The time has come for us to make passwords for identifying each other…
Remember, if it’s truly life threatening, the hospital is going to do the surgery and gouge you for it later.
The time pressure is meant to prevent you from looking into it.
Hang up, call them…. Don’t just hand money over the phone.use an excuse like calling your bank or something
Fortunately, I hate videocalls and have no reason to use them, so if my friend videocalled me I’d ask what the fuck they were doing and immediately be suspicious.
Especially if they were suddenly asking you for money.
My first thought would be “wtf? How did WhatsApp get installed” followed by throwing my phone in a lake.
This was common advice for parents in the 80s and 90s. If someone had to pick me up from school unexpectedly my parents gave them a code word to tell me to let me know it wasn’t a child abduction
according to the TV, child adoption is just an anti-semitic Qanon-adjacent conspiracy theory. No need for passwords! yay!
I’m in the US and have a well off friend who had his Facebook hacked. The bad actors sent messages to his friends asking to borrow $500 until tomorrow because his bank accounts were locked and he needed the cash. Someone who was messaged by the bad actors posted a screenshot of a deepfaked video call he received that caused him to fall for it. Wild times we live in!
I know someone who fell for a similar scam but it involved purchasing gift cards.
I routinely get emails from the owner of the company I work for asking me to kindly purchase several large gift cards and forward them and the receipt to him for prompt reimbursement.
asking me to kindly purchase several large gift cards
kindly give me your money, thanks
40,000 Indian rupees = $487 USD.
Wow that’s a cheap surgery! Definitely not US.
No. This is how you avoid the problem.
“Lemme call you back in 5 because <some excuse>”
If you’d lend them money you’ll have their contact info. Go get a different phone and call them.
You’re not wrong but it’s going to take a long time for “that relative that is calling could be someone else” to be something that people actually think about. Simple to execute your solution but 99% of the people out there won’t even consider the possibility.
“HI we are chased bank and we sent you 40k please give us the codes to Amazon gift cards to pay it back” still works on the elderly. This trick is going to wreak havok among old people.
Guy who scammed his friend out of $500: oh, no it totally wasn’t me man. There was a video? Weird it must have been a Randeep Fake
Source on the image? Seems to be a snippet of a longer article.
EDIT: looking up the text of the image gives me https://inshorts.com/m/en/news/kerala-man-loses-₹40000-as-video-call-from-friend-turns-out-to-be-deepfake-1689663557129, which is just the snipped text, but points at
as the source. I get images get more engagement than links, but it’s important to have the source handy.
I was so hoping the crappy “hey, a text thing I want to share, let me take a fucking attributionless accessibility-poisoning screenshot and upload it like a psychopath instead of just copy/pasting the link to the text or the text itself like a decent human being” routine would die with Reddit. We should be better than that here.
I even get why, images inherently get more eyes on them than articles through links, but the least we can do is include the source in the post body.
Jokes on you scammers. Can’t deepfake me with a friend’s face if I don’t got any friends to deepfake.
Isn’t that what we’ve already been using gpg for? More communication sites should implement it
Is it a user problem or platform problem that more services don’t implement some sort of OpenPGP solution? I mean to say, I absolutely agree this is a good idea, but is the obstacle the users or the services? I can see people getting really confused and not knowing to treat their private keys properly, etc. So are services afraid it’ll drive users away or are services afraid of it for some other reason?
I feel like it’s kind of a mix of both. It’s definitely a hassle to use and check as a user, but I think part of the reason it is is because sites just treat it as an extra thing rather than integrate it into their service
Using what?
GPG is GNU Privacy Guard, but same thing.
I thought linking to the original would be more useful than an implementation, you’re right though
Don’t deep fakes always look a little clunky?
When you’re 77 your eyes (and hearing and brain) don’t work as well as they use to. There’s a reason why old people are targeted for these kinds of scams.
I got one of these a few months ago. I could tell it was fake before I even answered, but I was curious so I pointed my own camera at a blank wall and answered. It was creepy to see my friend’s face (albeit one that was obviously fake if you knew what to look for) when I answered.
“I’m not a cat.”
You certainly look like a cat.
“Hey, what’s wrong with Woofie?”
Your friend is dead
Easy solution: Never give money that’s requested like this. Give the money in person or not at all.
If the friend doesn’t like it they can go to the bank. If they don’t like my terms they can pay interest to them.
Sorry people, I’m not your fuckin loan officer and scams are just too easy.
At the start of COVID, I was in Hanoi, but wanted to go to India before going home (it was super cheap). Before that, 2 things had happened:
- The stupid airline blocked the money (in the credit card) for our flight back and on top also transferred it, which left me without money in Vietnam. Super big pile of shit already.
- Due to COVID there was zero chance of reaching anyone for support. It took, at the end, another week when we where back for that money to be unblocked.
Then something else happened: They didn’t let us on our flight to India (and thus to our flight home). Despite the Indian government saying no restrictions untill 2 days later. I had the website if the Indian ministry right there to show them. (guess how long it took to get that money back, despite the person saying they refund right now: about a year!)
So now we were stuck in Hanoi, without money for a flight back. So I had to call my family for credit card details to pay for a flight. There was essentially no other option. I don’t plan to have 3x the amount of money “just in case”. I don’t travel much, so I assume parts of that are not too rare.
