Cryptocurrency enables a big part of this. Not saying that there weren't any wire scams before crypto, but crypto has made it much easier for average people to make anonymous international money transfers that can't be reversed.
Not to start a big argument, but to my eyes the main usecases of cryptocurrency are to bet on them as a speculative asset or to use them for various forms of crime. Someone will probably tell me about some theoretical situation where it is a positive force, but I still think those are by far the two most common daily uses.
Totally agree, I think crypto is cool from a technological standpoint, but I don't think I've seen one common genuine use of BTC, etc.
And before someone comes in with very specific, anecdotal examples - notice I said "common", ie not buying your indie music from a retro-Serb band that plays using the concept of instruments as instruments and from abandoned sewers; but only on Mondays.
I definitely feel like the majority of crypto traffic is primarily due to bubbles/moneymaking/bets/pumps+dump and then the secondary/next closest use case is for criminal activity. And then after that perhaps the myriad of much smaller use cases like people paying for Proton using crypto.
> I've seen one common genuine use of BTC
One of my favorited comments/threads:
Even that technically falls under the crime umbrella (though I don't believe it is immoral or unethical). It's basically the getting around government imposed capital controls.
The comment (and thread) isn't about getting around capital controls, which is why it is so powerful.
The comment argues that for people in stable, wealthy countries, Bitcoin can seem unnecessary or overhyped. But for those living in countries with dysfunctional banking systems, currency controls, or even mild corruption (like Argentina), it solves very real problems.
Traditional financial systems often restrict access to dollars, limit foreign transfers, and are vulnerable to government seizure or devaluation, leaving people with few safe options to save or send money.
Bitcoin offers a practical alternative for remittances, savings, and financial autonomy in places where the local system fails to protect or empower its citizens. While Bitcoin may look inefficient compared to ACH transfers in the U.S., it’s a lifeline elsewhere, and one that could become more relevant globally in times of instability.
You’ve literally just described getting around capital controls.
In some countries, there is nothing to get around.
The most surprising part of that thread is the claim that they’re using Bitcoin rather than a stablecoin. But perhaps things have changed in four years?
To be fair, the article for the thread is about how Tether was forced to end in NY.
I'm interested in that band if you have recommendations, though!
Just this week, I received a bug bounty from a company in bitcoin. No BS with banks or anything!*
*: until I convert it to fiat
That sounds like more hassle than receiving a straightforward deposit into my bank account.
For whom? In which country?
use them for various forms of crime
It's not a coincidence that a guy who was found liable for financial fraud is reducing regulations around crypto currency and then launched a meme coin.
The banks here have said that if you get scammed and money has been transferred (no cryptocurrency involved), there's nothing they can do. It was a bit surprising to hear since you only hear cryptocurrency transactions being irreversible.
The (dumbass) finance department in my last company was phished out of about $50k. They received an email "from another company", that we happened to do business with, that was asking to update the account information. The FD didn't do any verification cause it was over a weekend and it was 'urgent'. Basically ignored all the classic signals.
The bank refused to return the funds. The concept that just because it is a bank and it must be irreversible, is totally wrong. Another very good example of this is the whole corrupt Zelle service.
interested to hear more about zelle
IIRC zelle is designed to be reversible for the banks but not the customers, it is the worst of both worlds.
Zelle is effectively DNS for your ACH bank account and the address is your email or phone number. It is notoriously used by scammers because they know that it isn't reversible.
Just google "zelle fraud" and go down the rabbit hole...
The difference is, crypto makes irreversibility a fundamental part of the system, making it impossible for any party to unilaterally reverse a payment without having to first take over the entire chain. With regular fiat money and banks, such reversals are perfectly possible on a technical level. The banks are usually unwilling to do them, and an individual may not be able to force them to in practice, but it's still possible in a way it's not possible with crypto.
This seems like the correct way to go though.. if you want reversibility, then introduce escrow into the situation, the foundational building block should be irreversible.. as there's no way to make a means of transfer _more_ irreversible if you're inherently giving control to a 3rd party with no choice.
The thing is, crypto IS reversible, and has been reversed in the past. The people affected just need to be rich and/or powerful enough. And you and I are not in that club.
I agree. Smart contracts or other functionality integrated into wallets could also improve usability e.g. regarding irreversibility and user mistakes. Base layer doesn't have to be the final way to use cryptocurrencies and it isn't.
This just bring in new problems like people thinking they got paid but there being a refund trick.. This happens in the traditional system too, but at least when it exhibits total indifference to an account serving no purpose besides refund scams it is violating KYC principles instead of running as expected.
Why?
