[hugocbp]

In Brazil this is likely the most common scam nowadays. Almost every month one of the 4 members of my family gets a message in WhatsApp, usually from a cloned profiled, with the same script:

"Hi <brother|sister|dad>! I'm trying to buy something in store X but my card is getting declined, can you make a PIX (Brazil's real time rail payment) for <random person> for YYYYY (4, 5 digits amount) reais for me? I'll pay you tomorrow"

Or the out of fashion "This is X and I have your daughter, pay X so we can release her".

I have never understood how those people can do this for that long with the amount of tracing and spying the government has. Specially using payments from the Real Time Reail (PIX) that is tied to a CPF (equivalent to SIN/SSN).

Even in the current state of streaming, with sports spread between several providers, you can get, in good faith, in YouTube watching a pirated live stream of a major competition where the broadcaster fakes a famous bank or financial institution pretending to make lottery and faking draws on screen. It is so rudimentary you can see the person literally typing random names.

This is probably one of the easiest crimes to automate enforcement against in the age of AI, and yet, it happens for months, every day.

Good for Spain for actually doing something about it. I wish Brazil would start doing the same.

[nidnogg]

My mother recently got scammed with that first script during a hectic day at her workplace. As stupid and out of character as those messages were, somehow in between her these guys managed to clean out most of her bank accounts in PIX transactions. They're so easy nowadays you can transfer thousands with very few swipes.

[krageon]

Those payments are for a good operation routed through stolen identities and funneled out using the internet (e.g. gift cards, traditionally). It's easy to trace until the money goes out of the country and gets transformed from a gift card back into money in some place the country has a hard time touching.