New hot take after spending countless hours going through years of accumulated paperwork at my elderly uncle's: every mailing that is an advertisement should be required by law to have the words "this is an advertisement" printed on both sides of the envelope or postcard, with FTC enforcement power.
The quantity of deceptive, time-wasting mailings my uncle has received is appalling. This simple law would fix that. #ElderAbuse#scams#JunkMail#advertising
How South-East Asia's 'pig butchering' scammers are using artificial intelligence technology
Since 2020, scores of predominantly Chinese-run call-centre style scam operations have sprung up across South-East Asia mostly in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos.
Their trademark is "Sha Zhu Pan"or "pig butchering" scams in which victims are contacted through social media or text messages, befriended or seduced and then lured into fake investment schemes.
People Are Getting Scammed into Buying Seeds of Non-Existent Cat-Face Flowers Generated by AI.
Scammers are always finding new ways of taking advantage of gullible people, and apparently selling seeds of fake flowers generated by artificial intelligence is one of their latest techniques.
A service called Spy Pet is scraping Discord servers, archiving and tracking users' messages and activity, and then selling access to that data.
Spy Pet scrapes more than 10,000 Discord servers, and besides selling access to anyone with cryptocurrency, it offers the data for training AI models or to assist law enforcement agencies, according to its website.
Spy Pet claims to be tracking more than 14,000 servers, 600 million users, and includes a database of more than 3 billion messages.
Do yourselves a good turn and make sure to follow Author Beware by @victoriastrauss
The most recent post is about #CityOwlPress, but there's wisdom that applies to all small presses:
"there is a kind of alchemical process where long-standing strains and stresses within a publisher...abruptly reach critical mass and boil to the surface in the form of a rush of complaints."
Via Writer Beware: in order to avoid scammers, you must understand how your industry actually works. This post tackles the oh, so tempting "we can help you get your book made into a movie!" scam.
Fun reading about how even @pluralistic falls for phishing sometimes thanks to all the enshittification of getting in touch with necessary services making us less likely to catch the red flags.
I've clicked on a few of my office's "phishing tests" which at least gets me more "watch this social engineering info video" even if the videos are so bad that you can't help zone out.
@pluralistic I consider myself pretty tight against most #scams. I'm mostly a nobody with decent security. But last year I almost fell for one of the most basics. A "too good to be true" scam. Where they're selling product for insane prices. The gamers probably know about it but it was my first time seeing #DiceLegend. I was building a pretty hefty shopping card when I shared the site with a friend who told me it looked like a scam and I did a sanity check. Googling brought tons of scam warnings
More specifically, I was tricked by a phone-phisher pretending to be from my bank, and he convinced me to hand over my credit-card number, then did $8,000+ worth of fraud with it before I figured out what happened. And then he tried to do it again, a week later!
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
@pluralistic “Meanwhile, I'll continue to post about it whenever I get scammed. I find the inner workings of scams to be fascinating, and it's also important to remind people that everyone is vulnerable sometimes, and scammers are willing to try endless variations until an attack lands at just the right place, at just the right time, in just the right way. If you think you can't get scammed, that makes you especially vulnerable” #phishing#scams
Pica thinks that having tweed makes her “academic” please be on guard today for her typical online “university” scams. Remember that there is no such thing as a “BA in sleeping and relaxing” #catsofmastodon#pica#car#tweed#scams#caturday