Latin, and astrology and alchemy diagrams. If I don't make them nobody else will.
I am not optimistic about the bigger picture of scamming. If I do anything to help it's that I educate people to use Linux. A Linux user is harder to scam. It seems to me that to avoid being scammed someone has to think throughout the day "how could I be scammed now?" For instance you are having trouble with your internet. You have to think "will I get by intent or mass spam coincidence someone offering internet "help" and pretending to be from my ISP?" That is not a normal way to think. It's a bit like thinking when you park your car "what are the areas around these shops with tactical opportunities for a petty thief to rob me?" I couldn't function like that if I had to treat my whole life like a Baghdad warzone. I want to live my life.
In short someone has to think like a criminal. That criminal being a scammer.