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-...
Yoshkar-Ola itself is a forgery, just google for its photos and name of that embankment street (no offence, just kidding, I even kinda like it, hope they didn't destroy some valuable authentic architecture to build it).
I've happened to visit the city on a few occasions since 2000, before and after. They didn't destroy anything valuable (I think) as it was pretty generic before, but that fake embankment is bizarrely out of place indeed. They even have a bootleg Neuschwanstein castle, which is kind of ironic, considering that the original is also closer to being a forgery than to some authentic medieval castle.
Prigozhin visited one of our prisons once; that’s the only violence there is. The paganism is not Slavic, it's Uralic. Local indigenous people are related to the Finns.
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.
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.
"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."
I used to believe this. But I have since changed my mind. Corporations train their reps to actively stonewall and frustrate you and hope you go away while they screw up your finances, travel, healthcare and deny you things you paid for.
A couple years ago, I was on the return flight from France to the US with wife and kid in tow. At the airport, I learned that the flight was a code-share. The airline I had booked with was meaningless. Meaning, the seats that I had paid extra for so we could sit together was no longer the seats that I picked. Even though I spent extra money to get what I asked for, I wasn't getting it because the real airline said <random paragraphs of verbiage>. Meaning myself, wife, and kid would no longer be sitting together on an 8 hour flight despite me paying extra for it, five months in advance.
So I performed what I called my "angry frustrated customer routine". I became loud and agitated several times at the airport. Until I got my way and got what I had paid for.
> Corporations train their reps to actively stonewall and frustrate you and hope you go away while they screw up your finances, travel, healthcare and deny you things you paid for.
And how much choice do those reps have? Their choice is "follow the playbook" or "go out and find a new job".
It sounds like you yelled at someone who was not responsible for your original issue. You weren't performing. You were being.
>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?
> 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?
My feelings of pity towards the people being literally enslaved don't mean I don't want the scams to stop, or for the people to be liberated.
It just means I don't scream profanities at someone who had their passport stolen.
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.
Thanks for bringing this up, sums up how I feel about life.
And underlines one of my biggest realisations of recent times: depression is a valid/natural response to helplessness and a world of injustice...
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 wouldn't be embarrassed. I'd be embarrassed on their behalf, maybe, for half-assing it so badly.
I don't owe anybody who calls me out of the blue my time, especially when their shit isn't together. My mom answers the phone and actually talks to these people, and politely says "no thank you", whereas I don't even pick up the phone for certain area codes, and certainly don't engage in conversation if it's clear it's some bullshit I do not care about.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Are you talking about people who have been convicted of a crime and are calling you at dinner to sell you something or conduct a survey, or about people in Southeast Asia who have been kidnapped and are being forced to run scams? I've heard of this happening in Southeast Asia, but not with actual convicts, only kidnapping victims.
It's odd to me that people feel worse about unpleasant things happening specifically to convicted felons than to the general public.
If you were being mean to a random jerk, and then he pointed out "By the way, I roughed up my wife last night" would you feel more bad about being mean? But you'd feel worse if it turned out he was doing time for that same crime?
Note: I know that there could be people truly wrongfully convicted included in the set of all prisoners, but I certainly don't think that's common enough that they should be treated better than the average person.
Second note: I also am not saying being a felon means one should be punished forever or anything. Just that, yeah, prison isn't meant to be fun, and being expected to work while doing time is not cruel punishment. It's what most people do outside of prison. Anyone who doesn't accept those terms, I fully support them clicking "Decline" by not commiting crimes.
>> prison isn't meant to be fun, and being expected to work while doing time is not cruel punishment.
The problem I have with this is that last time I checked, nearly all sentences for people going to prison are incarceration, not incarceration+forced labour. It's the same as people cheering up prison rape because "they deserve it" or "if they don't like it, they should just stop committing crimes". Again, no one is ever sentenced to prison+prison rape, and failing to protect prisoners from each other is a massive failure of the state.