Irreversible transactions are not desired by anyone in payment networks. Consumers don't want to get scammed out of money. Merchants want customers to feel like transactions are low risk so they are more willing to make them. That's a big reason why merchants put up with the outright hostile to them system of chargebacks. Sure, you will lose some money to chargebacks you might think were not valid, but you have made much more than that back from liberalized spending habits.
Nobody benefits from irreversible transactions except fraudsters and other bad actors. And they benefit soooo much from transactions being irreversible. Why would you build and advocate for a system that explicitly empowers bad actors over anyone else?
An escrow is not a solution. The escrow itself could be a bad actor.
I've intentionally used irreversible crypto payments to a merchant that is an an industry with high chargebacks. It is highly useful in transactions where the merchant is highly trusted but the buyers tend to be weasels. Such merchants tend to charge high premiums for reversible payment methods.
In such cases it is win-win for both the merchant and customer, the customer doesn't have to foot the reversibility overhead and the merchant is able to offer goods at the same profit margins but lower price which should yield more sales.
The existence of wire transfers, cashier's checks, and, you know, CASH undermine your claim that people in payment networks don't desire irreversible transactions.
Basically everybody who's ever sold something in person wants to know they get to keep the money when the other person walks away with their stuff. It's the fraudsters in those everyday transactions who want reversibility.
I am much more likely to buy something if I can pay with a credit card. Making a wire transfer is stressful; I'm worried that I got the wire instructions wrong, and my money will go to the wrong place and be gone forever. Paying with a cashier's check is stressful; I worry that I will get mugged between the bank and wherever I'm spending it, or that I'll just lose it on the way. Cash isn't quite as bad, and I almost always have some cash on me.
But given the choice of paying with cash or credit card, I will almost always choose the credit card. I like the idea that if I walk away from that transaction and then later realize that the merchant sold me something defective or outright fraudulent, I will have some recourse in getting that money back.
I get that a merchant will prefer an irreversible transaction, all else being equal. But I don't think all else is equal; I absolutely buy the GP's argument that purchasers will be more liberal with their spending if they don't have to worry so much about the merchant being a scammer. And regardless, there are many many more purchasers than merchants, and most (if not all) purchasers would at least have a slight preference toward a reversible transaction.
That just kicks the can of trust to the entity performing the escrow, and there have been many, many cases of fly by night escrow companies (or companies pretending to be escrow companies) who just take the money and run.
So introducing another third party to trust makes it more complicated than the alternative of allowing transactions to be reversable.
Banking reversibility is also kicking the can to a trusted third party.
Several years ago my credit card was stolen. I contacted my bank, who then accused my wife of cheating on me in another state (I know this didn't happen because there is no way she left 1000 miles away for several days multiple times between me seeing her, unless she has a hidden personal jet). By 'lying' about it being a fraudster instead of my wife who 'had cheated on me' the bank then accused me of bank fraud.
The bank then obtained fraudulent invoices, which were used to 'prove' I owed the money. They just buried me in false paperwork to the point I could never win. When the bank was done with all that, they closed my regular checking account too, because they had now flagged me as a criminal.
I will take anyday, an 'irreversible' crypto account over a banking system where they just close my other accounts because they think one was fraudulent because I was defrauded.
Bank of America decided I really had been in rural France buying tires when I had proof I was at work, at my desk, in Boston at the times of the purchases, and the card was in my hand. It's been 20 years and I still won't ever do business with them again.
It was much more fun, at least, when Amazon tried to tell me one of my children must have taken my card and made the purchases. I took it to mean the children I have not conceived yet will have access to time travel, in which case I'm not even mad. Pranking me in the past deserves whatever trinket they bought!
> The banks are usually unwilling to do them, and an individual may not be able to force them to in practice, but it's still possible in a way it's not possible with crypto.
Generally they're unwilling to do that because it involves losing money for them.
Transfers work in a multi-step process to ensure money isn't created.
You tell Bank A to transfer money to person X at Bank B.
Bank A tells an intermediary bank C to move funds from Bank A's account to Bank B's account. (This step is unnecessary if either A or B are large enough to be an intermediary)
Bank C lets Bank B know that it's gained funds
Bank B moves funds internally from Bank C to customer X.
If you want your money back and Bank C says it's already been withdrawn then somebody in A,B,C is going to take a loss. Personally I think we should have an easy way to pay in a 7d settlement or something. Who really cares if somebody sends a 7d settlement when buying a house as long as its done 7d before closing.
Right. Still, the whole thing is plugged into society at large, including court system, so ultimately the courts have the power to force anyone in the chain to give money back and eat the loss or argue to take it from elsewhere.
