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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   33770 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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I don't understand how these scammers are making money. There are bots @ing me and like 10 other people with a shitcoin I've never heard of and some banal 'discussion group', I don't even read the whole message before blocking them.

Who are they targeting that follows Vitalik and/or Coindesk but is so dumb that they'll follow up on the world's laziest cold call?

A lot of otherwise intelligent, at least averagely so, people are surprisingly vulnerable to scams. If it looks any way official, people are inclined through a combination of laziness, fear of penalties, and familiarity (they've had to fill out one hundred replies today, what's one more?) to fall for it.

I've had to dissuade my boss from panic-paying scam invoices, by demonstrating that it is a scam, because they were unaware that this particular scam was going around. I can believe that people who don't know much or anything about bitcoin, are put off because it seems very complicated, but would be interested in buying or investing, would fall for a scam email that promises to make it as easy as possible for them, just send your payment here and we will invest it for you and do all the hard work, and then profit for you!

People will believe in 'free money for nothing' if you wrap the package cleverly enough.

power law. all you need is someone with $100k or more to fall for the scam, or 50 people with $2k, which is not that uncommon with crypto, and that is enough to live a long time in a 3rd or 2nd world country. When people get scammed with crypto, the losses can be very big, such as wallets being hacked, unlike a lot of other type of scams.

Who are they targeting that follows Vitalik and/or Coindesk but is so dumb that they'll follow up on the world's laziest cold call?

The million normal / below-average people who jumped on crypto not because of an interest in decentralization, experimental financial systems, or more practical applications for cryptography, but because the number went up and it put money in their bank account. Someone's buying and bagholding all the shitcoins after the bots and traders pump them.

Don't forget that making a scam somewhat obvious to skeptical people means that the population of people who the scammer has to invest follow-up time and effort on is more likely to fall for that scam. It's the Nigerian prince bad grammar rube filter.

The scammer that made it big compromised big trusted accounts, the take wasn't just from having blue check marks.

that is true. good point. but then they buy a verified account and rename it it something like "E1onMusk" or "T3sla" to fool people and evade the spam algo, and change the pic too. I saw one that had $2000 btc & doge collected from a single hacked verified account. Turning $8 into $2000 is a pretty good ROI.

But nobody will be following @T3sla, everyone is already following @Tesla. They would need to sit on the account and get followers by acting normal before springing the scam.

They could do something more like phishing though, where they DM users pretending to be customer support and stealing credentials.

They post replies in comments to high-traffic accounts like Musk, Tesla, Vitalik Buterin, etc. But some people are so impulsive that they fail to see that name is misspelled. The sort of person who falls for a crypto scam is probably not that careful.

Fair point.

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