And of course we have to acknowledge that having prison population working for close to nothing creates really perverse incentives, both on the side of the state as well as enterprises employing prisoners. In fact I'd argue that even if you feel that it's entirely fair and deserved you should still be against it to stop incentivising all the nasty shit happening around it. Prisoners should be sitting in prison, they shouldn't be working, or if they are it should be on public works not on anything that the state charges money for.
Respectfully, no it's not. Our society does in theory, and should, recognize a universal right to not be raped. It doesn't recognize, for anyone, a right to not have to work and still be taken care of, with the possible exception of the Royal Family. Though I understand most of their income comes from their historical ownership of vast lands, which is slightly different.
> Prisoners should be sitting in prison, they shouldn't be working,
Why should they only be sitting? Where's the free room and board for those who haven't committed felonies? If we aren't offering a UBI to random non-criminal lazy people, I don't think it's justified to recognize that as a right of prisoners specifically.
Alright, maybe the comparison took it too far but I hope you see my point - the sentence is imprisonment, not imprisonment+X.
>>It doesn't recognize, for anyone, a right to not have to work and still be taken care of
Nonsense - how about the ill and the disabled? Why do we take care of them even if they don't work? Unless when you say "our society" you mean some society that doesn't have that - but then I can't possibly know where you live.
>>Where's the free room and board for those who haven't committed felonies?
Uhm....almost every developed country offers some kind of socialized housing and food stamps if you need them?
>>I don't think it's justified to recognize that as a right of prisoners specifically.
It's not their right - it's ours. We lock them up and they should stay locked up. They should sit in prison all day not because it's their privilege to be sitting around all day bored, but because it's our privilege to walk streets free of criminals - we want them there.
Also observe how even I acknowledged that prisoners could be used for work - any kind of public work where they aren't a danger to society is fine with me. But the moment you introduce a profit motive you are creating breeding ground for corruption and incentives which have absolutely nothing to do with justice.
That’s the extreme stretch a certain lobby has been pushing. Even in deep blue California, where that was the marketing for Prop 6 last year, 55% of voters laughed that characterization off the ballot. Sure, it’s like slavery, except that you’re not born into it but rather you ended up in prison by choice, it’s fixed in term instead of for life, they by law can’t physically harm you, they can’t enslave your offspring, etc etc.
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.
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 would have thought the chief limitation in an operation like this would be that your profits are (presumably) Pareto distributed, so 80% of profits come from 20% of victims. This would make the operation more like mining Bitcoin than serving lunches. One thing that supports your theory that the margins are slim, however, is that there are crime syndicates kidnapping people to work in these call centers. If the wages didn't represent a significant marginal cost, they wouldn't need to risk attracting international attention by kidnapping people in the first place.
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?
I send them messages written in Khmer asking if they need help. (Most of the victims are not themselves Cambodian and cannot read this. But the messages are not for them; they're to spook their captors.)
The news reports I see said most of the scam centers are in Myanmar run by Chinese gangs. The victims are mostly Chinese, but there are reports of Japanese, Kenyans and many other nationalities being trafficked. They are forced to work 18 hours a day and tasered when they don't meet their quota.
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.
There is a video out there where a scammer gets scammed, and his reaction goes from fury to terror. I think it's because he'll be held accountable for the loss, and is likely working in horrible conditions. It's sad because this video was very popular entertainment on YouTube for a while.
And all of the scam call centers in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, etc. are run by Chinese gangsters with the tacit support of the CCP.
Just like how all the scam call centers across eastern Europe and Russia are run by Russian gangsters with ties to the Kremlin.
North Korea is also a big player in the global scam industry with many thousands of scammers operating out of state run call centers in Pyong Yang.
One thing that doesn't get discussed enough in the rise of internet scams over the past few decades is how much of the global scamming "Industry" is directly or indirectly state-sponsored.
I saw this happen a few times where I used to work. The one instance that I remember was an older pensioner and a Filipina woman in her 30s. She met him in our city and eventually convinced him to move back to the Philippines with her. He used his pension to build her family a house for them all to live in. Once the house was finished, they locked him out of it and threatened to call the police if he didn't leave. This guy was in a wheelchair and didn't know how to read. What struck me was how nice he was - he wasn't at all bitter when he was describing what happened, and was extremely polite to everyone in the office.
