Yoshkar-Ola, Russia is mentioned there. I'm from Yoshkar-Ola. This kind of scam business exists here at least since the early 2000s. We were once called the capital of such scam business in Russia. I didn't know it's still a thing. One of my acquaintances worked there in around 2005-2007. It was mostly students renting an appartment, rows of PCs. He left right before they were raided by police. Some British individual reported to our authorities and law enforcement acted on it. Never heard about them ever since, before this article.
It's kinda sad that we're associated mostly with Prigozhin in the West (the first thing the OP remembered), although we have other interesting stuff, for example we have probably the last remaining, still practiced pagan religion in Europe: https://hwpi.harvard.edu/pluralismarchive/news/europes-last-...
One warning, this scam, with it's fast timeline and request for funds to be sent to the girlfriend is a classic, but modern scams can be quite different than this.
"pig butchering" scams can run for months of contact with no requests for money, and then instead of asking for money, the user "invests" into what appear initialy to be profitable investments alongside the scammer.
There are downsides to engaging and not engaging, but I’m still on team engage and waste time.
Once they can’t find any true victims in a reasonable amount of time, the industry will disappear (or automate and remove the torture and amplify the attempts 1000x)
> Once they can’t find any true victims in a reasonable amount of time, the industry will disappear
You're wasting more of your time than theirs. Think of it, you've already got your own answer. This is a whole industry and that implies people that work full time. How much time do you spend on this? Have you spent your whole day optimizing your workflow and answers to get an optimal response? Because they most certainly have.
That just makes it seem like you're also exploiting the people who are forced into this, only for a different motive than the ones who forced them into it in the first place. Maybe there's a better way to entertain yourself than this?
But the industry has a business model and if the margins are slim enough the model doesn't work and the industry collapses.
Think about a drive through that serves three rushes in a day, people driving to work, people on theyr lunch break, and people driving home.
If each rush is an hour long how many people would need to DDOS the drive through with frivolous complaints and time wasting bullshit like 'oh let me find my change, just a second... Oops I dropped it sorry, let me get that... Oh I can't open my door can you be a dear and send someone outside to get it?' to completely disrupt the entire rush and therefoe the vital flow of cash?
If I spend twenty minutes on the phone with a scammer while I'm doing house chores like washing dishes and folding laundry that's 20 minutes that the scammer isn't making money.
If he has a 12 hour shift that's only 36 people to completely eliminate his chance of making any revenue.
How many people need to do this to eliminate the profit from this employee?
I used to be somewhat mean to telemarketers, until I learned that some of them are prison laborers - getting paid pennies per hour to work in a prison call center.
That already feels morally un-great, and messing with them further no longer felt like something I could justify.
I agree, and I feel like that goes for everything in general. It's like people who get mad at customer service people - the customer service person has absolutely nothing to do with the product that's giving you grief. Even the telemarketer, as you point out, doesn't want to be there (or even if they do, they may just be there because they have no better options and need to put food on the table).
In life, there are very few situations where being unkind is ever worth it.
And even here on HN, I sometimes get the impulse to argue with someone for whatever they said. What I do is I type out my little comment, then close the tab without actually posting it. Some things are better left unsaid, regardless of how satisfying they'd be to say.
One thing that really stuck with me from the show The Good Place. The premise is that getting into heaven is a points-based system. You get points for doing good things, loose them for doing bad things, and when you die, if you have enough points, you go to heaven.
Spoilers for season 3 ahead
Used to be, for hundreds of years, you'd go visit your mom for her birthday. You'd be walking down the lane and see some wildflowers, so you pick them and bring them to her. +10 points.
In modern society, to do the same you'd drive to the florist and buy some flowers, then drive to your mom's. +10 points. But the PE firm that bought the florist laid of 100s of workers, and -10 points for supporting them. And the flowers were picked by underpaid exploited immigrants, -10 points. And you dumped a bunch of CO2 in the air from your drive and gave a newborn asthma, -10 points.
The show was saying that because of the choices that modern society and late-stage capitalism force upon us, nobody has gone to heaven for decades.
In her book Medicine Stories, Aurora Morales speaks of the impact our participatory existence in an unjust world has on us.
We have to harden our hearts in order to walk by the unhoused, harden our hearts to buy stuff me know is produced by slavery, pretend we don’t see the extortionist, your-money-or-your-life nature of industrialized health services, harden our hearts to the slaughter of billions of animals for the meat industry, pretend we don’t witness the ongoing ecocide and destruction of our only biosphere.
That’s before the daily servings of doom via our doom-monetizing, amygdala-destroying media outlets.
Such levels of ongoing denial and desentization impact us to the point that we live in an increasingly unhealthy state of mass psychosis. We are all freaking out internally, pretending that all is OK externally.
I guess that show has been over for nearly 5 years, but it might still be a good idea to spoiler this reveal for folks who haven't gotten around to it so you don't lose 3 points.
Seriously though, I was super-embarrassed a year or two ago, when I received a phone call and quickly became convinced that some scammer had a hold of me.
I began questioning the poor lady on the phone and she gamely answered all my questions: location, company, including spelling her name and pronouncing it entirely differently. Many answers were quite vague and not satisfying to me at the time. But cold callers will absolutely hang up on that type of treatment!
My ultimate question was asking if she was safe or being trafficked or captive or something, because I noticed there was a dog barking in the background. And she must've been WFH.
Only after I wrote up a detailed play by play of the call and frantically reported it to several of my colleagues,
It turned out to be a totally legitimate call and somebody had authorized the marketing campaign. She just had so little information, she was unable to answer me adequately. I was so embarrassed I can't even tell you.
I should have been clearer that I meant the more-obviously illegal telemarketers, which frankly are the only ones left.
