After that report from Reuters came out saying that 10% of META's revenue comes from ads pushing scams and prohibited products I'm starting to think a very large chunk of the internet (and national economy) basically runs on scamming people.
And that's not even considering perfectly legal "scams" like shitcoin pumps and politicians awarding shady contracts to buisness people who donated to them without a technical bribe happening. I would love to know how much of the actual economy is above-board business and how much isn't, but the older I get the larger the "isn't" seems to grow. Is the scam-economy 1% of all real financial transations? 5%? 10%? 20%? I'm honestly not sure.
Yep. And it's only going to get worse as the population of wealthy older people suffering from mild cognitive impairment continues to grow. They're the perfect target for online scams: still able to use computers and in control of substantial assets but also lonely and gullible.
I think it's worse than that. Even what people think of as a "legit business" like Amazon and Walmart are scamming a significant percentage of their customers.
Selling people mountains of cheap garbage that will break almost immediately is not much different than theft to me. But it's a scam that benefits enough other people like the shipping industry than nobody will rock the boat.
The economy in general is trending more into figuring out how to siphon wealth from people without money into the pockets of people who already have everything. Poor people are actually pretty profitable because they have little choice in spending.
Amazon is explicitly auctioning off (and not even second-price auction) search spots. So if you search for something you don't get shown what you search for but something that Amazon extracts the maximum amount of money from.
It's surprising most MLM's are still so obvious. AI is going to be revolutionary for scammers. We're rapidly moving past call-bots that are good enough to bilk seniors. Imagine a MLM where the thousands of other suckers lining up to do the same thing are effectively invisible to the mark. That small fee the mark pays will seem like an unusual and extraordinary exception, but a necessary one. Suspicions will be allayed slickly, deadlines will be adjusted to add just the right amount of pressure, and the payoff will always be tantalizingly close. Every mark's online presence will be scraped so they can receive a custom tailored experience designed to press all their buttons.
It's also going to be about as easy to hold a data-centre in Nigeria responsible for scams running on their hardware as it is to prosecute a crooked call-centre in Mumbai today. AI-supercharged MLM's are going to be harder to block too. A call-centre can be blocked by telecoms (even if most don't currently bother). A MLM exploiting multiple forms of social media, websites, and networking apps on top of phones?
We need to start pressuring our governments to devote more resources to police anti-fraud units. We can't rely on journalists do this job.
>"It's surprising most MLM's are still so obvious."
From what I have heard & read, the obviousness is either intentional or unintentionally helpful, because it filters out people who would eventually figure out the scam (and would take up the scammers' efforts in the meantime). That said, more complicated frauds like what you're describing will likely proliferate.
Fraud has been the fastest growing sector for about 20 years now. Much of this is movement of previously simply scammy products into actual scams. The kinds of things that you used to find advertised on late night television are now supercharged by Amazon availability, by ads that can directly target likely marks, and by the terrible state of reviews; it's so easy to manipulate that there's effectively zero correlation between quality and reviews on any major site, and paradoxically the sites actually selling products are the least awful at this.
This is only the start, though, because growing even faster are obviously criminal exploitations. Flat out forgeries dominated the Amazon marketplace due to Amazon's binning practices. This ruined the margins and destroyed the reputations of every quality vendor. They have reversed this course, but too late, the quality vendors mostly went under or were bought up by scammers to ride their reputations, and we are left with marketplaces full of fly-by nights. Every major retailer dropped their quality to zero to keep up.
And last, we get to do the brazen criminality, pig fattening scams, tech support scams, identity theft, criminal gangs raiding supermarkets en-mass, and all manner of wire fraud. These are growing even faster, as an aging population has provided ample prey for these sorts of scams. They are generally headquartered overseas and effectively immune from prosecution.
It is not all Doom. These are problems that have been dealt with before. There is an idiom that has softened with use, "wild west", that accurately describes this. The solution, historically, was the posse system, state authorized activity that otherwise looked an awful lot like vigilante justice. We haven't demanded that yet, but we will soon.
I made a job board scraper when I was looking for work. I found job listings from at least 6 years prior. I replied to some of them to call them on their stale listings. Not surprisingly no response. The lack of oversight or quality control is annoying, so make your own
One place laid everyone off, in the job hunt after that I found job ads from the same
company, for my own role, for enough less than I earned that the ad had to have been many years out of date.
As everyone was laid off, nobody inside to contact. Messaged the (by this point former) CTO on LinkedIn, was a surprise to him too.
More shocking is, some non-fake postings also turn out to be result of company internal politics and not really to hire someone. They do conduct interviews, but don't select anyone. They probably want to have unfilled positions as a justification for all their failures or for some other mysterious reason.
This is just a drop in the bucket. Hopefully, this snowballs into a sustained effort to enforce no ghost listings. Its understandable from both the recruiter and recruitee perspective, but something needs to change and it’s probably policy.
Maybe I'm old fashioned. In my opinion people who prey on others who are desperate looking for food/job, and who prey on elderly/kids/disabled, are the lowest scum.