I await the day where the companionship models are actually as good at creative writing as even ChatGPT. Of course if they're ever as good as a real person (the holy grail) then I'll be very happy, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
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.
This thread is the first I've heard of it. I had to look it up.
The scammer convinces the mark to put money into fake investments and escalates until the mark runs of of money or gets spooked, then disappears. It's often made more persuasive by engaging in a fake romance.
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 :)
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.
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?
> The article doesn't reveal where those pictures were stolen from, does it?
It says they're taken from the Instagram account of "a Russian personal trainer".
I doubt the author is making an ethnic distinction between European Russians and Turkic Kazakhs, so the woman is probably identifiably located inside Russia.
Really? What kind of structure do their names have? I think even cultures that used full-sentence names tended to have some conventional ones.
And certain name ideas are very common cross-culturally, as witness Bogdan / Nathaniel / Theodore (and older Diodorus / Apollodorus / Herodotus / etc) / Dieudonné / Atallah...
Going to something I know better, Chinese names can be unique, and I know someone who tells me her father specifically attempted to ensure that nobody shared her name, but I wouldn't go as far as saying that being unique is the typical case. Some names (小丽, 国强) have an attractive meaning and are used with identical spelling by large numbers of people; other names (Xīnyuè, Sījiā) show a lot of spelling variation while always being pronounced identically.
There are quite a few pre-Islamic taboos some of which persist to this day. For example, can't give a child a name of a living person parents know of. This of course includes extended family, friends and even acquaintances. This restriction alone enforces creative naming.
Typically names consist of 1-5 elements which can be combined arbitrarily. There are literally thousands of such elements though.
Last name often is a first name of an ancestor a few generations deep and it is likely to be unique too.
So as a result first+last name combinations are quite unique.
Urbanization is changing all this of course but some traditions are still strong. In my entire life I've met just 3 people with the same first name as mine.
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.
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".
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.
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?
Interesting read, I wonder why they didn't get more into details about this fake dental practice website used by the scammer, like what server it's hosted on, who the domain is registered to, I guess they just had pretty good opsec and there was nothing interesting to find there?
"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."
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.
To expand on what the other commenter noted, these are well known industries, mostly in India. Just like this also well-known romance scam slavery industry existing in SEA (especially Myanmar, Cambodia, Philippines).
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
I find it hard not to put some blame on the victim though. At the end of the day you are are responsible for watching out for yourself. When I look at the pictures of these people scammed. They are most often unattractive and unaccomplished people that believe suddenly a good looking international fashion model or a Harvard Doctor is inexplicably interested in them.
I know its kinda sad but you have to have SOME idea of where you fall in the game of life and if something that much of an outlier comes along. You have got to be a little suspicious that they would really be interested in a romantic relationship with you.
You cannot protect someone that has allowed this level of delusion to be their real world view is my point. "Protecting" these people from themselves essentially requires complete submission and removal of free will from at least some part of the population by force.
I've watched the documentaries and most of the people after the fact admit that they basically did it to themselves. Nothing anyone could have done would have changed the outcome because they wanted it that way until it was too late.
The scammer just has to catch the victim at their worst moment. Tired? Drunk? Undergoing a personal crisis? Maybe the scam just hit exactly the right formula to trick you-- you'd just been on the phone with comcast and then a scammer pretending to be comcast just happens to call back at the right time.
Sure, some of their victims would always for it, though I suspect they're a small minority. But everyone can be scammed.
Sure maybe a one off for a moderate sum say <$500. However these bigger ones like over $10K are almost always over a long period of time with many transactions. At some point you have to make a choice to go with the delusion of the scam rather than face reality.
I've been a bit interested in this and have seem many interviews with the scammed people. Almost all of them admit after the fact looking back they made the choice to go along with it and at least were partially to blame from their own perspective.
I find the entire social dynamic interesting.
