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Comment by muh_gradle | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why in the world Thomas wouldn't directly communicate via phone and video chat to any of these people first before doing serious business and potentially traveling across the country for random anonymous folks on Discord.

Social engineering is so much easier when you engage in faceless, voiceless communication. This could've been shut down so much more easily if they put a real human being to match the messages. When things actually matter, I need more than just a Discord avatar and a handle to identify someone.

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How would that help? Are you thinking it might be easier to prosecute with a voice or image file?

It's an extremely basic check. If I'm going to be getting on a plane to see someone, I want to do a basic background check.

But what are you checking with a call? That just seems like creating a false sense of security since there is virtually no additional “useful” information that is being sent over the audio channel above and beyond what is in text.

I'm checking to see if this Linh Nguyen that some random Discord user referenced me is the Linh in front of me on Zoom. A phone call isn't ideal, but it's still better than nothing. At the very least, there's one more identifying factor though that may help with spotting any scams, but yes, it can be false sense of security if you rely purely on it.

If I'm John Doe and I made some merge requests to your open source project for a couple of weeks, is that alone really enough to potentially meet me in some city far from yours? That's essentially what the author was prepared to do.

A deepfake requires significantly more effort than just impersonating someone over text.

If Ms Linh Nguyen turns out to be a burly Nigerian dude on video, you just acquired some "useful" information about their legitimacy.

It's way easier to lie via text. There are verbal and facial cues that make it much harder to maintain a convincing lie.

Scammers have plenty of time to practice compared to the average person, and the face to face nature can make people more susceptible due to a false sense of trust / thinking that they can judge character over video.

OTOH it'll probably be harder for non-native English speakers to pull off a phone/video call considering that a lot of amateur scammers have telltale bad grammar even over text

"Discord" by itself is a pretty big red flag to be honest. I would personally not engage in any business or industry where that is the main communications platform.

Billion dollar deals are negotiated on Discord all the time.

That sounds really surprising to me. Have any references to share?

Also interested. Pretty easy thing to say without citation

Tons of business happen on WeChat and that's the 99% marketshare in some countries.

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