| As evidence of the current state of play: Friend receives an email from ISP, asking her to contact them. She searches, comes across a "customer service number" on a legit looking page, calls them up. (Whoever she called) plays out a 30 minute charade about how she's been flagged by IRS for illegal activity and is about to have her business accounts frozen, including multiple phone transfers to "another party" (played by different people) to boost authenticity. And during this whole time, they not once asked her for any "red flag" information (e.g. account #, SSN). Instead, it seemed to be a shell game of extracting limited information (last 3 of your account #?), then having "unrelated" parties parrot that back as proof of their "working for the government." I expect it would have eventually escalated into an actionable ask, but they were definitely playing the intermediate-term game. If not for the utter moral black hole of the endeavor, I'd be kind of impressed. |
Last time I did this, it took three days of texting my new friend before it was finally clear that what she really wanted more than anything was to teach me to trade cryptocurrency.
Once, I thought I had her, because she spelled D&D like: D&D, but she played it off real cool and just explained that her English isn't that great so she used translation software.
In retrospect I think that all of her probing questions about my Svirfneblin cleric were because she later intended call him up and teach him to trade cryptocurrency. I like to think he's in some scammer's database now, causing confusion. He'd like that too.
Once I understood what she was after, I explained that my problem with cryptocurrency was that it resembled money too closely and really what I'd like to do with blockchains is to do away with money in favor of something entirely different.
Her training dataset had not prepared her for this conversation, so it was quite clear when her human handler took over. They were very rude, unlike their AI pet, and tried to bully me into sharing other people's contact info, which is when I lost interest.