A trend that’s leading to more victims is the wave of boomer retirements. Every year there are millions of new 60 and 70 somethings with loads of time on their hands, many of them loaded to the gills and keen to write that novel/memoir/children’s book they’ve been thinking about for years.
I met a guy who fell for the romance version of that scam over and over again. He was living in an assisted living facility by himself and was very isolated there. He would, as we all do, get those messages via email/Instagram/other chat networks (I get the most of this kind of spam on Telegram, to the point I have disabled Telegram sending me notifications, but the occasional one slips through on WhatsApp; it seems for whatever reason they have given up on SMS spam) from supposedly “cute” girls who he believed were just random young girls randomly sliding in to his DMs (this guy is in his mid-70s for the record).
It ended up that these girls would ask him for money, and he drained his savings accounts giving money to these “girls”, and even after running out of money, he kept believing these girls were real, they wanted to know him as a person, and that they just needed a little money to help out.
Everyone close to him, including his family, kept telling him these girls weren’t real, to stop contacting them. He would briefly relent, delete all his messaging apps these scammers were using to contact him, then he would feel lonely or what not, reinstall the apps, and resume contact with the scammers. It didn’t matter how many times we told him they weren’t real. It didn’t matter how much money he lost from these scammers pitching their wares to him.
He just stubbornly believed these were actual young girls who wanted to be his friend, no matter how many people told him they weren’t real, that he was just setting himself up to be scammed yet again.
I had to break contact with him. It just really angered me that this guy couldn’t believe something as basic as these girls actually being African/Southeast Asian/etc. scammers and not real people wanting to get to know him.
People often believe what they want to believe, even bending logic and facts towards their desire. We see it all the time in politics, up to the point people vote for literal criminals who want to rip them off and they see it, but they just want to believe it's all false.
Most of the people live in the world they invented, where they are the protagonist, naturally young girls want to talk to the protagonist, even when he's 70. You'd have to dismantle their whole worldview to disabuse them of the protagonist idea, but by 70 it's often too far gone and requires facing a million mistakes they have conveniently swept under the rug with the fairytale they've told themselves.
I recently saw a screenshot from Facebook of a mattress ad presented inline in a page load that had two conventionally attractive normal looking (fully clothed, not immodest at all) women on a mattress. Below it was somebody's grandpa writing a message basically to the effect of "hello sexy ladies I am (name) please chat with me".
It possibly could have been a bot, but I don't think bots commonly use profile pictures of dishevelled looking 75 year old men. Maybe for commenting on political agitprop, they do...
This reminded me of something that happened to me maybe 15 years ago. I was helping my Grandpa get his first smart phone. The saleswoman was maybe mid twenties and had a kinda hoarse voice. I was a little bit younger than her and I thought it was cute in its own way but of course I wasn't gonna say anything. She apologized for being hard to understand and my grandpa said no, it was fine, her voice was sexy.
Naturally I was mortified.
But I wonder how much of it is just "Fuck it, I'm an old man, I'm gonna let my creep flag fly."
Well, it's hard to convey, but he gave off a strong sense of "hitting on her" and she gave off a strong sense of "I'm in customer service and cannot tell him to stop".
But, I was in my latest teens, earliest twenties; I could have been misreading the situation. All I can say for certain is I was uncomfortable.
At that age a lot of people literally don't have the intellectual capacity to deal with this. Their brain is biologically atrophied due to illness, not exercising it anymore, not seeing or hearing well anymore (this has a huge impact), being socially isolated, etc.
They're not inventing a new world, they're not "conveniently" and consciously sweeping anything under the rug, they're not telling themselves a fairy tale. They're just losing much of the world they were living in and have to deal with what's left, holes and all. Why do you think old people are such easy targets for scams and fraud in general? Do you think only the body degrades with age?
If you're young enough to not have seen this in action ever, you'd be excused for not understanding at all what happens and for building such bad faith scenarios. Common sense and some light reading on the topic would have prevented that nonetheless.