Having said that, I have no moral problem with keeping them on the line and dragging out a conversation without being rude - every minute they're speaking with me is a minute they're not trying to convince my elderly grandmother to switch her power bill to some fly-by-night shitfarm.
>It's like people who get mad at customer service people
Except the customer service people willingly accept a job to act as an in-between so that any appropriate anger at a company is directed at an employee. To what extent do companies purposefully make use of this to prevent outrage directed at them? Back to the original topic, how much do the people leading these scams like pushing the story of the scammers being forced into it, because it increases the empathy that people feel towards the scammers and better allows the scams to continue?
At what point does being kind shift into a sort of pacifist mindset, that while great if everyone used it, creates fertile ground for far worse approaches to human relationships to flourish and spread, leading to the quality of the average approach to human relationships declining?
I used to be mean to scammers and ask if their mother was ashamed of them etc., but I recently tried another tactic and told them I loved them. It works a lot better. One told me his name and where they were located. It costs me nothing to tell them I love them. Maybe they need to hear it.
Many years ago when advance-fee email scams [0] became common I was likewise amazed that anyone would fall for them. Then it was pointed out that the seemingly obvious warning signs were a feature and not a bug, they are there to filter out everyone with a minimum of common sense and ensure that the scammers, who are casting their nets wide, only get responses from a few people but those people who do respond are quite gullible. The pig butchering thing is just a different filter meant to trap a different kind of vulnerable person.
I was scammed out of about $4 when I was kid playing Ragnarök Online. Taught me zero trust. In hindsight, it's a cheap but effective learning experience... well, until I met my now ex-wife.
Kazakh names are typically unique planet-wide. There is a very, very low chance of there being another person with the same name. Chances of finding another person with the same name and the same year of birth are practically zero.
Edit: Seems like this particular combination is not unique after all. Found quite a few people of the same name. Perhaps they chose a victim which can't be found trivially.
Though the name Aidana is Kazakh, the pictures would be more plausible for a member of the Russian minority in Kazakhstan (15% of the population according to Wikipedia). The article doesn't reveal where those pictures were stolen from, does it? And the voice? Typical spam call centre voice ... Philippines?
Romance scams are pretty wild. A few years ago someone attempted to catfish me on hinge by impersonating WWE wrestler Mandy Rose. I think the irony or impersonating a professional wrestler (whose job is to act within an artificially constructed kayfabe universe) was lost on them.
Thanks for this great example of how much metadata can work against the person generating it.
And I also want to thank the author for the wiki regarding the identification of the MUA by the Message-ID, that was a nice new detail I didn't know :)
I thought gmail doesn't disclose sender's IP address? Or I was wrong? This is not good for privacy.
Also, for fingerprinting you can obtain a GPU model via WebGL (helps in detecting a VM), and probably can scan for known browser extensions by trying to fetch extension-specific URLs. Some sites also scan ports on the localhost by trying to connect to them to find out which software is run.
I learned that most email services do attach the IP address of the MUA (that is, the user's computer) if you send through SMTP. I set up an SMTP relay for myself to hide that.
The user's IP address is not attached if you use webmail.
> I thought gmail doesn't disclose sender's IP address? Or I was wrong? This is not good for privacy.
This is not necessarily a Gmail thing, but just how SMTP works. It's not as bad as you'd think though.
SMTP services log the IP address and/or hostname of the remote host, and the address used by the host to identity itself (known as the HELO address). This is the address of the remote SMTP service (known as the MTA), which isn't typically the IP address of the users computer where the email client runs on (known as the MUA).
Under normal circumstances your email client (MUA) connects to your email service provider (MTA), which then sends the email to the MTA of the recipient. So the IP of your MTA (email hosting service), not your MUA (your computer) is exposed.
For example: if you send an email to a Gmail inbox using MS365, the receiver (the Gmail user) would see only the IP-address from Microsoft's outbound SMTP services.
So unless you run your own SMTP service at home, or attempt to directly connect with the receiving MTA using SMTP, your IP address won't be exposed.
If you send through a MUA (like Thunderbird) that uses Gmail's SMTP then Gmail do expose your IP address. Most other email providers do the same.
> Under normal circumstances your email client (MUA) connects to your email service provider (MTA), which then sends the email to the MTA of the recipient. So the IP of your MTA (email hosting service), not your MUA (your computer) is exposed.
This is incorrect, most email providers' MTA includes the MUA's IP address in the headers.
A bit of a missed opportunity with the war in Ukraine. He could have expressed pro-Ukraine sentiment and the (most likely Russian) scammer could have echoed them back and possibly be caught in a FSB dragnet.
The fact that the scammer was in Russia was pretty credible. It'd be pretty odd for a scammer in Myanmar to alter the metadata to appear as to be from Russia and not from Kazakhstan as the "woman" claimed to be.
Ha, with AI scammer traps (e.g [1]), it'll be AI lying to other AI, trillions of CPU cycles wasted accomplishing nothing other than speeding up the destruction of the planet.
I suppose one can then declare the mission accomplished: zero scammers left on the planet.
> Ha, with AI scammer traps (e.g [1]), it'll be AI lying to other AI, trillions of CPU cycles wasted accomplishing nothing other than speeding up the destruction of the planet.
Reminds me of a small part of Neal Stephenson's "Anathem".
Its also important to get the maximum engagement from the scammer. Text produced is work and time. This is the only thing you can cost them, so its time to engage chatgpt and have them stuck in a telenovella.
Modern lawyers use preproduced text blocks for their letters. I would like to believe, that scammers do the same. Probably they even have figured out what phrases are the most effective for good engagement.
Their early emails are often boilerplate, but once you get them out of their opening book, they have to write their own emails. I've often seen in advance fee scams, after the first few emails, there's a sudden decrease in the quality of the text, that's how you know they're writing their own emails
The article might have been updated, but it addresses your point now. This particular scam used emails consisting of one persinalized paragraph + a few slightly randomized paragraphs straight from the playbook.
