[shuaib]

I am hoping you are hinting that this story is an exact replica of that behavior... pulling off a social formula, on a slightly bigger scale. Even if you are not, having gone through a similar phase back in early years with that exact same motivation, I am!

This is a text book usage of social engineer. Putting in divorced parents, single child getting all the attention from the engineer dad making the kid an above average amongst his/her peers, and then putting in a girl, so to make you focus less on the flaws in the story and drool over the hot-geek image more... evergreen combination.

I would doubt though that Forbes came up with this on their own. Rather, it could very much be someone from anon, just having little more fun.

[noahc]

Thanks for making that explicit. My point was that the context (story) she used makes it so we want to believe her. In the same way I could setup a context that makes you want to believe and ignore irregularities.

I would expect that the journalist as a filter makes this even more likely. The journalist would then ignore irregularities or dull them in the story presenting the most consistent pieces in the story, not the least.

I would say one advantage that I had, is I could test responses, over and over again. But that is always what allowed me to basically have a formula that would result in 95%+ conversion on the phishing attacks. The other 5% often times where do gooders trying to tell me not to be in chat rooms or to warn me about pedos.