I of course don't know the person but are you sure he didn't have some mental problem and not just refusing to believe he was being played?
I knew a man and a woman who were in a couple and they were like this, they would believe anything that people told them because they were significantly mentally impaired and had some sort of psychological problem that was unclear. They could be taken advantage of by anyone.
It was pretty sad, in fact the best thing for them was if they were only slightly taken advantage of by people who then had an interest in taking care of them to keep the advantage taking going.
Like if someone drained this guy's back account halfway, but made sure no one else drained it, and came to see him every now and then sent him a nice greeting card. I know that sounds pretty weird to claim but I saw it with this couple, they were essentially protected and controlled by the people who took a little long term advantage, basically because the American system just lets you lose everything and go live on the streets and die if you can't take care of yourself, but if people who need a place to stay come stay with you and make sure your money gets spent on food for everyone they're actually better off. It was sad to see but also the best possible outcome given the miserable situation for them.
Anyway, these people were not fixable by being talked to, and it wasn't because they had spent so many years deluding themselves. It was because they had real problems that meant they could never understand some things.
Yes it's infuriating to see someone you care about fall for an obvious scam, yet... I don't know... If it's his money and it makes him happy, or a little less sad, a little less lonely... Why not...
Honestly the main problem is one of efficiency not whether buying happiness with money is a bad idea. Being less sad is more important than having money, but you do need to plan ahead so you don't run out too quickly.
In this thread we're talking about people who have life savings to be scammed out of. I'd say it's probably not an everyday thing that people empty their life savings and blow it all on Temu and strippers.
Because the same techniques are used in the media and politics to get believe and vote for things that aren't true, by people who will not just scam money from the victims in many different ways, but do far worse things to other innocents.
We don't need voter id or age verification laws, we need laws that make any form of deliberate online deception for profit a crime punishable by jail time.
reddit.com/r/scams/ has numerous and varied reports of these from the point of view of (usually) a concerned family member. It's a real plague on society. Older people who are inclined to be trusting, lonely, isolated or those with diminished mental faculties need to be extensively warned about this. Despite warnings many still engage.
That is 100% what was happening. But there are so many ways to "buy" company, from buying another guy a beer at the pub to paying an escort to go with you to a social event. Sure, the expensive end of that would also drain his savings quickly. But at least he would get something more real than text messages
It's sad that there are people who are creative enough to pull this off who choose to participate in petty scams instead of applying their ai and persuasion skills to something more useful.
This seems to be limited to the English publishing world, at least for now? I self-published a historical fiction book a couple of years ago, in French, that got a little notoriety (I was interviewed on national public radio in France about it) and didn't receive any one of those scam emails. -- Not "few": zero.
Perhaps the scam hasn't jumped cultural / linguistic borders yet. Pig butchering scams used to be almost exclusively targeted at Chinese users until China kicked out the Triads. The Triads then set up slave camps in Myanmar and started targeting English-speaking users instead.
I wouldn't be surprised if all the book marketing scammers are one or two groups of people that just haven't thought to target French authors yet. But basically any creative endeavor in the Anglosphere has its own attendant scammer ecosystem.
Or who knows, maybe the Francosphere just doesn't have the algorithmic gatekeepers the Anglosphere has.
Ah, thanks for pointing it out. "Notoriété" doesn't have any bad connotation in French, but apparently it does in English. The more you know! I meant renown.
I recognise these scammers. I run a website for a small community group which just has a bit of information about them which has a contact us page with minimal protection. It comes in waves the language is very similar offering SEO and suchlike. I don't allow any of that through to the community because they are mostly non-technical and somebody will no doubt reply.
This scam spam has been arriving since I set the website up (2019 IIRC), well before LLMs became available. Now that I consider it, haven't seen any lately I guess they have a new target.. I'd better brace myself for a new AI generated onslaught.
Replying to the first-ever email was really just making the problem worse for the author. Exacerbated by continuing to engage.