Growing up in the cold war, we always heard of "Mail order brides from Russia".
In 2008 I had a disastrous international romance that began on an MMORPG.
It was then that I learned that mail order bride companies often mediated between prospective girlfriends and the men overseas, and they actually protected both sides from scams or utter heartbreak. They made secure matches if they were reputable and they were able to arrange romances, or visas, immigration or whatever was being looked for.
Their clients alone would never have the resources to research and verify and vet one another.
It may have been a backpage, craigslist, back alley sort of operation, but perhaps sometimes it actually worked?
"Although I was invested in this project, I definitely wasn't "flirty sex chat with some random scammer" levels of invested. The thought also dawned on me that part of their playbook could even involve "Aidana" calling for phone sex.
Either would be crossing lines that I didn't want to cross, meaning that I'd stumbled upon an unexpected 4th rule of engagement: don't talk dirty with scammers."
Every few weeks I'll get a DM on Discord where they try to sell me some art. Of course they never have any public portfolio and don't identify themselves further. Usually I ask them directly "what's the scam this time" or similar and they always reply along the lines of "I'm not scammer. I'm real!". Haven't had the patience to find out how the scam eventually works.
I don't know about that region, or whether they were trying to create a breakfast that would sound classy but credible to a Westerner.
However, I can say from first hand experience that home cooked Russian breakfasts in Vladivostok were mind bending. As an American, when I eat breakfast but it's a small and simple affair. A cup of oatmeal and some coffee, maybe eggs if I feel ambitious.
The Russians I stayed with made hela breakfast every morning. Like a huge potluck dinner made from recognizable ingredients in very unexpected combinations. While I'm sure they were spoiling me a little because I was a guest, it was always the biggest meal of the day. One memorable example was buttered noodles and meatballs, bread, butter, cheese, cucumber slices, coffee and tea with condensed sweetened milk, and even a little dark chocolate for desert. I'm probably forgetting more stuff.
Also the kids (10 and 8) drank coffee! I think they were mostly in it for the sweetened condensed milk though.
It's probably more that most Americans typically have very little for breakfast.
Around here, cornbread and sausage gravy, coffee (milk or tea for my teenager) is a not-uncommon Saturday breakfast. I think I made a variety of muffins last weekend. Or home-made corned beef hash with scrambled eggs, etc. You get the idea.
OTOH, during the week it's probably something simple like a sausage patty on a toasted English muffin, maybe with a scrambled egg (my version of a McMuffin). Or cereal if I'm not feeling it.
I have had Caesar and other salads for breakfast. Salads are really delicious when you don't want a heavy meal and they're quick and easy to make.
I’m okay with a heavy breakfast. It’s the mixture of Caesar salad, omelette and coffee that doesn’t sit well with me. I’ll take some cold romaine lettuce with my eggs, or some hot spinach, but something about Caesar salad - maybe the dressing? - feels distinctly “lunch or dinner only” to me.
There's a message encouraging Russian visitors to not support the war in Ukraine. If your antivirus is flagging any Cyrillic text, that's a bit overzealous IMO.
I strongly believe that overseas scammers should be treated as enemy combatants of the United States and neutralized with loitering munitions just like an ISIS terrorist would be.
I've never quite understood this sort of anti-scammer content and what its appeal is to readers. There are a million YouTube videos and other articles out there that explain, analyze, as well as mock[1] and denigrate scammers - who are essentially modern day slaves [2].
Yesterday someone tried to hack my WhatsApp. He call me and said something like:
> Hello! I'm from phone company $Name. Someone tried to register your WhatsApp number form $Another_city. We are calling to confirm because otherwise we will have to block your phone line with $Name.
The first problem was that $Name was not my phone company. I though it was a "change company" call that is worse than a scam because it's real and is done by the phone companies. They even let children accept the company change. So I said that I didn't authorize any change to anything. He replied that:
> You are in WhatsApp group $Something and if you don't confirm we will have to block your phone line with $Name.
Weird pause because I was in group $Something! And he continued:
> We will send you now an SMS with a code to confirm your identity, because if we don't get the confirmation we will have to block your phone line with $Name.
I hang up.
I got a SMS from WhatsApp with a secret number to install WhatsApp in a new device, that explicitly says that I should not share the number with anyone.
They probably hacked the account of other member of group $Something. The main plan is to send money request to other persons in the group. Our bank system is quite modern and everyone has in their phone an app from the bank to transfer money instantly for free. (I have not seen a dead-tree check in decades.)
So today I have zero sympathy for scammers. Moreover, I think the employees of the call centers of the real companies here have worse working conditions than the scammer here. And neither of them are in almost slavery conditions.
(From time to time we have police investigations of slavery conditions but mostly for forced prostitution and ilegal cloth factories. It's a real problem but not in the scammer area.)
The article mentions that the call centres in Myanmar were targeting Chinese and Americans, so although the call centers are very far away the people they are scamming might be a lot closer. Its a very international problem.)
Depending on group privacy, they may be able to identify members without joining it (i.e. no need to hack someone else in the group).
I haven’t kept up on WhatsApp research but at some point this was true - same goes for online status and avatars. I have those set to “nobody” and “default.”
WhatsApp makes it way too easy to go from “phone number” to “real person online at X, Y, Z hours.”
I can think of three things: serving as a guide, serving to raise awareness, and entertainment.
On the "serving as a guide" part, some people are activists and subscribe to the idea that if they are wasting a scammer's time, this means the scammer has one victim fewer.
On the raising awareness side, there are absolutely plenty of YouTube videos, but it's always good to educate people before they become targets. The psychological and financial impact of getting scammed can be devastating. Raised awareness could also prompt the authorities to crack down on scam centers.
