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Comment by daviddoran | Hacker News Reader

A family member works in banking phone support and the scams people get caught by are unbelievable. Every week people are convinced by scammers to give their bank cards to a taxi that arrives at their house (supposedly sent by the bank), they transfer 1,000s of euro to foreign bank accounts (supposedly at the request of the bank to safeguard the funds), they lie to the bank (somehow convinced by the scammers), etc.

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That's a symptom of law enforcement having dropped the ball for over a decade. There is no way in hell anyone would dare send a taxi "sent by the bank" to pick up scam proceeds in a society with a functioning law enforcement system because the scam victim would be a honeypot most of the time and whoever shows up would be arrested & jailed (and likely rat out the rest of his crew).

> because the scam victim would be a honeypot most of the time

The pool of potential victims is the entire population with a bank account, meaning at least the majority of adults. The percentage that would fall of it and agree is certainly not 100%, but it is definitely higher than I personally expected years ago. That still results in a ton of possible victims.

Give such a large pool, how can a police honeypot be the scam victim “most of the time”?

Scammers need to reach the victim somehow. How they do this currently is either robocalls (call every single potential number in a loop), social media or advertising.

If every disconnected number leads to a police-run honeypot that would play along (easy with the carriers' cooperation), police running bait social media accounts to get scammers to approach them, and proactively crawling scam-prone keywords for any scam ads to follow up on, the scammers will likely all get arrested before they'd even reach a single real victim.

Most importantly, the mere fact this is happening would have a deterrent effect and effectively put a stop to such scam operations because even ignoring the risk of arrest, it's simply not profitable if the majority of your scam attempts go to law enforcement who simply wastes your time.

From my understanding, the scammers themselves are typically a half/whole continent away, in a jurisdiction that doesn't care too much and is easily bought by money. Meanwhile the people picking up cash are sometimes not even connected to the scam, they can be Uber drivers who were requested to pick up a package, as was the case when a man in Ohio tragically shot someone sent by scammers [0]. Unfortunately the Internet has made it really easy to do things like this without stepping foot in the country

[0] https://apnews.com/article/uber-driver-killed-scam-4998a42b2...

At least in the UK many (most?) scams operate via a robocall claiming you owe taxes/a bill/etc and you need to bank transfer the money to a local UK account of a money mule.

The money mules are either knowingly doing it or recruited on social media/etc thinking it’s a job and they’re running payroll by receiving and forwarding money.

Law enforcement should be proactively attacking this supply chain by posing as willing money mules - not only they’d potentially be able to unravel the whole network but at the very least act as an effective DDoS on the practice and making that method unprofitable for the scammers.

I sat in a taxi once when he received a call purporting to be from HMRC about his taxes. I think I managed to intervene forcefully enough to make him understand that no, HRMC would not ask him to call back via Vyber or whatever, and no they'd never ask him to send money without actually sending a letter.

But this only after he had called them back while I was listening in - that was when I interrupted.

A big problem is so many people have situations ongoing with HMRC (as did that taxi driver) that it seems plausible to them, because it's all confusing anyway, so make the call a bit scary and people seem to shut off all critical senses.

I stressed to him that if he got any calls like that again and was unsure, to always hang up and call the numbers on the HMRC website, and hopefully he got the point...

What I find surprising about those scams are that people believe that a bank that for two decades have tried to avoid providing ANY in person service or show the slightest interest in you, would suddenly provide that level of service and support.

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