One of the great things about SMTP and email is that a spammer can really never be sure whether a person opened or read an email. Many SMTP will silently accept emails and not inform the sender or auto-generate a reject bounce that a recipient's address doesn't even exist. Unless the reader opens an email and loads some active html content, image, 1x1 px pixel, etc, the sender can never know.
When you start responding with hand crafted emails back to a spam farm all you've done is successfully mark your email address as "there is a live human reading this and they will reply" in some spammer's database.
> Authors are desperate because books aren’t selling, traditional marketing isn’t working, and publishers are offering less support per title. We’re feeling pretty helpless about our career trajectories, watching sales numbers decline while wondering what we’re doing wrong.
What's wrong? There's nothing wrong. Just people addicted to FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, etc.
Book publishers have spent the last few decades making a profit off of managing the decline of their entire field of endeavor. Every opportunity to expand the medium was thrown out, and every big fad wound up hurting rather than helping. For example, you know that "generation of readers" a certain YA book supposedly made? What it actually did was destroy graded readers because publishers thought YA books had to go upmarket. The publishing industry is just chock full of short-sighted moves like this.
If you look outside the Anglosphere you see far healthier[0] book publishing, to the point where translations of those books into English are filling the holes domestic publishers are leaving in the market. It started with comic books[1] and expanded into basically all fantasy fiction.
Social media has little to do with this, except that they're also filling a hole publishers aren't interested in filling.
[0] Healthy in terms of sales and audience. The authors of these books are being treated like shit, which perhaps is its own shortsightedness.
[1] It is hard to understate how weirdly pigeonholed western comics are, even after the death of the comics code and the indie comics boom gave authors way more creative freedom.
> Some I’d deleted without recording. Some had been auto-deleted from spam after thirty days. Some I’d forgotten about before I started keeping systematic track.
> I wasn’t being marketed to. I was being carpet-bombed.
Three in a row directly followed by a juxtaposition containing a weird metaphor (shouldn't it be "bombarded" instead of "carpet-bombed"?)
53 comments
[ 0.12 ms ] story [ 48.3 ms ] threadwhy anyone would respond to spammers, if they recognize them as spammers? And want them to stop spamming?
I don't think he replies to all spam emails.
yeah, it was quite visible in style (in parts that I bothered to read)
Claude: "Hold my beer."
It ended up that these girls would ask him for money, and he drained his savings accounts giving money to these “girls”, and even after running out of money, he kept believing these girls were real, they wanted to know him as a person, and that they just needed a little money to help out.
Everyone close to him, including his family, kept telling him these girls weren’t real, to stop contacting them. He would briefly relent, delete all his messaging apps these scammers were using to contact him, then he would feel lonely or what not, reinstall the apps, and resume contact with the scammers. It didn’t matter how many times we told him they weren’t real. It didn’t matter how much money he lost from these scammers pitching their wares to him.
He just stubbornly believed these were actual young girls who wanted to be his friend, no matter how many people told him they weren’t real, that he was just setting himself up to be scammed yet again.
I had to break contact with him. It just really angered me that this guy couldn’t believe something as basic as these girls actually being African/Southeast Asian/etc. scammers and not real people wanting to get to know him.
It possibly could have been a bot, but I don't think bots commonly use profile pictures of dishevelled looking 75 year old men. Maybe for commenting on political agitprop, they do...
Naturally I was mortified.
But I wonder how much of it is just "Fuck it, I'm an old man, I'm gonna let my creep flag fly."
You need to reign in your ageism sunshine.
But, I was in my latest teens, earliest twenties; I could have been misreading the situation. All I can say for certain is I was uncomfortable.
They're not inventing a new world, they're not "conveniently" and consciously sweeping anything under the rug, they're not telling themselves a fairy tale. They're just losing much of the world they were living in and have to deal with what's left, holes and all. Why do you think old people are such easy targets for scams and fraud in general? Do you think only the body degrades with age?