On the entertainment side - some people just get a kick out of it.
Additionally, this particular article breaks down the various tactics used and teaches the reader to identify them.
It’s a form of “justice porn”. You’re right that these scammers are victims themselves. But seeing how they treat vulnerable groups (particularly less tech savvy, trusting, older people - which may well be your mom one day) is absolutely fucking vile.
Also, some anti-scammer YouTubers are legitimately very skilled and entertaining to watch. Kitboga is the first that comes to mind. He has all these voices, characters, sound effects - and takes scammers on quite some adventures. Pretty funny.
This deserves some nuance. Much of the scam-baiting content - in fact, all of the ones I'd seen until this post - revolves around tech support scams, advance fee scams and the likes, which unlike these romance scams are generally not done by slaves.
Scammer Payback's videos always include footage from the surveillance cameras. At least the scammers he and his crew target don't use slavery - that's more of a problem in Burma/Myanmar, not in India where many tech scammers are.
Didn't know, are they individuals working independently with some 'services' to provide targets/money laundering or are they part of organized crime or payroll? I am curious in the support structures they are embedded in.
SP gives tales on that in pretty much every video. It's usually messenger apps where the coordination happens - scammers share and sell lists of leads, marks and mules, with different prices for "verified susceptible" targets, there's regional groups (even on Facebook lol) where scam ringleaders and potential agents meet, and yes there's payroll and even legit shift work.
In the worst cases, legitimate companies sublet their office space to scammers - the day shift are regular callcenter employees that do fully legitimate consulting/support/outsourcing stuff, and in the night the scammer crews roll in. Utterly absurd to watch, and police usually doesn't do shit because they're paid off.
I posted it because I find awareness of these scams is useful. If you have older relatives or friends you might want to be ready if they report a new online relationship.
I also don’t spend much time on YouTube so a blog post is good for people who don’t want to take the time warning a video.
Based on crime research, it seems that most organized crime is composed of modern day slaves, with varied degree of slavery. The most extreme are those that involve trafficking. It is a key distinction of the lowest level of their hierarchy, including the aspect that the lowest levels do most of the hands on work and most/all of the interaction with victims.
I view articles like this to be similar to those that explain and analyze the behavior of foot solders in street gangs. Who do they approach, how, what strategy do they employ to build trust, and how do they avoid detection.
In this case, if the scammer is from Russia there is likely no trafficking involved (except maybe for the woman who called on the phone because she did not sound Russian to me).
Unrestrained empathy is self-destruction. Being a victim is not a blanket excuse for the act of victimizing others. There is no easy, feel-good solution to this problem.
Are you maybe falling into the trap of being surprised at other people not yet knowing what you know? "Today's ten thousand" as it's called in xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/
If you're not already jaded with the topic, it's really interesting! There's a lot of detail and nuance to it, and yeah, there's some satisfaction in seeing the bad guys get foiled for once.
This particular investigation doesn't actually mock or denigrate the scammers. The author sets a strict rule at the very start:
Techniques not people: the aim of this is not to identify the individuals behind the scams, it's to see how they work.
That doesn't actually rule out mockery, but they don't engage in it anyway (beyond a "cheeky bastards" aside, which in any case is more about acknowledging their chutzpah).
scams are not acceptable, no matter who's performing it
> I've never quite understood this sort of anti-scammer content and what its appeal is to readers.
mocking is a very effective way to raise awareness of the issue, it delivers information on how scammers act and how to understand you're being scammed, and make that information stick.
making that kind of scam inefficient is a very good way (entertaining, non-violent, essentially harmless to scammer) to make the phenomenon disappear.
Yoshkar-Ola, Russia is mentioned there. I'm from Yoshkar-Ola. This kind of scam business exists here at least since the early 2000s. We were once called the capital of such scam business in Russia. I didn't know it's still a thing. One of my acquaintances worked there in around 2005-2007. It was mostly students renting an appartment, rows of PCs. He left right before they were raided by police. Some British individual reported to our authorities and law enforcement acted on it. Never heard about them ever since, before this article.
It's kinda sad that we're associated mostly with Prigozhin in the West (the first thing the OP remembered), although we have other interesting stuff, for example we have probably the last remaining, still practiced pagan religion in Europe: https://hwpi.harvard.edu/pluralismarchive/news/europes-last-...
One warning, this scam, with it's fast timeline and request for funds to be sent to the girlfriend is a classic, but modern scams can be quite different than this.
"pig butchering" scams can run for months of contact with no requests for money, and then instead of asking for money, the user "invests" into what appear initialy to be profitable investments alongside the scammer.
The people doing the pig butchering are themselves trafficked and working in horrendous slavery conditions in Cambodia:
https://theconversation.com/pig-butchering-fraud-the-link-be...
https://restofworld.org/2022/cambodias-scam-mills/
I stopped trying to mess with them and string them along after I heard about this.
There are downsides to engaging and not engaging, but I’m still on team engage and waste time.
Once they can’t find any true victims in a reasonable amount of time, the industry will disappear (or automate and remove the torture and amplify the attempts 1000x)
> Once they can’t find any true victims in a reasonable amount of time, the industry will disappear
You're wasting more of your time than theirs. Think of it, you've already got your own answer. This is a whole industry and that implies people that work full time. How much time do you spend on this? Have you spent your whole day optimizing your workflow and answers to get an optimal response? Because they most certainly have.
Finding out how to keep them on the line longer is part of the fun.
That just makes it seem like you're also exploiting the people who are forced into this, only for a different motive than the ones who forced them into it in the first place. Maybe there's a better way to entertain yourself than this?
...let me pass you to my brother...
But the industry has a business model and if the margins are slim enough the model doesn't work and the industry collapses.
Think about a drive through that serves three rushes in a day, people driving to work, people on theyr lunch break, and people driving home.