To the unending dismay of crypto fans, the same is true about cryptocurrency - but its design fundamentally gives the law less leverage and actual points an intervention could be made. That, plus the whole thing is very new. But that's just a transient state; this kind of immutability is not compatible with society or real life, so the only cryptocurrency-based systems that'll survive long term will be the ones that give up on the whole cryptoanarchy thing.
But you know who customer X is and if he obtained the money fraudulently then the bank (or police, courts, etc) can go after him to recover it. It might not happen but it's possible.
Same statement could be said about you no?
You're the one that was defrauded. The bank processed the transfer exactly as you told them to. So therefore, if person X isn't providing the service you expected then you should have to go to the courts to get it back?
The general problem is that it takes a lot of leg work. Often Customer X was being defrauded through some payroll scam (they take out ~500 and forward the remaining 1500). So now you have to recover $500 from them and then trace the 1500 again. Possibly through multiple countries and their courts (who may see this as beneficial for their country; jury nullification goes both ways).
Correct, but there are possibilities and established processes (however unlikely or inconvenient) to get the money back.
If Bank C is forced to take the loss, it'll be more careful in opening accounts for scammers to withdraw money. If Bank C is in a country that doesn't care to enforce such losses, then Bank B (or A if A is big enough) will think twice about deciding to do business with Bank B. Moving the cost of the scams onto the banks will strongly incentivize them to prevent the scams.
> Moving the cost of the scams onto the banks will strongly incentivize them to prevent the scams.
And then less people have bank accounts.
The scammer isn't necessarily the person with the final bank account. Its often somebody who was told they're managing payroll for some made-up company and they're going to get a 2k transfer and to keep 500 of it and withdrawal 1.5k of it as cash to do payroll.
While you may think that now only people who aren't scammers won't get bank accounts what actually is happening is that anybody that can be fooled doesn't get one.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
Doesn't that already happen? I've read stories from people in the US who are fooled, and as such, are marked as high risk and have their accounts closed. The rate it happens might be greater, but the total increase in harm from fewer people having bank accounts due to risk of scams might be less than the harm reduced by fewer people getting scammed. If scams are reduced enough, the number of people having bank accounts might go up because less people are losing them after being scammed.
There's some kind of circular reasoning going on here.
Banks are more careful, and that's why they don't deal with certain kinds of transactions. And that's where crypto comes in to "disrupt banks" and "democratize finance".
Long term, crypto will be no different than regular currency and finance because people don't like getting ripped off and defrauded. We'll have a period of time with people pulling old scams but with crypto, and eventually it'll be regulated just like normal finance.
The problem is that crypto is designed to evade regulation. You can put lipstick on a pig and regulate the centralized intermediaries (which, remember, crypto aimed to disintermediate): exchanges, custodians, ETF providers, ...
The dilemma is that you can either escape those regulations by going to unhosted wallets (self-custody) and transacting on the blockchain, or you keep everything (by regulation) entirely within the regulated intermediaries, but then there's no need to waste 1% of world electricity on some slow "decentralized" database.
This was mostly true of v.1 cryptocurrencies, but it's not like it's inherent to the system. It's just as easy to design cryptocurrencies where there are control mechanisms, governed however you'd like them to be. USDC, for example, can be frozen in any wallet at any time, and has still become hugely popular.
IF reversibility is a desired feature of digital currencies, the market will bear that out. People can and will choose those currencies.
As with any "feature," there are tradeoffs, and it might well be that people en masse decide they would rather everyone control their own money than have central powers supervising, just as it might well be that people opt back into a system very much like the one that exists today, but with new efficiencies.
Adding programmability to money in the digital age was necessary. I don't know why anybody is surprised it hasn't reached some sort of final, settled state this early in the digital age. It basically only came into practical existence after the launch of smartphones and ubiquitous internet access. Give it a minute.
USDC is only popular because it can be easily used to evade taxes while retaining its value
This comment just isn't even remotely connected to U.S. reality. Transactions into and out of USDC are taxable just like transactions into and out of USD, and the IRS can every bit as easily find the owners of these accounts as they can offshore bank accounts or anything else someone might use to try to evade taxes.
I'm confident that any other country who cares to (i.e., anywhere people bother to try to evade taxes) can also do so.
Reversing stolen crypto transactions in practice is done the same way you reverse stolen cash transactions.
You find the criminal, and the cash and give back the cash to the wronged party. With cash, the criminal can hide the cash in some random location, and nobody can say if they spent it or they lost it. With crypto, everyone knows where the money is. You just have to figure out the passwords to the wallet in some way.
