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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

At some point, the scam evolves to a live video of a gagged loved one being tortured. "Stop wasting my time or they lose another finger."

People aren't prepared for this shit.

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I know lots of old people who have instant access to quite significant sums of money and many of them just don't need it. I don't need it. I'd be happy to opt-in to, say, a three day wait period on new payment recipients, but my bank doesn't offer that.

One of my banks as well as my investment broker have a three day wait to increase the maximum transaction limit.

I have them both set at about €150.

I think for the bank I can go to a branch to avoid the limit, but that will be with the full fraud suspicion of the teller.

Oh, man. That does seem likely. What a world. I wonder if eventually there won’t be a human in the loop, just a model trained to make money with a strategy like that, automatedly selecting victims and a person to be impersonated for each. Pre-render a few videos, place multiple calls in parallel. Basically a turnkey Docker container that takes a bitcoin address as a parameter and fills it with stolen money.

Just add video and a better voip endpoint to existing setups and you're already there. A lot of scams can be (and are) run by a small handful of people now. Phishing at scale with stuff like fake tracking links etc. is already fully automated by people in a ton of ways and can definitely handle some back-and-forth over sms/whatsapp/whatever.

Long-term, it would mean that videos like that no longer function as a proof of life nor as a credible threat.

That only poisons the pool for actual kidnappers, not scammers.

"Are you prepared to bring them down to a total of 11 fingers?!?"

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