If each rush is an hour long how many people would need to DDOS the drive through with frivolous complaints and time wasting bullshit like 'oh let me find my change, just a second... Oops I dropped it sorry, let me get that... Oh I can't open my door can you be a dear and send someone outside to get it?' to completely disrupt the entire rush and therefoe the vital flow of cash?
If I spend twenty minutes on the phone with a scammer while I'm doing house chores like washing dishes and folding laundry that's 20 minutes that the scammer isn't making money.
If he has a 12 hour shift that's only 36 people to completely eliminate his chance of making any revenue.
How many people need to do this to eliminate the profit from this employee?
I used to be somewhat mean to telemarketers, until I learned that some of them are prison laborers - getting paid pennies per hour to work in a prison call center.
That already feels morally un-great, and messing with them further no longer felt like something I could justify.
I agree, and I feel like that goes for everything in general. It's like people who get mad at customer service people - the customer service person has absolutely nothing to do with the product that's giving you grief. Even the telemarketer, as you point out, doesn't want to be there (or even if they do, they may just be there because they have no better options and need to put food on the table).
In life, there are very few situations where being unkind is ever worth it.
And even here on HN, I sometimes get the impulse to argue with someone for whatever they said. What I do is I type out my little comment, then close the tab without actually posting it. Some things are better left unsaid, regardless of how satisfying they'd be to say.
One thing that really stuck with me from the show The Good Place. The premise is that getting into heaven is a points-based system. You get points for doing good things, loose them for doing bad things, and when you die, if you have enough points, you go to heaven.
Spoilers for season 3 ahead
Used to be, for hundreds of years, you'd go visit your mom for her birthday. You'd be walking down the lane and see some wildflowers, so you pick them and bring them to her. +10 points.
In modern society, to do the same you'd drive to the florist and buy some flowers, then drive to your mom's. +10 points. But the PE firm that bought the florist laid of 100s of workers, and -10 points for supporting them. And the flowers were picked by underpaid exploited immigrants, -10 points. And you dumped a bunch of CO2 in the air from your drive and gave a newborn asthma, -10 points.
The show was saying that because of the choices that modern society and late-stage capitalism force upon us, nobody has gone to heaven for decades.
In her book Medicine Stories, Aurora Morales speaks of the impact our participatory existence in an unjust world has on us.
We have to harden our hearts in order to walk by the unhoused, harden our hearts to buy stuff me know is produced by slavery, pretend we don’t see the extortionist, your-money-or-your-life nature of industrialized health services, harden our hearts to the slaughter of billions of animals for the meat industry, pretend we don’t witness the ongoing ecocide and destruction of our only biosphere.
That’s before the daily servings of doom via our doom-monetizing, amygdala-destroying media outlets.
Such levels of ongoing denial and desentization impact us to the point that we live in an increasingly unhealthy state of mass psychosis. We are all freaking out internally, pretending that all is OK externally.
I guess that show has been over for nearly 5 years, but it might still be a good idea to spoiler this reveal for folks who haven't gotten around to it so you don't lose 3 points.
Good idea. HN doesn't have a spoiler tag, but I added a warning.
Freezes; looks around Hackernews...
Wait a minute... THIS is The Bad Place!!!
Seriously though, I was super-embarrassed a year or two ago, when I received a phone call and quickly became convinced that some scammer had a hold of me.
I began questioning the poor lady on the phone and she gamely answered all my questions: location, company, including spelling her name and pronouncing it entirely differently. Many answers were quite vague and not satisfying to me at the time. But cold callers will absolutely hang up on that type of treatment!
My ultimate question was asking if she was safe or being trafficked or captive or something, because I noticed there was a dog barking in the background. And she must've been WFH.
Only after I wrote up a detailed play by play of the call and frantically reported it to several of my colleagues,
It turned out to be a totally legitimate call and somebody had authorized the marketing campaign. She just had so little information, she was unable to answer me adequately. I was so embarrassed I can't even tell you.
I should have been clearer that I meant the more-obviously illegal telemarketers, which frankly are the only ones left.
Having said that, I have no moral problem with keeping them on the line and dragging out a conversation without being rude - every minute they're speaking with me is a minute they're not trying to convince my elderly grandmother to switch her power bill to some fly-by-night shitfarm.
>It's like people who get mad at customer service people
Except the customer service people willingly accept a job to act as an in-between so that any appropriate anger at a company is directed at an employee. To what extent do companies purposefully make use of this to prevent outrage directed at them? Back to the original topic, how much do the people leading these scams like pushing the story of the scammers being forced into it, because it increases the empathy that people feel towards the scammers and better allows the scams to continue?
At what point does being kind shift into a sort of pacifist mindset, that while great if everyone used it, creates fertile ground for far worse approaches to human relationships to flourish and spread, leading to the quality of the average approach to human relationships declining?
What if everyone started responding with aggressive encouragements, "Escape!" "Run from that place," "Murder your overlords, you outnumber them!"
I used to be mean to scammers and ask if their mother was ashamed of them etc., but I recently tried another tactic and told them I loved them. It works a lot better. One told me his name and where they were located. It costs me nothing to tell them I love them. Maybe they need to hear it.
The cynic in me is wondering if this is them attempting to swap to another tactic to establish a different relationship with the same end goal.
I can confirm. Someone I know went there for "job abroad" via an "agent" and then came back after knowing what it truly was. It's common in India
I suppose it's good news that AI will displace these humans ?
Removed as my context was incorrect
I ask them to invest in an alt coin I'm launching and then they stop talking to me.
Sad example of out rural kansas: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/21/cryptocurrency-shan-hanes-pi...
I think at this point pig butchering is so famous that if you fall for it you'd fall for any scam.