Right, my mistake for using too broad terms. I meant specifically electronic payments, which have this reversibility aspect that neither cash nor crypto have.
Stellar XLM has reversibility but no one seemed interested in that
How do you reverse yourself mailing $1000 USD cash to some scam outfit?
I meant electronic payments specifically; my error in using terms that implied cash also counts.
Obviously, you can't just reverse a cash transaction. It's one of the reasons people try to avoid using it in many situations.
Banks aren't perfect, but they also aren't anonymous.
If you feel wronged, you can take appropriate legal recourse.
Crypto offers no such thing.
Banks are good if you live in a functional democratic country with sane politics.
If you don't then you'll easily get the bad side of it since abusing the power is not that hard.
How is paypal / venmo / cashapp different?
you can sue them
modulo all the ToS / arbitration clauses, that is still the fundamental difference
and although not a recourse available to most people, still not nothing
KYC
Good luck taking legal action against an off shore entity, especially when the legal fees is more than the money transferred, and the money most likely moved to three different accounts in as many countries from that first off shore account.
You’re right that you don’t have guaranteed recourse for foreign fraud. But at least the banks play whack-a-mole and make it somewhat expensive for criminals to set up accounts; crypto undoubtedly makes money laundering substantially easier and cheaper.
> Someone will probably tell me about some theoretical situation where it is a positive force
Challenge accepted. My positive use case for cryptocurrency pertains to someone like me being over sixty and worried about being swept up into the guardianship system. With most of my assets in crypto and assuming decent opsec, they would be inaccessible to the guardian. If a judge ordered me to grant access, could I be cited for contempt by refusing to comply given that I had already been legally ruled incompetent? If I were cited regardless, would the threat of incarceration carry any weight given that I would be already incarcerated in an old age home? Unless there's some principle the guardian is trying to uphold, the rational course would be to choose a different victim.
> With most of my assets in crypto and assuming decent opsec, they would be inaccessible to the guardian.
The flip side of this is that there’s also a decent chance of your assets becoming completely inaccessible to anyone, including you or any of your successors (if applicable), unless you’ve made careful preparations involving time locked contracts or similar.
And yes, you’re probably safer against the enforcement of court rulings you might disagree with, but you are extremely vulnerable to blackmail or cyberattacks compared to traditional bank accounts.
That's what happened to my grandfather, and the same happened to a friend's father two years ago.
There are greater protections against elder abuse today, but often by the time their broker or finance manager finds out, the damage has been done.
> worried about being swept up into the guardianship system.
Functionally speaking you'd have to be incapable of calling a lawyer on your own, which means you'd already be under someone's care. Even if you're being scammed dry, the absolute last thing you want in that situation is a lack of funding.
Find someone who understands end of life financial planning and set up whatever trust-like scheme they recommend.
whats the benefit to you though?
youre going to be incarcerated in an even worse kept old folks home, and anything you actually try to spend on will be both spied upon - you getting a nurse to type in the secrets for you, or confiscated an sold before yoy could enjoy the results.
i think you'd be better off trying to tackle the problem directly, and get legal changes to how guardianship works, since itll still screw over your crypto assets
Elder abuse is certainly a real problem, but the guardianship/conservatorship system also does address a real problem: many seniors actually do become mentally unable to manage themselves.
You're worried about falsely being forced into a guardianship, but what happens if you actually do develop Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia and your family legitimately needs access to your assets to care for you? It's easy to say you'd just give them access before it gets really bad, but an insidious part of the problem is that someone suffering from such a decline either doesn't, or refuses to, recognize it happening.
Before she died, my grandmother couldn't remember where she'd hidden her most valuable jewellery.
She was an excellent card player 10 years before that, probably because she could recall most/all of the playing cards in the discard pile, so I'm sure she could have remembered a Bitcoin wallet passphrase — until the last few years.
I’ve unfortunately seen that as well.
Paranoia is a common side effect of dementia, and I’ve seen lots of anguish and money (legal/bank fees) spent on recovering non-life-changing savings that were just too well hidden. At least there was a fallback option to get them back – crypto would have been permanently lost.
Finding a middle ground between security and availability is hard even as a healthy adult and only gets worse with age.
Whether you see international money transfers outside of the government control as a positive or negative force largely depends on how much you trust your government. How much it should limit things for your own safety?
I suspect that for majority of the earth population the trust level is rather low, even though in some countries it could be different.
For the majority of the earth population, this is not a concern. Yes, things may get fuzzy around an inflection point, but for most people, their concerns fall way short of that.
lots of people live in countries with severe governance problems and a bad monetary regime.
