| HN Mirror

There is a wide world of scams outside of call scams. These scammers are not call center scammers - they're lurking in Facebook AI groups and asking for mentorship. After they show some signs of progress, they ask you to buy them computer equipment for their studies, or try to get you to invest in get rich schemes. If you tell them no, they'll give you another unit of progress, then make another request. Their approach is so amateurish and their odds of success are so long you get the feeling you're not dealing with anyone who has a real scam boss above them. Usually it's college age kids claiming to want to get into compsci or security, sometimes it's educated middle aged men pretending to want a change of career.

The news coverage nowadays mainly covers call centers and focuses a lot on the operations that use captives. But I think there's a much greater variety of operations, and I would estimate at least 2/3rds of scammers are free agents. These are motivated by money, a sense of exploiting others, and identifying as a scammer, rather than direct threats, blackmail, or violence.

But I also doubt that a human captive would do coding homework, video chat, pair programming, and send PRs, all of which I demand in order to keep the mentorship going.

I am also aware of the spectrum of strategies that scam bosses use to extort performance from their victims, and feel professional mentorship could help people escape some forms of extortion. Scammer boss extortion is often partly or even heavily psychological, based on establishing that the victim's identity is now that of a low level criminal. In many cases, just blackmailing people is enough to secure their compliance, and bosses will tend to use the minimal control mechanism possible.

So not only do I think it would be unlikely that a captive could invest the learning effort that I demand from my students. If they did, it's possible that the positive experiences of learning could help them escape the control of their bosses.

If this person is in a coercive work situation with low respect, low learning opportunities, and high coercive control, let me provide them a simulated work experience that affords them high respect, rewarding learning opportunities, and a glimpse of life where they are proud of their work and have nobody devaluing and intimidating them. It might be a psychological lever that helps them challenge and defeat the assumptions of their extortion.