[traviswingo]

I can’t prove it, but it feels like the world recently decided that spamming/scamming is acceptable, so the number of spammers/scammers has increased dramatically.

The number of spam calls, texts, emails, iCloud account unlock requests, etc I’ve received in the last year is insane.

[adrian_b]

I believe that these spammers now concentrate their efforts towards e-mail addresses hosted by major providers, like Gmail.

The reason is that I have an opposite experience, during the last couple of years I have received much less spam messages than before.

I have hosted my own e-mail server for more than 2 decades. Previously, I had to filter large quantities of spam messages, but lately the number of spam messages is much less than 10% of the total number of received messages.

[bix6]

I’m considering self hosted. I’m so tired of the major providers not even trying. And I have no serious control over blocklists.

[dotancohen]

My personal domain has the MX records pointing at Gmail. It gets far less spam than my Gmail address does.

[throwaway2037]

What about fastmail.com or hey.com or proton.me? I have heard good things about all of them.

[frizlab]

I use fastmail, I love it. I have a catchall and thus can use a different address per service. Leads to sometimes awkward conversations as to why the email address contains the company name in it, but can also be a life saver. For instance, free recently got hacked and all their email db was online. I can just block this email address and not receive the spam. Fastmail itself is reliable and fast on the web, but I only use it through IMAP anyways. It works perfectly.

[thewebguyd]

Lack of accountability for the companies that allow their services & platforms to be used for spam/scamming.

Take DocuSign for instance. Still, this many years later, is a major source of phishing emails from their free trials. DocuSign could easily shut this down today by either requiring a CC for the trial, or forcing a call with a sales rep to start a trial. But they don't, they continue to allow their service to be used for wide scale phishing.

Atera, an RMM, is another one that has been a big source of malware delivery, also via the free trials.

Shutting down the trial accounts after the fact does nothing, the emails already went out.

[Analemma_]

I feel like there's no way for them to win, though. The kind of accountability you're talking about what require them to do essentially tons of KYC/AML vetting, and HN would be equally outraged about that.

[duskwuff]

It's a little hard to get outraged about that hypothetical, given that legitimate usage of DocuSign typically involves sending them documents containing all sorts of sensitive information.

[xboxnolifes]

Every single day since around the start of the year I get at least 1 text with the content of roughly: "FROM TRUMP: You could be the next winner of this PRIZE/MONEY!", "Click here to receive your $10,000 tariff refund!", "DEMOCRATS are trying to DESTROY EVERYTHING!". Plus I get almost daily calls that immediately hang up, and leave a 30 second voicemail with no audio.

I've always had some level of political spam, usually only close to voting months, but this year has been the worst for me.

[account42]

The first two don't sound like political spam, just politically-themed regular scams.

[xnx]

> I can’t prove it, but it feels like the world recently decided that spamming/scamming is acceptable

In the US, we elected a well-known scammer ... twice!

[account42]

You mean 60 times? It's not like you get on the ballot by being an honest person.

[testudovictoria]

In addition, it feels like the past 5 years have brought on more marketing spam. I've been slowly reappearing onto marketing lists that I either never signed up for or unsubscribed from. They're coming from legitimate companies that I've done business with.

[abirch]

It's AI that's doing a lot of it. For a lot of spam, scammers would want to exclude anyone who may not fall for the scam due to the costs associated with dealing with people who won't pay you. Now that AI decreases the need for a human scammer to scam, expect them to start to widen their scam nets.

[BLKNSLVR]

The decline had been happening long before AI hit mainstream.

It's been a _lot_ of years that I've hesitated to answer calls from unknown numbers.

[afavour]

Yeah this feels like one of those cases where the term "AI" gets broadened out so far it becomes meaningless.

This stuff is automated. The ability to automate spam calls (using the same form of APIs developers love, like Twilio) make it absurdly easy for one person to set up a spam machine. No AI required.

[mapt]

The lead generation was automated ten years ago ("Hello?"), but the actual scam conversation was not. Until recently, you still had to pay somebody in South Asia better than the prevailing wage of ~$1/hr to have these conversations, as well as set them up in an office with computers and managers, and bribe local police (call it $5/hr of fully burdened work product). If your success rate is ~1% and the average human portion of the scam lasts 12 minutes, you're getting 0.05 successes per hour, and you better be netting an average of $100 per successful scam (accounting for financial clearing issues / reversals!) or you're losing money on every hour worked.

[abirch]

You're correct about the calls, but the ability to talk with the people was the rate limiter. Even if you have many people in Cambodia or India, the scammers still needed to scam more than they paid out. Now you can have AI bots that do the first level of filtering.

Unfortunately scamming is a business and if certain actions become less expensive, I would expect more of them.

[account42]

It's the natural progression of hustle culture. Profit makes right, nothing else matters.

[ge96]

I get these voicemails almost daily it's a cutoff message talking about "a loan just came across my desk"

It's such a good tactic too to start the voicemail with the conversation already going people are like "what? who?"

[bix6]

AI + FCC weakening

[ryandrake]

Not just the FCC but the entire regulatory apparatus is completely non-functional when it comes to regulating commerce.

The clear, unspoken message in the USA is now: "Enrich yourself in any way you can, as fast as you can. Buyer Beware is the law of the land."

[harrall]

New tools like LLMs probably make previously unscalable techniques scalable.

[torben-friis]

I think part of it is AI allowing sophistication at scale, but there's also a generational factor. The techbro + business shark culture, influencers who manipulate people being role models, and so on.

[Ajakks]

Oh no - you can definitely 100% prove it, this is the direct consequence, the exact intended consequences, of Trump gutting consumer protections - across the board, not only online but with food and laws about not dumping chemicals in rivers.

The man is the absolute worse person - unless your a rich guy, who wants to make more money by screwing over people who mostly don't even know it.

Anyone who reads this, I dare you to find out why that thing in your life you hate so much, sucks so bad - nothing is ever by accident or unintentional.

The United States, and its People, will be discovering/realizing different ways we have been absolutely f-d by that grifter for likely the rest of my millenial life, thankfully (silver lining!!) US life expectancy has dropped substantially for the 150 million Americans in the bottom 50% of income - rich people in America have to deal with this bs for almost 8 more years than we do

Oh yeah, if you want a faster out even yet - just make 30k or less per year, your life caps at 71 then.

I joke but I hate so much that people will read this and then promptly go back to sustaining this system at their job.

We work our lives away so the rich dont have to and they get to live 14 more years on average than poor people.

[account42]

Curb your TDS, this trend has been going on much longer than the bad orange man.

[Ajakks]

Oh, I was just really upset having found out that the IRS is going to settle Trumps 10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, for releasing his tax returns but showed he payed 0 dollars in taxes - AND, the terms of the settlement are that the IRS cannot investigate his family or any of their businesses in the future.

That is the most corrupt thing a Leader in a western country has ever done in the modern world.

[array_key_first]

Acknowledging reality = TDS.

While you're correct that this is a trend that has been going on for a while, the keyword is trend. Do you understand what a trend is? It's a direction. Meaning, under Trump, it has gotten worse, and that is directly related to the piss-poor policy choices of this administration.

I won't mince words here. People who think policy is completely detached from outcomes are dim, and should spend less time talking because it wastes everyone's brain space.