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Comment by b6 | Hacker News Reader

Man, it's a strange article. Fraud of every kind is endemic in China. When I'm in China, it's reasonable to assume anyone who initiates conversation with me has some kind of scam in mind. Strangers are very wary of each other. It's common to receive scam texts from people saying they're your dad or your landlord and to send money to such and such a bank account. I think most Chinese people have never had the opportunity to use any computer other than perhaps an iPhone that has not been backdoored/rootkit'd/RAT'd in at least one way. What would data protection by Chinese companies even mean? They're already comprehensively cooperating with the CCP.

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To be fair to China that scam has targeted me at least 15 years ago via email and so common in the USA that the FTC warns people about it. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0204-family-emergency-... Fraud is everywhere including the USA but not in the same way as China I imagine. There are some industries rife with fraud in the USA, how do you explain the following to people in China - auto repair (can't trust anybody until proven fair and have to get multiple estimates)/short term payday loans/that recent posting about elder guardianship abuse/multi level marketing systems/furniture rental. OTOH I don't worry about the food in the USA being tampered with in the infamous ways Chinese industries put poison in pet food or put plastic toxins in milk to cut costs.

Or opium in the noodles... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/09/2...

You don’t get scammed on the street like you do in china or Italy tourist areas. Ya, instead you have to believe a Nigerian prince really is contacting you by email or that Microsoft is really calling you about your windows PC.l, or there are really single girls in your area who are interested in you in the Internet.

But really scams all over the world prey on people who don’t get “too good to be true.” That fancy shampoo you bought cheaply at the whole in the wall store below your apartment? Ya, it will definitely be fake!

> You don’t get scammed on the street like you do in china or Italy tourist areas.

Yes you do.

When I was in New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Chicago, and other cities, I constantly had people come up to me and "ask for help." They would give some sob story about how they were tricked to come to the city and they are just trying to get some money to go back home.

Or people would approach me at gas stations, saying they forgot their wallet and just needed to borrow some money for gas.

That’s not scamming, that’s begging.

Have you spent time in NYC? I get scammed regularly here, it's not a Chinese or American thing. It's possible the rates are higher there in general, but I wouldn't say you "don't get scammed in the streets" in the USA.

I haven't, but I've spent plenty of time in Beijing. I think Italy is worse though, especially Milan.

Anecdotally in the Bay Area have been approached by strangers for both the three card Monte and the shell game. I think that if I did not have prior knowledge of these I would have been vulnerable to them as well.

I don't know. Gambling on the street doesn't seem like a very American thing. Are you sure you weren't targeted because you looked Chinese? (for the same reason white people get targeted for specific scams in China...)

I don't know, either, not enough data/investigation to judge. Off the top of my head I was in San Francisco and a homeless person approached me and several Asian friends for a game in the street and once in a BART station and another time I was with some caucasian co workers in Redwood City at a fast food place.

Strange. I've been to the Bay Area many times, lived there for a couple of years even, and I never saw anything like that, especially in Redwood City.

I'm pretty versed in the foreigner scams in China, but, they aren't applied to Chinese people. The main ones that apply to Chinese are fake goods at the small stores (very common, almost universal), a farmer in the middle of the street at night pretending to get hit or waiting to pretend to get hit, and the money on the ground scam.

> Gambling on the street doesn't seem like a very American thing.

I've seen it occur a few times personally, usually with no Asian participants, and its been regularly depicted as a thing in US entertainment media with non-Asian participants in a manner which suggests that the audience was not expected to see it as unusual as a practice.

I wouldn't be so sure an iphone isn't backdoored. Apple did participate in PRISM[1], after all.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

and Apple was denying PRISM before proofs were presented[1]... Apple has 100% control on your device and the government has 100% control over Apple. If you think that the device is unbreakable, you are foolish. But either way, they can transfer data while you are using the phone because it is unencrypted at that point.

1. https://www.cultofmac.com/230452/are-apple-and-other-tech-co...

>What would data protection by Chinese companies even mean? They're already comprehensively cooperating with the CCP.

Well even if it looked anything like the EU's GDPR, even then the CCP would still have a carte blanche to collect whatever they wanted, just as the BND [0], AVID [1] et al do so today, and at least the politicians could pat them selves on the back about how they are protecting their people, while continuing to subvert such protections.

[0] https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2016/09/secret-report-rev...

[1] https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/02/dutch-government-...

The GDPR specifically exempts governments from the regulation.

In fact the GDPR would likely concentrate data collection to governments which would provide services to the market. In fact this has already happened in countries with strict regulation like Germany where if you want to look up someone’s details it’s much easier to simply access them from a government run DB than collect them on your own.

>if you want to look up someone’s details it’s much easier to simply access them from a government run DB

Yes, it will be much easier to gain access to a compromised government DB if you want to have bulk access to such information a la shadowbrokers et al.

> When I'm in China, it's reasonable to assume anyone who initiates conversation with me has some kind of scam in mind.

That's pretty much true everywhere else, isn't it now? If a random stranger you don't know initiates a conversation with you, it's usually because they have something in mind that quite likely is not in your best interest. I believe what you called "having a scam in mind" for China is usually called "salesmanship" in the US.

No, what I mean is that in China, anyone who comes up to me, especially if they are speaking English, intends to lie to me and maybe lead me to some place to be defrauded, and this is their job. It's not the same in the US or many other places at all.

Strange. In my experience, when someone comes up to me, they are either trying to hand me a leaflet or they are some old dude who's amazed that he gets to see a real foreigner in his lifetime and wants to make some small talk. The one time someone spoke English, it was a student who wanted to practice.

Obviously I'm not spending enough time in the right places to be targeted for a scam.

> Obviously I'm not spending enough time in the right places to be targeted for a scam.

Or you don't look like an easy mark.

Sorry, when I look back at my comment, it was overly broad. China is very diverse and every city is different. Part of my time in China was spent in probably one of the worst areas for that kind of behavior, at least towards foreigners: Shanghai.

Well, I've been living in Shanghai for more than a year now ...

I walk to and from work each day in a large urban downtown in the US, and I average one interaction each way, each day. Almost none of them are approaching me about anything involving a scam.

For every 5 people that communicate (other than a nod or polite hello), 4 are just asking for money, full-stop. That's begging, but not a scam. It's honest, they ask, I say no, because I don't carry cash. The other 1 out of 5, such as today, was just a guy who wasn't sure if the bus he was looking for stopped at the street we were both on. It was about 22:30 and he was worried he'd miss the last express bus home.

Occasionally someone asks for money for food, and then I offer to buy them lunch, and most turn it down. Maybe that counts as a scam? But some take me up on it. So if that's a scam, I'd estimate 5% of people I talk to ask me for money for food, truly just want money, and have a scam in mind. That's definitely a minority.

Edit: As additional context, I traveled through China for a little over a month in 2005, and very much related to the GP's comment. I know the country has changed massively since then, but I have traveled through a half-dozen countries, lived in 2 others, and China stands out in that way.

In the few years that I lived in the US, there were at least two occasions where I have been approached with a somewhat scammy story in different (large) cities. I'm not saying its endemic in the US, but it does happen.

But compared to China, (a) the frequency of an encounter with a random person on the street as a pedestrian is significantly lower in US cities and (b) I imagine the levels of poverty in China were/are much higher, which might be a factor why scams are frequent?

Not in Canada.

There's a pretty clear distinction between salesmanship and fraud, to the point that one is legal and the other is not.

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