Even better scams are coming for you

The Catalina Mountains; as always, click for bigger

This Freakonomics podcast is some eye-opening stuff! I didn't know the example below (and more):

And so, Daffan estimates, in 2024, in the U.S.: Between $31.3 billion and $195.9 billion was lost to fraud. ...

Some of the best [scams] take advantage of existing problems with our slow bureaucracies, poor customer service. Let’s say you get a text from your bank that says, did you make this purchase? It says you bought an Apple computer or something. So, of course, a wise, scam-literate person would say, “I’m pretty sure I didn’t purchase an Apple computer, and this is probably a scam, but let me call my financial institution. And I’m not going to be foolish and click the number that appeared in the text message, I’m going to go on the website and I’m going to call their actual number.” So here’s the thing. Bank call centers are so busy that you often hear a message that, “We will save your place in line, just click 1, record your name, and we’ll call you back when it’s your turn.” Scammers know this. So what will they do? They’ll wait 30 minutes after they sent that text message, and call you. And they will have faked the caller ID. So it will say Chase Bank, U.S. Bank, Bank of America — whatever the bank that they initially pretended to be. And ask you questions and confirm your identity. They’ll probably have information about you already. They might have your full Social Security number, your name, your date of birth. And it works. And that would work for many of us. ...

A.I. has made it so that all of our old consumer-education rules of thumb — we’ve had to throw out the window. Things like, look for spelling errors in the email — gone. Do a video call with this person that says they’re in love with you — gone. So we’re having to kind of reinvent the wheel and adapt to this environment that’s changing so quickly that sometimes in my public presentations with older adults I look at them and I say, I don’t know what advice I can give you to stay safe in today’s world. ...

Last year, Reuters reported that leaked documents from Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) showed that 10 percent of Meta revenue comes from running ads for scams and banned items. ...

...so that companies like social media companies, telecoms, that they take more action in preventing the scam messages from getting to us in the first place.

DUBNER: And how hard would that be for them? How hard would it be for Facebook, for instance?

DeLIEMA: The technical capacity of these companies to identify and flag scams is there. I think what we saw with the recent Meta leak about the profits that they make from these scam ads really shows that they’re making a calculated choice to either show and host known false and fraudulent ads or not.