Give me money I will maybe give you something. Ok here is the money. <repeat forever>
How have we gotten to a point where this very obvious psychological dynamic is such a huge problem? What can be done to mitigate it?
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.
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-...
> It's kinda sad that we're associated mostly with Prigozhin in the West
Unfortunately, Pringles had such a hilarious (in a dark way) last few years that it makes it very hard to compete with.
I recently encountered a YouTube video talking about a related industry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYup8chgkwM
It seems to be a similar idea, but with the scamming hidden in less-obviously-illegal places.
Wasn't Pringles right hand man pagan?
Yoshkar-Ola itself is a forgery, just google for its photos and name of that embankment street (no offence, just kidding, I even kinda like it, hope they didn't destroy some valuable authentic architecture to build it).
I've happened to visit the city on a few occasions since 2000, before and after. They didn't destroy anything valuable (I think) as it was pretty generic before, but that fake embankment is bizarrely out of place indeed. They even have a bootleg Neuschwanstein castle, which is kind of ironic, considering that the original is also closer to being a forgery than to some authentic medieval castle.
[flagged]
Nationalistic flamewars are not allowed on Hacker News. No more of this, please, regardless of which nation you have a problem with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Prigozhin visited one of our prisons once; that’s the only violence there is. The paganism is not Slavic, it's Uralic. Local indigenous people are related to the Finns.
"Prigozhin visited one of our prisons once; that’s the only violence there is".
No, it's not.
Hate to be pedantic, but it's definitely not slavic paganism. Finno-Ugric, maybe.
As far as I know, known sources for Slavic paganism are terrible, so finding extant practitioners would be a huge deal.
Bit rude but okay
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.
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.
"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."
I used to believe this. But I have since changed my mind. Corporations train their reps to actively stonewall and frustrate you and hope you go away while they screw up your finances, travel, healthcare and deny you things you paid for.
A couple years ago, I was on the return flight from France to the US with wife and kid in tow. At the airport, I learned that the flight was a code-share. The airline I had booked with was meaningless. Meaning, the seats that I had paid extra for so we could sit together was no longer the seats that I picked. Even though I spent extra money to get what I asked for, I wasn't getting it because the real airline said <random paragraphs of verbiage>. Meaning myself, wife, and kid would no longer be sitting together on an 8 hour flight despite me paying extra for it, five months in advance.
So I performed what I called my "angry frustrated customer routine". I became loud and agitated several times at the airport. Until I got my way and got what I had paid for.
> Corporations train their reps to actively stonewall and frustrate you and hope you go away while they screw up your finances, travel, healthcare and deny you things you paid for.
And how much choice do those reps have? Their choice is "follow the playbook" or "go out and find a new job".
It sounds like you yelled at someone who was not responsible for your original issue. You weren't performing. You were being.
Eventually I got someone’s attention although I had to through five different people. Somebody did the right thing after I became loud.
I termed it performing as I was deliberately trying to draw attention to myself from the other passengers.
>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?
> 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?
My feelings of pity towards the people being literally enslaved don't mean I don't want the scams to stop, or for the people to be liberated.
It just means I don't scream profanities at someone who had their passport stolen.
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.
Thanks for bringing this up, sums up how I feel about life. And underlines one of my biggest realisations of recent times: depression is a valid/natural response to helplessness and a world of injustice...
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.
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 wouldn't be embarrassed. I'd be embarrassed on their behalf, maybe, for half-assing it so badly.
I don't owe anybody who calls me out of the blue my time, especially when their shit isn't together. My mom answers the phone and actually talks to these people, and politely says "no thank you", whereas I don't even pick up the phone for certain area codes, and certainly don't engage in conversation if it's clear it's some bullshit I do not care about.
Good idea. HN doesn't have a spoiler tag, but I added a warning.
Spoilers for those interested:
Calculating points process - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY-Rzou38k4
Michael trying to explain the problem (see math on screen) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8m_5HDZF7w&t=1m40s
> 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.
So, Calvinism basically.
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.
> 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.
