Thraeg
2779
FWIW, my mother-in-law has been scammed out of $120,000 and counting via wire transfers. None of the traditional banks involved did more than warn her that it was a bad idea, and said there was nothing they could do to claw any of them back when we contacted them (even as soon as the next day). She also tried to send Bitcoin, but the exchange actually rejected the transaction outright as likely fraud.
So… not to defend Bitcoin, but score at least one point for them over the traditional finance system, I suppose. Fuck scammers.
Menzo
2780
What role do you suggest banks should play in stopping people from withdrawing their own money and doing with it what they wish?
Aleck
2782
I would hope you could set up an account where a dual authorization is required? I worry about this as my parents are getting older – they’re not showing signs of senility, but my mother in law (who is now in a memory care facility) blew through $30k or so in the year before she moved into the facility. We literally can’t find any paper trail for what happened to that money.
Old people can seem to lose their ability to discern these scams. The GF’s late father tried to send a money order to some scammers who told him he had won a free car but needed to pay taxes on it first. He went to Wal-Mart and they wouldn’t give him the money order when he told them what it was for, told him it was a scam.
I get people pretending to be the IRS calling me, pretending to be a collection agency ready to file criminal charges against me, etc. I get all kinds of phishing attempts in my email and text messages. It’s pretty bad these days.
I’m still agog that someone pays $12,000 to unlock a laptop. You could simply buy a new, high end one and still have $10K leftover.
People need to learn how to backup data.
ShivaX
2785
What’s ridiculous, imo, is how hard it is to report these scammers and how easy it is for them to hide.
Like say you get a scam phone call. The number is fake. To report it to anyone requires going to a website and filling out forms that will effectively end up in a trash can. Hell, to block a number on your phone requires a ton of fiddling.
It shouldn’t be legal to mask a number with a fake one. There is no scenario where me calling from Iowa should show up as me calling from Los Angeles that is a legitimate reason. Exponentially so for my own fucking phone number calling my own fucking number.
But no. There are no rules or laws that prevent any of this. Scams are effectively free reign for scammers. Your best hope is to be friends with a local cop and them being there when it happens, because the Feds will do nothing and your are powerless.
Email is actually more secure than phone calls and texts, since at least there you can block easily. Blocking a texter is akin to doing your taxes and then it just blocks that specific email address in my experience. Meanwhile my email client can nuke entire domains from ever seeing my inbox with 2 clicks.
Timex
2786
I still don’t know why this isn’t the case.
Sharpe
2787
Yeah, the failure of the government to respond to robo-calls, phone spam, fraud calls, and to enforce the Do Not Call list is one of the great costs we are paying right now for our government being crippled by the right-wing driven partisan chaos that is engulfing us.
In addition to the hot-button partisan issues, there’s a TON of just general “make government and the law work for the good of the people” stuff that we need to have been doing since Gingrich crippled compromise and bipartisan legislation, that we haven’t been doing. We should have been updating out IP laws, and our tech laws, and our laws on communications, phones, etc. repeatedly over the last 30 years. But we can’t have nice things so we get a tepid Do Not Call bill that becomes essentially a ghost of itself within a few years, with very little real-world protection provided.
This area is one of several where we need the basic boring work of government updating laws and taking into account new technologies, etc. and yet we cannot have nice things.
Oh, hey another area where we need to think hard about our legal setup? Given the aging population and the issues discussed above, we REALLY need to think about how to protect elders without taking away freedom from those we retain capacity. It’s a tricky mess, to provide safeguards without empowering scumbags, and we should really be having major studies on these issues: studies on competency in the aging population, studies on what legally works and doesn’t, new laws if necessary to provide safeguards, new regulations if appropriate, and so forth. We need this, like, yesterday. And at the national level… bupkis. Some states are working on it, but it’s all very piecemeal.
In this case (as I understand it), it doesn’t have anything to do with normal financial investing. This flash loan wasn’t someone just making a profit off normal appreciation of a cryptocurrency; it was the person or persons using the flash loan to execute malicious (but technically legal) behavior, before immediately repaying the loan.
The real-world analogy would be: You walk into a bank, get an immediate loan for $X million dollars, buy the bank, say “I own the bank now, so everyone load the money from the vaults into my car”, and then once you’ve done that you immediately sell the bank back and repay the loan.
I was going to make this point, but here you already done did it.
Elder abuse is a massive problem that the state is totally incapable of dealing with. I don’t know wtf to do about it, but I know shit has gotten bad and we need to do something.
Too bad that one runner in Vermont or whatever ran faster I guess? Better launch ourselves into oligarchy.
The capability was developed for outbound call centers, where the call-back number they would want you to use is often different than the source number that would appear on caller ID otherwise. But the use of it now is insane and it should be outlawed / prevented and legitimate call centers should figure something else out.
This is a decent analogy, more so because it highlights the main difference: regulation would prevent you from looting the bank, even if you bought it; or at least it would make that behavior a crime.
PREVIOUSLY ON BAD PEOPLE BEHAVING BADLY: Madison Cawthorn, US Representative and giant GOP asshole, said in public that he had been to parties where other giant GOP assholes had been engaging in sex, drugs, and possibly rock and roll (but surely only good old-fashioned classic rock, like Trump favorite “YMCA.”)
In retaliation for this breach of omerta, various other GOP assholes have been spilling everything negative they have on Cawthorn, including lingerie pics. And now today the GOP asshole newspaper The Washington Examiner has published an expose implicating Cawthorn in possible financial crimes.
“You idiot, we have a whole other thread for GOP assholes!” you say. Yes, but: the financial misdoing involved is, you guessed it, a cryptocurrency pump-and-dump scheme!
And yes, it involves Let’s Go Brandon Coin, because of course it does.
I’m not sure the GOP assholes trying to take down Cawthorn know their audience, though. Most of the party considers running a successful pump-and-dump or pyramid scheme a badge of honor, not a disqualification.
Thrag
2793
IIRC he’s named in the hilarious lawsuit against the LGB coin scammers.
Timex
2794
If I understand it correctly, the problem isn’t that it was a pump and dump scheme.
The problem is that Cawthorne bought into this coin using insider knowledge about how this professional driver was going to endorse it.
JD
2796
If anyone wants to actually watch the parts quoted above without going through the podcast, Coffeezilla has you covered.
Timex
2798
On some level, the guy’s right… stuff has value if people think it has value. The problem arises from when someone questions the emperor’s clothes.
My favorite part, beyond straightforwardly describing a ponzi scheme is definitely the “imagine the box does…something”, without even attempting to come up with a use case, just admitting up front that one doesn’t exist.
