Scammers Redux

One time, as was my hobby, I was on my hands and knees furiously scrubbing the carpet of cat barf. This was in the Old Days where phones were connected by a copper wire and each phone had a companion piece of tech called an “answering machine” (the most direct and purely descriptive nearly metonymic word devised by us puny humans). The phone rang in the kitchen and the answering machine clicked on, and I heard this: “Your iCloud account has been hacked. This is an alert . . . “

Of course, I jumped up with inhuman speed, ran to the phone, and grabbed it in time to hear the telltale click-click-click of the line connecting from switch to internet relay to switch.

Then a voice, shrouded in a thick accent: “Hello, how can I help you?”

I put on my most sincere and thickest Texan accent I could muster. “Welllll, heeeeooooo. My cloud’s bin hacked!”

“This is a terrible thing, sir. I can, of course, help you. Please, first, open Windows.”

So I held the phone close to my feet and stomped across the house where I dramatically opened a window with a flourish.

“Weeeee hoooo!” I exclaimed. “I like that breeze!”

“No sir, no sir,” protested my new tech support ally. “You must open Windows on your computer.”

I went back to scrubbing cat barf. I had my laptop open next to me. Since this was a Mac, I simply ran a virtual copy of Windows, limiting this guy's nefarious ends to this little virtualized area of my computer. He would get no further.

And, of course, he immediately wanted me to log on the a website that could remotely control my computer, so I followed along, so very, very slowly.

At the same time since now I could see where his signal was coming from, I ran a little program called a port sniffer to see what security problems his own computer had.

Let’s just say it had a lot.

Now the following thing I did is classified and censored but let’s just say, in the end, the last thing my phone pal said to me was this:

“You fook me?”

And I kindly replied, “I’m not sure what that word means, but I do get the gist, and fooked is a good description.”

So, sure, messing with scammers and burning their time tickles me, but this was in the Before Times, when Nigerian Princes were convincing people to send them money - or people here were convincing them to act out an entire Monty Python skit.

But today it’s much worse and much more dangerous, and there is high risk you’ll find yourself a victim. These scammers and thieves are becoming more and more sophisticated every day, and their use of identity faking tech such as AI is bound to cause agony for many, many people.

This video is one of the most lucid and direct explanations of how significant this threat is to you. Please watch it.

If you want to double-check it’s really your family calling and not a voice faked message, please consider making up a very secret code word you have with your family. Don’t send it in a message or in an email. Just come up with it when everyone’s together. That will be the key you can trust.

You might not believe this can really happen, but it is and it’s happening right now. Generative AI will magnify this problem a thousand fold.

Believe it or not, going old school is the best and most effective defense.