Many years ago when advance-fee email scams [0] became common I was likewise amazed that anyone would fall for them. Then it was pointed out that the seemingly obvious warning signs were a feature and not a bug, they are there to filter out everyone with a minimum of common sense and ensure that the scammers, who are casting their nets wide, only get responses from a few people but those people who do respond are quite gullible. The pig butchering thing is just a different filter meant to trap a different kind of vulnerable person.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam
I have literally never heard of it before this thread.
If only that was true. In reality, outside of the more online-fraud-savvy demographics...
Getting scammed on Runescape should be part of the school curriculum.
I was scammed out of about $4 when I was kid playing Ragnarök Online. Taught me zero trust. In hindsight, it's a cheap but effective learning experience... well, until I met my now ex-wife.
At least know that I have trust in your humor and sense of smiling in the face of adversity.
Kazakh names are typically unique planet-wide. There is a very, very low chance of there being another person with the same name. Chances of finding another person with the same name and the same year of birth are practically zero.
Edit: Seems like this particular combination is not unique after all. Found quite a few people of the same name. Perhaps they chose a victim which can't be found trivially.
Though the name Aidana is Kazakh, the pictures would be more plausible for a member of the Russian minority in Kazakhstan (15% of the population according to Wikipedia). The article doesn't reveal where those pictures were stolen from, does it? And the voice? Typical spam call centre voice ... Philippines?
Sounds clearly Russian to me. Russian spoken in Yoshkar-Ola I guess.
nothing like Russian, South Asian maybe
Romance scams are pretty wild. A few years ago someone attempted to catfish me on hinge by impersonating WWE wrestler Mandy Rose. I think the irony or impersonating a professional wrestler (whose job is to act within an artificially constructed kayfabe universe) was lost on them.
I ended up turning the exchange into an interactive website: https://0ms.co/sexydating
Thanks for this great example of how much metadata can work against the person generating it.
And I also want to thank the author for the wiki regarding the identification of the MUA by the Message-ID, that was a nice new detail I didn't know :)
Yeah, a pass with some exif scrubbing software would've gone a long way here.
They probably just don't care though because not doing so doesn't really risk anything.
Anyone sophisticated enough to even look at the exif data is not a good mark.
I thought gmail doesn't disclose sender's IP address? Or I was wrong? This is not good for privacy.
Also, for fingerprinting you can obtain a GPU model via WebGL (helps in detecting a VM), and probably can scan for known browser extensions by trying to fetch extension-specific URLs. Some sites also scan ports on the localhost by trying to connect to them to find out which software is run.
>I thought gmail doesn't disclose sender's IP address? Or I was wrong? This is not good for privacy.
The IP address is the smtp server of course, not the individual user.
I learned that most email services do attach the IP address of the MUA (that is, the user's computer) if you send through SMTP. I set up an SMTP relay for myself to hide that.
The user's IP address is not attached if you use webmail.
> I thought gmail doesn't disclose sender's IP address? Or I was wrong? This is not good for privacy.
This is not necessarily a Gmail thing, but just how SMTP works. It's not as bad as you'd think though.
SMTP services log the IP address and/or hostname of the remote host, and the address used by the host to identity itself (known as the HELO address). This is the address of the remote SMTP service (known as the MTA), which isn't typically the IP address of the users computer where the email client runs on (known as the MUA).
Under normal circumstances your email client (MUA) connects to your email service provider (MTA), which then sends the email to the MTA of the recipient. So the IP of your MTA (email hosting service), not your MUA (your computer) is exposed.
For example: if you send an email to a Gmail inbox using MS365, the receiver (the Gmail user) would see only the IP-address from Microsoft's outbound SMTP services.
So unless you run your own SMTP service at home, or attempt to directly connect with the receiving MTA using SMTP, your IP address won't be exposed.
If you send through a MUA (like Thunderbird) that uses Gmail's SMTP then Gmail do expose your IP address. Most other email providers do the same.
> Under normal circumstances your email client (MUA) connects to your email service provider (MTA), which then sends the email to the MTA of the recipient. So the IP of your MTA (email hosting service), not your MUA (your computer) is exposed.
This is incorrect, most email providers' MTA includes the MUA's IP address in the headers.
Now i think it doesn't but it did as recent as in 2014, in a Received header like the one in the article.
It still does, just tested it.
Pretty sure that gmail doesn't disclose a useful email address when using web version of gmail, is that right?
Every message International 1 cent.. and doing nothing against the scaming is promoting deglobalization.
A bit of a missed opportunity with the war in Ukraine. He could have expressed pro-Ukraine sentiment and the (most likely Russian) scammer could have echoed them back and possibly be caught in a FSB dragnet.
It was probably a Chinese slave in a Myanmar boiler room.
Romance scammers and “pig butchering” scams are usually run by Asian gangs. Nasty folks.
The “good” news, however, is that AI is likely to make a big impact, here, and reduce the need to kidnap poor folks.
The fact that the scammer was in Russia was pretty credible. It'd be pretty odd for a scammer in Myanmar to alter the metadata to appear as to be from Russia and not from Kazakhstan as the "woman" claimed to be.
Good point.
Ha, with AI scammer traps (e.g [1]), it'll be AI lying to other AI, trillions of CPU cycles wasted accomplishing nothing other than speeding up the destruction of the planet.
I suppose one can then declare the mission accomplished: zero scammers left on the planet.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV_SdCfZ-0s
> trillions of CPU cycles wasted accomplishing nothing other than speeding up the destruction of the planet.
Also known as "advertising".
> Ha, with AI scammer traps (e.g [1]), it'll be AI lying to other AI, trillions of CPU cycles wasted accomplishing nothing other than speeding up the destruction of the planet.
Reminds me of a small part of Neal Stephenson's "Anathem".
Or maybe a bit of Peter Watts' Rifters trilogy.