If you're young enough to not have seen this in action ever, you'd be excused for not understanding at all what happens and for building such bad faith scenarios. Common sense and some light reading on the topic would have prevented that nonetheless.
I knew a man and a woman who were in a couple and they were like this, they would believe anything that people told them because they were significantly mentally impaired and had some sort of psychological problem that was unclear. They could be taken advantage of by anyone.
It was pretty sad, in fact the best thing for them was if they were only slightly taken advantage of by people who then had an interest in taking care of them to keep the advantage taking going.
Like if someone drained this guy's back account halfway, but made sure no one else drained it, and came to see him every now and then sent him a nice greeting card. I know that sounds pretty weird to claim but I saw it with this couple, they were essentially protected and controlled by the people who took a little long term advantage, basically because the American system just lets you lose everything and go live on the streets and die if you can't take care of yourself, but if people who need a place to stay come stay with you and make sure your money gets spent on food for everyone they're actually better off. It was sad to see but also the best possible outcome given the miserable situation for them.
Anyway, these people were not fixable by being talked to, and it wasn't because they had spent so many years deluding themselves. It was because they had real problems that meant they could never understand some things.
Honestly the main problem is one of efficiency not whether buying happiness with money is a bad idea. Being less sad is more important than having money, but you do need to plan ahead so you don't run out too quickly.
If this sounds surprising to you then probably you have enough money that you don’t need to give all of it away to be less sad.
We don't need voter id or age verification laws, we need laws that make any form of deliberate online deception for profit a crime punishable by jail time.
Ironically, instead of breaking contact, maybe the solution would have been to be there for him more.
When he realizes he's committed a terrible crime, the next day he goes back to believing he's a US marshal. His last words:
- this place makes me wonder...
+ Yeah, what's that, boss?
- Which would be worse, to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?
This is a sad reality of life, that leads many, to choose a fantasy over reality. How many of us consistently avoid this trap?
Given he had family, one remedy would have been to establish a guardianship/conservatorship on the basis of mental/financial incompetence.
I wouldn't be surprised if all the book marketing scammers are one or two groups of people that just haven't thought to target French authors yet. But basically any creative endeavor in the Anglosphere has its own attendant scammer ecosystem.
Or who knows, maybe the Francosphere just doesn't have the algorithmic gatekeepers the Anglosphere has.
Was it bad or scandalous, or did you mean “renown” instead of “notoriety”?
This scam spam has been arriving since I set the website up (2019 IIRC), well before LLMs became available. Now that I consider it, haven't seen any lately I guess they have a new target.. I'd better brace myself for a new AI generated onslaught.
One of the great things about SMTP and email is that a spammer can really never be sure whether a person opened or read an email. Many SMTP will silently accept emails and not inform the sender or auto-generate a reject bounce that a recipient's address doesn't even exist. Unless the reader opens an email and loads some active html content, image, 1x1 px pixel, etc, the sender can never know.
When you start responding with hand crafted emails back to a spam farm all you've done is successfully mark your email address as "there is a live human reading this and they will reply" in some spammer's database.
What's wrong? There's nothing wrong. Just people addicted to FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, etc.
If you look outside the Anglosphere you see far healthier[0] book publishing, to the point where translations of those books into English are filling the holes domestic publishers are leaving in the market. It started with comic books[1] and expanded into basically all fantasy fiction.
Social media has little to do with this, except that they're also filling a hole publishers aren't interested in filling.
[0] Healthy in terms of sales and audience. The authors of these books are being treated like shit, which perhaps is its own shortsightedness.
[1] It is hard to understate how weirdly pigeonholed western comics are, even after the death of the comics code and the indie comics boom gave authors way more creative freedom.
> I wasn’t being marketed to. I was being carpet-bombed.
Three in a row directly followed by a juxtaposition containing a weird metaphor (shouldn't it be "bombarded" instead of "carpet-bombed"?)
Good luck selling books.
presumably it stands for "I asked LLM to write it for me"