Are you talking about people who have been convicted of a crime and are calling you at dinner to sell you something or conduct a survey, or about people in Southeast Asia who have been kidnapped and are being forced to run scams? I've heard of this happening in Southeast Asia, but not with actual convicts, only kidnapping victims.
It's odd to me that people feel worse about unpleasant things happening specifically to convicted felons than to the general public.
If you were being mean to a random jerk, and then he pointed out "By the way, I roughed up my wife last night" would you feel more bad about being mean? But you'd feel worse if it turned out he was doing time for that same crime?
Note: I know that there could be people truly wrongfully convicted included in the set of all prisoners, but I certainly don't think that's common enough that they should be treated better than the average person.
Second note: I also am not saying being a felon means one should be punished forever or anything. Just that, yeah, prison isn't meant to be fun, and being expected to work while doing time is not cruel punishment. It's what most people do outside of prison. Anyone who doesn't accept those terms, I fully support them clicking "Decline" by not commiting crimes.
>> prison isn't meant to be fun, and being expected to work while doing time is not cruel punishment.
The problem I have with this is that last time I checked, nearly all sentences for people going to prison are incarceration, not incarceration+forced labour. It's the same as people cheering up prison rape because "they deserve it" or "if they don't like it, they should just stop committing crimes". Again, no one is ever sentenced to prison+prison rape, and failing to protect prisoners from each other is a massive failure of the state.
And of course we have to acknowledge that having prison population working for close to nothing creates really perverse incentives, both on the side of the state as well as enterprises employing prisoners. In fact I'd argue that even if you feel that it's entirely fair and deserved you should still be against it to stop incentivising all the nasty shit happening around it. Prisoners should be sitting in prison, they shouldn't be working, or if they are it should be on public works not on anything that the state charges money for.
> It's the same as people cheering up prison rape
Respectfully, no it's not. Our society does in theory, and should, recognize a universal right to not be raped. It doesn't recognize, for anyone, a right to not have to work and still be taken care of, with the possible exception of the Royal Family. Though I understand most of their income comes from their historical ownership of vast lands, which is slightly different.
> Prisoners should be sitting in prison, they shouldn't be working,
Why should they only be sitting? Where's the free room and board for those who haven't committed felonies? If we aren't offering a UBI to random non-criminal lazy people, I don't think it's justified to recognize that as a right of prisoners specifically.
>>Respectfully, no it's not.
Alright, maybe the comparison took it too far but I hope you see my point - the sentence is imprisonment, not imprisonment+X.
>>It doesn't recognize, for anyone, a right to not have to work and still be taken care of
Nonsense - how about the ill and the disabled? Why do we take care of them even if they don't work? Unless when you say "our society" you mean some society that doesn't have that - but then I can't possibly know where you live.
>>Where's the free room and board for those who haven't committed felonies?
Uhm....almost every developed country offers some kind of socialized housing and food stamps if you need them?
>>I don't think it's justified to recognize that as a right of prisoners specifically.
It's not their right - it's ours. We lock them up and they should stay locked up. They should sit in prison all day not because it's their privilege to be sitting around all day bored, but because it's our privilege to walk streets free of criminals - we want them there.
Also observe how even I acknowledged that prisoners could be used for work - any kind of public work where they aren't a danger to society is fine with me. But the moment you introduce a profit motive you are creating breeding ground for corruption and incentives which have absolutely nothing to do with justice.
> being expected to work while doing time is not cruel punishment
No, but it sure smells like slavery.
That’s the extreme stretch a certain lobby has been pushing. Even in deep blue California, where that was the marketing for Prop 6 last year, 55% of voters laughed that characterization off the ballot. Sure, it’s like slavery, except that you’re not born into it but rather you ended up in prison by choice, it’s fixed in term instead of for life, they by law can’t physically harm you, they can’t enslave your offspring, etc etc.
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.
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 would have thought the chief limitation in an operation like this would be that your profits are (presumably) Pareto distributed, so 80% of profits come from 20% of victims. This would make the operation more like mining Bitcoin than serving lunches. One thing that supports your theory that the margins are slim, however, is that there are crime syndicates kidnapping people to work in these call centers. If the wages didn't represent a significant marginal cost, they wouldn't need to risk attracting international attention by kidnapping people in the first place.