Man, not even slaves are needed for scams anymore. Sad to see job losses even there... /s
Its also important to get the maximum engagement from the scammer. Text produced is work and time. This is the only thing you can cost them, so its time to engage chatgpt and have them stuck in a telenovella.
Modern lawyers use preproduced text blocks for their letters. I would like to believe, that scammers do the same. Probably they even have figured out what phrases are the most effective for good engagement.
Their early emails are often boilerplate, but once you get them out of their opening book, they have to write their own emails. I've often seen in advance fee scams, after the first few emails, there's a sudden decrease in the quality of the text, that's how you know they're writing their own emails
The article might have been updated, but it addresses your point now. This particular scam used emails consisting of one persinalized paragraph + a few slightly randomized paragraphs straight from the playbook.
Growing up in the cold war, we always heard of "Mail order brides from Russia".
In 2008 I had a disastrous international romance that began on an MMORPG.
It was then that I learned that mail order bride companies often mediated between prospective girlfriends and the men overseas, and they actually protected both sides from scams or utter heartbreak. They made secure matches if they were reputable and they were able to arrange romances, or visas, immigration or whatever was being looked for.
Their clients alone would never have the resources to research and verify and vet one another.
It may have been a backpage, craigslist, back alley sort of operation, but perhaps sometimes it actually worked?
Hail Melania
"Although I was invested in this project, I definitely wasn't "flirty sex chat with some random scammer" levels of invested. The thought also dawned on me that part of their playbook could even involve "Aidana" calling for phone sex.
Either would be crossing lines that I didn't want to cross, meaning that I'd stumbled upon an unexpected 4th rule of engagement: don't talk dirty with scammers."
Rules of life to live by.
The opening email is hilarious
"I am true woman! Scammers are bad!"
Every few weeks I'll get a DM on Discord where they try to sell me some art. Of course they never have any public portfolio and don't identify themselves further. Usually I ask them directly "what's the scam this time" or similar and they always reply along the lines of "I'm not scammer. I'm real!". Haven't had the patience to find out how the scam eventually works.
For me the most off-putting email was the one describing her favorite breakfast of an omelette, Caesar salad and coffee. Gross!
I don't know about that region, or whether they were trying to create a breakfast that would sound classy but credible to a Westerner.
However, I can say from first hand experience that home cooked Russian breakfasts in Vladivostok were mind bending. As an American, when I eat breakfast but it's a small and simple affair. A cup of oatmeal and some coffee, maybe eggs if I feel ambitious.
The Russians I stayed with made hela breakfast every morning. Like a huge potluck dinner made from recognizable ingredients in very unexpected combinations. While I'm sure they were spoiling me a little because I was a guest, it was always the biggest meal of the day. One memorable example was buttered noodles and meatballs, bread, butter, cheese, cucumber slices, coffee and tea with condensed sweetened milk, and even a little dark chocolate for desert. I'm probably forgetting more stuff.
Also the kids (10 and 8) drank coffee! I think they were mostly in it for the sweetened condensed milk though.
That was an awesome breakfast for sure.
It's probably more that most Americans typically have very little for breakfast.
Around here, cornbread and sausage gravy, coffee (milk or tea for my teenager) is a not-uncommon Saturday breakfast. I think I made a variety of muffins last weekend. Or home-made corned beef hash with scrambled eggs, etc. You get the idea.
OTOH, during the week it's probably something simple like a sausage patty on a toasted English muffin, maybe with a scrambled egg (my version of a McMuffin). Or cereal if I'm not feeling it.
I have had Caesar and other salads for breakfast. Salads are really delicious when you don't want a heavy meal and they're quick and easy to make.
I’m okay with a heavy breakfast. It’s the mixture of Caesar salad, omelette and coffee that doesn’t sit well with me. I’ll take some cold romaine lettuce with my eggs, or some hot spinach, but something about Caesar salad - maybe the dressing? - feels distinctly “lunch or dinner only” to me.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
They are so greedy, it didn't take me much effort to run a successful phishing campaign against multiple scammers a few years ago, when I got bored.
This website tries to deliver a trojan payload.
Which one? HN? TFA? Any of the scammy subdomains mentioned therein?
The site linked by the article.
It does not. If you believe otherwise, elaborate on your claim.
My antivirus blocked loading the site, identifying a trojan payload, using Russian text. That's as far as I went.
There's a message encouraging Russian visitors to not support the war in Ukraine. If your antivirus is flagging any Cyrillic text, that's a bit overzealous IMO.
Kapersky, perhaps? Flagging an antiwar message as dangerous?
I strongly believe that overseas scammers should be treated as enemy combatants of the United States and neutralized with loitering munitions just like an ISIS terrorist would be.
From another comment:
The people doing the pig butchering are themselves trafficked and working in horrendous slavery conditions in Cambodia:
https://theconversation.com/pig-butchering-fraud-the-link-be...
https://restofworld.org/2022/cambodias-scam-mills/
---
Thank god a bloodthirsty ignoramus like you is not in charge of the military.
I've never quite understood this sort of anti-scammer content and what its appeal is to readers. There are a million YouTube videos and other articles out there that explain, analyze, as well as mock[1] and denigrate scammers - who are essentially modern day slaves [2].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWzz3NeDz3E [2]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-02/human-trafficking-vie...
Hi from Argentina!
Yesterday someone tried to hack my WhatsApp. He call me and said something like:
> Hello! I'm from phone company $Name. Someone tried to register your WhatsApp number form $Another_city. We are calling to confirm because otherwise we will have to block your phone line with $Name.
The first problem was that $Name was not my phone company. I though it was a "change company" call that is worse than a scam because it's real and is done by the phone companies. They even let children accept the company change. So I said that I didn't authorize any change to anything. He replied that:
> You are in WhatsApp group $Something and if you don't confirm we will have to block your phone line with $Name.