As a parent of two young boys, I am seriously confused in what values I should teach them. I am defaulting to traditionally "good" values because that's how I was raised and all I know. But there's a part of me that feels my kids will be at a disadvantage when they grow up, if they carry my values.
religion used to promise a heaven for those who did good, and hell for those who do evil
life taught me that living well grants you admission to heaven here while you're alive, while committing things society still considers sin makes you live through hell right here on earth
cant imagine how much better/worse it gets if theres more after death
nah even ignoring religion, there was this story of if you work hard study hard listen to your parents and your teachers and people of authority you will generally wind up more-or-less okay (not rich! just _okay_, and that's okay).
"A virtue is something that is valuable even if it gives you nothing. A virtue persists without payment or compensation. Positive thinking is great. Vital. Useful. But it has to remain so even if it gets you nothing. Belief, truth, honor … if these exist only to get you something, you’ve missed the storming point." - Kaldin Stormblessed
As a parent of two young boys I've had the same concerns, but I would rather have them grow up to be men of virtue in poverty that can go to bed at night with a clear conscience than the most powerful man in the world without integrity.
I've got a friend, who is on SSDI due to mental and physical health issues. And yes, they are real. I've known this friend for 20 years, they are a good person, but they have serious challenges integrating into society between past trauma and the MH/PH problems.
Her sister often 'borrows'[0] from her food stamps or SSDI income to pay for her own shit. Her sister's husband gets a new car every 1-2 years, charges his wife (the sister) and their daughter rent every month, and votes in a specific way because 'people are scamming away our tax dollars'.
IOW, "You're right but it's curious to look at the people who think that and how they pose"
at first I was just going to say that screenshot of McCovy looks like a cringey amateur rap video but zooming in I see his eyes and I'm unsettled, distracted
And that's not even considering perfectly legal "scams" like shitcoin pumps and politicians awarding shady contracts to buisness people who donated to them without a technical bribe happening. I would love to know how much of the actual economy is above-board business and how much isn't, but the older I get the larger the "isn't" seems to grow. Is the scam-economy 1% of all real financial transations? 5%? 10%? 20%? I'm honestly not sure.
Selling people mountains of cheap garbage that will break almost immediately is not much different than theft to me. But it's a scam that benefits enough other people like the shipping industry than nobody will rock the boat.
The economy in general is trending more into figuring out how to siphon wealth from people without money into the pockets of people who already have everything. Poor people are actually pretty profitable because they have little choice in spending.
It's also going to be about as easy to hold a data-centre in Nigeria responsible for scams running on their hardware as it is to prosecute a crooked call-centre in Mumbai today. AI-supercharged MLM's are going to be harder to block too. A call-centre can be blocked by telecoms (even if most don't currently bother). A MLM exploiting multiple forms of social media, websites, and networking apps on top of phones?
We need to start pressuring our governments to devote more resources to police anti-fraud units. We can't rely on journalists do this job.
From what I have heard & read, the obviousness is either intentional or unintentionally helpful, because it filters out people who would eventually figure out the scam (and would take up the scammers' efforts in the meantime). That said, more complicated frauds like what you're describing will likely proliferate.
Illegal drugs are absolutely a single digit percentage of the economy.
This is only the start, though, because growing even faster are obviously criminal exploitations. Flat out forgeries dominated the Amazon marketplace due to Amazon's binning practices. This ruined the margins and destroyed the reputations of every quality vendor. They have reversed this course, but too late, the quality vendors mostly went under or were bought up by scammers to ride their reputations, and we are left with marketplaces full of fly-by nights. Every major retailer dropped their quality to zero to keep up.
And last, we get to do the brazen criminality, pig fattening scams, tech support scams, identity theft, criminal gangs raiding supermarkets en-mass, and all manner of wire fraud. These are growing even faster, as an aging population has provided ample prey for these sorts of scams. They are generally headquartered overseas and effectively immune from prosecution.
It is not all Doom. These are problems that have been dealt with before. There is an idiom that has softened with use, "wild west", that accurately describes this. The solution, historically, was the posse system, state authorized activity that otherwise looked an awful lot like vigilante justice. We haven't demanded that yet, but we will soon.
As everyone was laid off, nobody inside to contact. Messaged the (by this point former) CTO on LinkedIn, was a surprise to him too.
life taught me that living well grants you admission to heaven here while you're alive, while committing things society still considers sin makes you live through hell right here on earth
cant imagine how much better/worse it gets if theres more after death
editing seems to be an emergent property :P
As a parent of two young boys I've had the same concerns, but I would rather have them grow up to be men of virtue in poverty that can go to bed at night with a clear conscience than the most powerful man in the world without integrity.
I've got a friend, who is on SSDI due to mental and physical health issues. And yes, they are real. I've known this friend for 20 years, they are a good person, but they have serious challenges integrating into society between past trauma and the MH/PH problems.
Her sister often 'borrows'[0] from her food stamps or SSDI income to pay for her own shit. Her sister's husband gets a new car every 1-2 years, charges his wife (the sister) and their daughter rent every month, and votes in a specific way because 'people are scamming away our tax dollars'.
IOW, "You're right but it's curious to look at the people who think that and how they pose"
[0] - Often without properly repaying
The money for those payments is taken from me, from all taxpayers, under threat of violence from the government.
a type of ?projection? that happens to be more prominent when one is unable to perceive second- and third-order consequences of their own actions