It may be like bitcoin mining in that sense but either way x% less time spent with a possible mark is x% less time to take their money.
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...
What if everyone started responding with aggressive encouragements, "Escape!" "Run from that place," "Murder your overlords, you outnumber them!"
I send them messages written in Khmer asking if they need help. (Most of the victims are not themselves Cambodian and cannot read this. But the messages are not for them; they're to spook their captors.)
The news reports I see said most of the scam centers are in Myanmar run by Chinese gangs. The victims are mostly Chinese, but there are reports of Japanese, Kenyans and many other nationalities being trafficked. They are forced to work 18 hours a day and tasered when they don't meet their quota.
Even a famous Chinese actor was tricked and trafficked. https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/china/china-actor-thailand-sc...
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.
There is a video out there where a scammer gets scammed, and his reaction goes from fury to terror. I think it's because he'll be held accountable for the loss, and is likely working in horrible conditions. It's sad because this video was very popular entertainment on YouTube for a while.
And all of the scam call centers in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, etc. are run by Chinese gangsters with the tacit support of the CCP.
Just like how all the scam call centers across eastern Europe and Russia are run by Russian gangsters with ties to the Kremlin.
North Korea is also a big player in the global scam industry with many thousands of scammers operating out of state run call centers in Pyong Yang.
One thing that doesn't get discussed enough in the rise of internet scams over the past few decades is how much of the global scamming "Industry" is directly or indirectly state-sponsored.
This is terrible. We must demand better working conditions for these folks.
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.
I saw this happen a few times where I used to work. The one instance that I remember was an older pensioner and a Filipina woman in her 30s. She met him in our city and eventually convinced him to move back to the Philippines with her. He used his pension to build her family a house for them all to live in. Once the house was finished, they locked him out of it and threatened to call the police if he didn't leave. This guy was in a wheelchair and didn't know how to read. What struck me was how nice he was - he wasn't at all bitter when he was describing what happened, and was extremely polite to everyone in the office.
I guess they look for people like that.
Sad example of out rural kansas: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/21/cryptocurrency-shan-hanes-pi...
And in case it isn't obvious, with AI "companionship" models and such, this is about to get a lot worse as the cost of the string-along goes to zero.
I await the day where the companionship models are actually as good at creative writing as even ChatGPT. Of course if they're ever as good as a real person (the holy grail) then I'll be very happy, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
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
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.
This thread is the first I've heard of it. I had to look it up.
The scammer convinces the mark to put money into fake investments and escalates until the mark runs of of money or gets spooked, then disappears. It's often made more persuasive by engaging in a fake romance.
I have literally never heard of it before this thread.
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.
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
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?
> The article doesn't reveal where those pictures were stolen from, does it?
It says they're taken from the Instagram account of "a Russian personal trainer".
I doubt the author is making an ethnic distinction between European Russians and Turkic Kazakhs, so the woman is probably identifiably located inside Russia.
Sounds clearly Russian to me. Russian spoken in Yoshkar-Ola I guess.
nothing like Russian, South Asian maybe
> Kazakh names are typically unique planet-wide.
Really? What kind of structure do their names have? I think even cultures that used full-sentence names tended to have some conventional ones.
And certain name ideas are very common cross-culturally, as witness Bogdan / Nathaniel / Theodore (and older Diodorus / Apollodorus / Herodotus / etc) / Dieudonné / Atallah...
Going to something I know better, Chinese names can be unique, and I know someone who tells me her father specifically attempted to ensure that nobody shared her name, but I wouldn't go as far as saying that being unique is the typical case. Some names (小丽, 国强) have an attractive meaning and are used with identical spelling by large numbers of people; other names (Xīnyuè, Sījiā) show a lot of spelling variation while always being pronounced identically.
There are quite a few pre-Islamic taboos some of which persist to this day. For example, can't give a child a name of a living person parents know of. This of course includes extended family, friends and even acquaintances. This restriction alone enforces creative naming.
