this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
603 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
59589 readers
3300 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I’m all for Xitter bashing but it’s the same on Youtube and pretty much everywhere else. What’s actually most striking to me is how simple these bots are. They don‘t even use AI most of the time, just spamming the same hand full of extremely vague statements while having the profile picture of a young woman, often only showing certain body parts.
I‘m suspecting that more and more scammers caught up on the pig butchering trend which has been a huge thing in China for over a decade. Until last year the African prince was still the most damaging type of online scam for the US economy until pig butchering finally dethroned it. That shows how quick it‘s growing.
That being said, platforms in general seem to follow the same pattern in that moderation is practically non-existent anymore and it will only be a matter of time until Brussels will feel inclined to really crack down on it when it inevitably becomes a much bigger problem for online discourse.
What do you mean by pig butchering trend?? Not familiar with that scam
[Alice]"Bob, we're going to butcher a pig and get rich selling the meat!"[Bob]"Okay. What do I need to do?"[Alice]"give me some money for pig food."[Bob]"fine"[gives Alice five coins][Alice, a month later]"Bob, our pig is eating a lot. We'll need more money. Could you spare fifteen coins?"[Bob]"Fifteen? Fuck."[Alice]"If you don't give me 15 coins the pig will starve, and we'll lose the investment. Remember, once we butcher the pig we're getting rich!"[Bob]"Fiiiiine."[gives Alice fifteen coins.][Bob, a month later]"Hey Alice, how is our pig going?"[Bob]"Alice? Where are you?"[radio silence]And Alice just stole 20 coins from Bob, through a pig butchering scam.
The key elements of the scam:
Wiki link Truly vile, long-term scamming strategy that became an industry in and of itself. There are entire companies that hire people specifically to lull people into trusting them and giving them money ( often their entire savings ) using what is essentially weaponized catfishing
The key is to start small - throw away money for the victim so they don’t think it through.
Then you progressively ask for larger amounts working the victim over with the sunk cost fallacy.
It doesn’t take much, the victim naturally doesn’t want to admit they fucked up, and you can reinforce that so they think they’re doing the right thing by investing more money.
Keep it up until they are bankrupt, then disappear.
People have invested years I their twitter profile. They don’t want to admit it was a total waste of time.
-Wikipedia