Weird pause because I was in group $Something! And he continued:
> We will send you now an SMS with a code to confirm your identity, because if we don't get the confirmation we will have to block your phone line with $Name.
I hang up.
I got a SMS from WhatsApp with a secret number to install WhatsApp in a new device, that explicitly says that I should not share the number with anyone.
They probably hacked the account of other member of group $Something. The main plan is to send money request to other persons in the group. Our bank system is quite modern and everyone has in their phone an app from the bank to transfer money instantly for free. (I have not seen a dead-tree check in decades.)
So today I have zero sympathy for scammers. Moreover, I think the employees of the call centers of the real companies here have worse working conditions than the scammer here. And neither of them are in almost slavery conditions.
(From time to time we have police investigations of slavery conditions but mostly for forced prostitution and ilegal cloth factories. It's a real problem but not in the scammer area.)
(Last month there was a crackdown that freed over 7000 call centre slaves in Myanmar.
In that operation those freed actually ended up in a kind of captive holding situation https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/southeast-asia/myanmar-sc...
The article mentions that the call centres in Myanmar were targeting Chinese and Americans, so although the call centers are very far away the people they are scamming might be a lot closer. Its a very international problem.)
Depending on group privacy, they may be able to identify members without joining it (i.e. no need to hack someone else in the group).
I haven’t kept up on WhatsApp research but at some point this was true - same goes for online status and avatars. I have those set to “nobody” and “default.”
WhatsApp makes it way too easy to go from “phone number” to “real person online at X, Y, Z hours.”
I can think of three things: serving as a guide, serving to raise awareness, and entertainment.
On the "serving as a guide" part, some people are activists and subscribe to the idea that if they are wasting a scammer's time, this means the scammer has one victim fewer.
On the raising awareness side, there are absolutely plenty of YouTube videos, but it's always good to educate people before they become targets. The psychological and financial impact of getting scammed can be devastating. Raised awareness could also prompt the authorities to crack down on scam centers.
On the entertainment side - some people just get a kick out of it.
Additionally, this particular article breaks down the various tactics used and teaches the reader to identify them.
It’s a form of “justice porn”. You’re right that these scammers are victims themselves. But seeing how they treat vulnerable groups (particularly less tech savvy, trusting, older people - which may well be your mom one day) is absolutely fucking vile.
Also, some anti-scammer YouTubers are legitimately very skilled and entertaining to watch. Kitboga is the first that comes to mind. He has all these voices, characters, sound effects - and takes scammers on quite some adventures. Pretty funny.
This deserves some nuance. Much of the scam-baiting content - in fact, all of the ones I'd seen until this post - revolves around tech support scams, advance fee scams and the likes, which unlike these romance scams are generally not done by slaves.
How do you know they are not done by slaves?
Scammer Payback's videos always include footage from the surveillance cameras. At least the scammers he and his crew target don't use slavery - that's more of a problem in Burma/Myanmar, not in India where many tech scammers are.
Didn't know, are they individuals working independently with some 'services' to provide targets/money laundering or are they part of organized crime or payroll? I am curious in the support structures they are embedded in.
SP gives tales on that in pretty much every video. It's usually messenger apps where the coordination happens - scammers share and sell lists of leads, marks and mules, with different prices for "verified susceptible" targets, there's regional groups (even on Facebook lol) where scam ringleaders and potential agents meet, and yes there's payroll and even legit shift work.
In the worst cases, legitimate companies sublet their office space to scammers - the day shift are regular callcenter employees that do fully legitimate consulting/support/outsourcing stuff, and in the night the scammer crews roll in. Utterly absurd to watch, and police usually doesn't do shit because they're paid off.
I posted it because I find awareness of these scams is useful. If you have older relatives or friends you might want to be ready if they report a new online relationship.
I also don’t spend much time on YouTube so a blog post is good for people who don’t want to take the time warning a video.
Based on crime research, it seems that most organized crime is composed of modern day slaves, with varied degree of slavery. The most extreme are those that involve trafficking. It is a key distinction of the lowest level of their hierarchy, including the aspect that the lowest levels do most of the hands on work and most/all of the interaction with victims.
I view articles like this to be similar to those that explain and analyze the behavior of foot solders in street gangs. Who do they approach, how, what strategy do they employ to build trust, and how do they avoid detection.
In this case, if the scammer is from Russia there is likely no trafficking involved (except maybe for the woman who called on the phone because she did not sound Russian to me).
Unrestrained empathy is self-destruction. Being a victim is not a blanket excuse for the act of victimizing others. There is no easy, feel-good solution to this problem.
Are you maybe falling into the trap of being surprised at other people not yet knowing what you know? "Today's ten thousand" as it's called in xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/
If you're not already jaded with the topic, it's really interesting! There's a lot of detail and nuance to it, and yeah, there's some satisfaction in seeing the bad guys get foiled for once.
This particular investigation doesn't actually mock or denigrate the scammers. The author sets a strict rule at the very start:
Techniques not people: the aim of this is not to identify the individuals behind the scams, it's to see how they work.
That doesn't actually rule out mockery, but they don't engage in it anyway (beyond a "cheeky bastards" aside, which in any case is more about acknowledging their chutzpah).
> who are essentially modern day slaves
scams are not acceptable, no matter who's performing it
> I've never quite understood this sort of anti-scammer content and what its appeal is to readers.
mocking is a very effective way to raise awareness of the issue, it delivers information on how scammers act and how to understand you're being scammed, and make that information stick.
making that kind of scam inefficient is a very good way (entertaining, non-violent, essentially harmless to scammer) to make the phenomenon disappear.
Then the telecom industry is responsible for blocking it, or perhaps is liable for damages caused by the slavery.
Same, better to think about ways to actually help them than mock them.