Typically names consist of 1-5 elements which can be combined arbitrarily. There are literally thousands of such elements though.
Last name often is a first name of an ancestor a few generations deep and it is likely to be unique too.
So as a result first+last name combinations are quite unique.
Urbanization is changing all this of course but some traditions are still strong. In my entire life I've met just 3 people with the same first name as mine.
> Typically names consist of 1-5 elements which can be combined arbitrarily.
Out of curiosity, are those elements meaningful or just pure sounds?
Yes, they are meaningful. For example: Adjective + some natural phenomena + some flower = girl name.
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.
Pretty sure that gmail doesn't disclose a useful email address when using web version of gmail, is that right?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Man, not even slaves are needed for scams anymore. Sad to see job losses even there... /s
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I find it strange that you seem to think he called them nasty because they are Asian an not because of the slavery and scams.
Americans seem more comfortable with slavery and scams
Yes, let us focus on virtue signalling instead of the scammers stealing people's hard-earned money.
you didn't read my other comment, sigh.
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.
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My own skepticism that young attractive women are not likely to contact me keeps me safe.
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
Someone I know is AFAIK still with his (second) Russian mail-order bride and has been for many many years. (The first one was sent back...)
Interesting read, I wonder why they didn't get more into details about this fake dental practice website used by the scammer, like what server it's hosted on, who the domain is registered to, I guess they just had pretty good opsec and there was nothing interesting to find there?
The author should redact the face of the woman whose photos were stolen
"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.
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.
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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.
To expand on what the other commenter noted, these are well known industries, mostly in India. Just like this also well-known romance scam slavery industry existing in SEA (especially Myanmar, Cambodia, Philippines).
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).
> 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.
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).
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.
Same, better to think about ways to actually help them than mock them.
Then the telecom industry is responsible for blocking it, or perhaps is liable for damages caused by the slavery.
Every message International 1 cent.. and doing nothing against the scaming is promoting deglobalization.
Reminds me of those 419 scams ("Nigerian Prince" scams) from the 90s and early 2000s.
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.
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These scams are sad and horrible.
I find it hard not to put some blame on the victim though. At the end of the day you are are responsible for watching out for yourself. When I look at the pictures of these people scammed. They are most often unattractive and unaccomplished people that believe suddenly a good looking international fashion model or a Harvard Doctor is inexplicably interested in them.
I know its kinda sad but you have to have SOME idea of where you fall in the game of life and if something that much of an outlier comes along. You have got to be a little suspicious that they would really be interested in a romantic relationship with you.
You cannot protect someone that has allowed this level of delusion to be their real world view is my point. "Protecting" these people from themselves essentially requires complete submission and removal of free will from at least some part of the population by force.
I've watched the documentaries and most of the people after the fact admit that they basically did it to themselves. Nothing anyone could have done would have changed the outcome because they wanted it that way until it was too late.
The scammer just has to catch the victim at their worst moment. Tired? Drunk? Undergoing a personal crisis? Maybe the scam just hit exactly the right formula to trick you-- you'd just been on the phone with comcast and then a scammer pretending to be comcast just happens to call back at the right time.
Sure, some of their victims would always for it, though I suspect they're a small minority. But everyone can be scammed.
Sure maybe a one off for a moderate sum say <$500. However these bigger ones like over $10K are almost always over a long period of time with many transactions. At some point you have to make a choice to go with the delusion of the scam rather than face reality.
I've been a bit interested in this and have seem many interviews with the scammed people. Almost all of them admit after the fact looking back they made the choice to go along with it and at least were partially to blame from their own perspective.
I find the entire social dynamic interesting.
Give me money I will maybe give you something. Ok here is the money. <repeat forever>
How have we gotten to a point where this very obvious psychological dynamic is such a huge problem? What can be done to mitigate it?
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.
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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.
No, there was a Trojan payload, like I said. Despite the social down voting, I'm giving the truth.
There isn’t. Your software is incorrectly flagging it. Please don’t make accusations without proper vetting.
Kapersky, perhaps? Flagging an antiwar message as dangerous?