More like this, please!

  • ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Fascinating read about a horrible tragedy by a complete idiot. I also learned such a way of scamming is called pig butchering.

    I’m not making fun of scammed people and feel for them, but I’m stunned how person X from NYC could believe that person Y from Hong Kong would want to marry them by never having met them. I mean, I can’t understand why you’d trust someone who you’ve never met and only been chatting to.

    For example, if a real friend of yours had been a victim of email spoofing and the scammer started trading emails as your friend, then you’d be interacting with a “trusted” party and I can see it would be easier to fall for it, but these are random numbers from a country you’ve never visited (which no one can even certify even is the one they claim to be) and you start trusting them for no good reason.

    There are tons and tons of scams, some much more subtle and/or targeted than others, but this stuns me in how generic and random it is (and how successfully it works)

  • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    “He said … ‘If I just had another two months, I could get the money back,’” Mitchell told NBC News.

    So the CEO was a gambling addict on top of being a clear idiot. How the fuck do these people fail their way into these positions and not get filtered out along the way?

  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Shit like this is infuriating. I had someone try it on me and I strung them along to see what the scam was.

    Basically “invest in my crypto and you can get 3x your money back.”

    So I asked them “which crypto?” and I looked it up… they swore there were these limited windows where it spiked in value. Sell at that window and make 3x your money.

    So I pulled 6 months worth of history… no spikes. None.

    What they do is set up a fake payment portal where money goes in and nothing comes out.

    • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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      4 months ago

      Yes, that’s exactly right. Though in some cases, they let the victim make one withdrawal after they get an initial “profit” just to make it appear legit. But never more than that one.

    • NarrativeBear@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      “What they do is set up a fake payment portal where money goes in and nothing comes out.”

      They actually go alot further in making the scam seem legit. They setup full trading platform apps that look legit. These apps are listed in the apple store and play store, they even have real real reviews.

      You download the app yourself, you setup your profiles yourself. Everything seem legit because you actually setup the acounts.

      You then put money into these “accounts”, you watch the value go up and down like it normally would on a stock market. Then when you are happy with your “investment”, time to withdrawal and there’s no money to take out.

  • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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    4 months ago

    “Many victims will never fully recoup losses to their life savings and retirement funds, but at least we at the Department of Justice can see that Hanes is held criminally responsible for his actions.”

    Can someone explain how they lost this money if the FDIC covered the missing $44M?