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Email scams fascinate me. They're elegant illustrations of what (on average) makes us react on a purely emotional level and fling all caution (and any money we have) straight into the heaving bosom of our first, largest, and best mother: The Ocean.
You've definitely heard of the Nigerian Prince scams, you've probably heard of the "Your son John has been arrested in Florida and I'm totally his bail officer looking to get him out of here for only $10,000 ;)" emails. And calls! They also just call people! These and the various dating site scams (I'm hot and I love you! Oh, no! I've been shot and the hospital bill is $10,000!) all kind of run on the same human impulse: Someone is in trouble - sometimes someone you 'know,' other times not - and we do have this deep-seated biological drive to render aid. Also, in the case of the prince scams, the wheels can be greased with greed. Both very, very simple. To desire material security, just like the drive to help humans in need, is almost assured in all people at some base, abstract level.
More interesting to me is a scam about which I've only recently become aware-
You know, probably because most of them wind up in my spam folder.
That scam is the "i ha++0rzd you webcam while you were looking at pr0n, gimme a bitcoin or I'll email your dead dad" scam, and while it's a weirder gambit because it implicitly involves dickpics it does do the same basic trick of identifying and exploiting a common impulse. It's mostly noteworthy in that instead of targeting greed or altruism and relying on shame to keep people from reporting the scam, it just goes full shame. If we weren't socialized as intensely to feel shame over having sexuality, or looking at porn, or having it known that we possess sexual agency and look at porn, this would not be remotely effective.
And just like the other scams, it's blatant and butter-fingered specifically ensure that the only people who respond are (at least in this kind of situation, be it greed or altruism or shame) all emotion and no critical thought. You don't want to hook someone who might, mid-deal, realize that something's amiss. If you do, you lose valuable time and you've given them some access to you that, now that they're wise and probably pissed, could land you in a lot of trouble. You want the contextually moronic. Your grown cousin who wore an ahegao hoodie in his driver's license photo is not the guy they want; shame vacated his vehicle a decade ago. They don't even want your hellaciously repressed friend who was on the debate team in middle school, because he's more likely to realize that covertly recording the sexual activity of strangers - many of whom, by the scattershot nature of this scam, must be underage - is a deeper legal boondoggle than is worth pursuing when you could totally hack a million other things.
Hell, even if I did make it a huge secret that I'm a pervert and a pornographer, even if it did seem plausible to me, I'd be a pretty bad choice for this since I don't jerk it while I look at porn. *I* go to dirty websites to get all riled up before I log off to go negotiate with the terrorists. The most they'd get is five minutes of me in darkness, staring stone-faced with the screen reflected in my glasses, and I think that would be more disturbing for them than it would be embarrassing for me.
You've definitely heard of the Nigerian Prince scams, you've probably heard of the "Your son John has been arrested in Florida and I'm totally his bail officer looking to get him out of here for only $10,000 ;)" emails. And calls! They also just call people! These and the various dating site scams (I'm hot and I love you! Oh, no! I've been shot and the hospital bill is $10,000!) all kind of run on the same human impulse: Someone is in trouble - sometimes someone you 'know,' other times not - and we do have this deep-seated biological drive to render aid. Also, in the case of the prince scams, the wheels can be greased with greed. Both very, very simple. To desire material security, just like the drive to help humans in need, is almost assured in all people at some base, abstract level.
More interesting to me is a scam about which I've only recently become aware-
You know, probably because most of them wind up in my spam folder.
That scam is the "i ha++0rzd you webcam while you were looking at pr0n, gimme a bitcoin or I'll email your dead dad" scam, and while it's a weirder gambit because it implicitly involves dickpics it does do the same basic trick of identifying and exploiting a common impulse. It's mostly noteworthy in that instead of targeting greed or altruism and relying on shame to keep people from reporting the scam, it just goes full shame. If we weren't socialized as intensely to feel shame over having sexuality, or looking at porn, or having it known that we possess sexual agency and look at porn, this would not be remotely effective.
And just like the other scams, it's blatant and butter-fingered specifically ensure that the only people who respond are (at least in this kind of situation, be it greed or altruism or shame) all emotion and no critical thought. You don't want to hook someone who might, mid-deal, realize that something's amiss. If you do, you lose valuable time and you've given them some access to you that, now that they're wise and probably pissed, could land you in a lot of trouble. You want the contextually moronic. Your grown cousin who wore an ahegao hoodie in his driver's license photo is not the guy they want; shame vacated his vehicle a decade ago. They don't even want your hellaciously repressed friend who was on the debate team in middle school, because he's more likely to realize that covertly recording the sexual activity of strangers - many of whom, by the scattershot nature of this scam, must be underage - is a deeper legal boondoggle than is worth pursuing when you could totally hack a million other things.
Hell, even if I did make it a huge secret that I'm a pervert and a pornographer, even if it did seem plausible to me, I'd be a pretty bad choice for this since I don't jerk it while I look at porn. *I* go to dirty websites to get all riled up before I log off to go negotiate with the terrorists. The most they'd get is five minutes of me in darkness, staring stone-faced with the screen reflected in my glasses, and I think that would be more disturbing for them than it would be embarrassing for me.
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