If I had to throw out a number describing how many more times I trust the FDIC than I trust some cryptobro, the first thing that comes to mind is "ten billion".
And my trust in the current administration is rather low.
Sure. But not everyone in the world shares the same FDIC with you.
To complicate things further, international transfers require cooperation not only between the sending and receiving states but also from states that control the transfer system. Any hiccup along the way and you may lose your money, sometimes forever (true story).
> And my trust in the current administration is rather low.
Again, I'm not sure you realize what the "low trust into the government" means for the rest of the world.
Well, that only works until bank accounts of somebody disloyal become frozen.
And if you compare chances of that with chances of being deported to El Salvador prison... Well let's say frozen bank accounts doesn't sound that impossible.
Well, they're pretty comparable in many parts of the world (and I despise cryptocurrency, btw). Despite what you might think, the current US administration is far from the worst compared to what some of us live under. Americans simply lack a proper "zero point" to be able to properly gauge this.
I place exactly zero trust in what our administration says, because they've lied about the country's economic situation and what they're planning to do about it four times during my lifetime, and several more times during our parents' lifetimes. Our savings were cut in half (or more) several times because of this, and so much of it was lost, the total amount of time wasted working for effectively free is in the decades now.
There's really no reliable way of saving money long-term here, unless you scrounge enough to buy real estate or something else that is unlikely to be devalued to 30% of its original value with a stroke of a pen.
I can imagine why some people would resort to cryptocurrency and extracting money out of the country asap.
These are all good points. Like others here, I will preemptively state my dislike of the political classes.
Perhaps if financial regulations were not so onerous, traditional payment processors like PayPal would be able to handle more types of transactions with a lower overhead. As it is, the large number of prohibited categories creates a demand for cryptocurrency. As you noted, inflationary monetary policy is another source of discontent. Perhaps if central bankers had exercised a bit more restraint, there would be less demand for cryptocurrency. The same can be said for capital controls and more...
So there is a bit of irony when posters appeal for even heavier regulations and prohibitions. These are the forces which have created demand for wholly unregulated markets. It shouldn't be hard to see how these overreaches have created a counterbalancing force. Tragically, these overreaches generate a safe-haven for additional bad actors.
the point is that you don't have to trust 'some cryptobro' to hold USDS and you certainly don't have to trust Şahap Kavcıoğlu to keep your lira safe or Olayemi Cardoso's stewardship of your naira.
The biggest impact cryptocurrency has had on my life is the ability to pay criminals after they've taken your data hostage. It's awesome that we've invented a way to make creating and distributing malware profitable.
it definitely helps to motivate some people to consider security as a functional requirement
> main usecases of cryptocurrency are to bet on them as a speculative asset or to use them for various forms of crime. Someone will probably tell me about some theoretical situation where it is a positive force
When you don't agree with the laws that are being broken in a particular case.
So if 57% in a country agree with a law, the remaining 43% should be allowed to circumvent that law through these means?
Of course, the opposite argument is "what about north korea", but it's a package deal is my point.
Pretty much, yeah.
If almost half of the population disagree with something then it’s probably a stupid restriction to begin with.
But most laws in democracies pass with just about majority. The president in america was selected with just-about majority. Do you suggest changing elections so that we keep doing them until the vote skews to 100%? 90%? What's the threshold?
Generally speaking you shouldn't be able to impose your will on others
Sure, but in every democracy most laws pass with such just-about majorities.
I use crypto often. I am Russian, I left Russia when Putin started the war. For me, it is quite hard to open a bank account. So I use crypto. I work remotely for a Singaporian company. Now I'm in Vietnam, I can pay for my groceries with crypto using QR code. I can cash USDT crypto with a rate better than paper bills.
I have two bank accounts in Kazakhstan. Both card credentials were stolen after I used a popular hotel booking website, which, by the words of reddit, shares my card details with hotels. Some money was stolen. Seems like 3D-security only affects my payments, and theifs have a freedom to choose a website without 3D. Now I have to keep that cards always locked. Unlocking them for a short moments, when I need to make a card payment. Like booking an hotel, or buying an airline ticket.
It is wild how Vietnam really transformed from a complete cash society to a mostly digital one in just a few years. Covid did it.
Nothing more annoying than having your largest bill be worth about $20 and having to carry stacks of them around for things like just paying rent.
>Now I'm in Vietnam, I can pay for my groceries with crypto using QR code.
That sounds great. What do you use?
Fizen
i bet heavily using crypto against AI progress on coding to hedge my career
Is your job developing AI coding tools?
no, but i do work in ML - i think there are two channels through which this derisking makes sense, but people on here get aggressive if you mention the other one.
How is crypto relevant to betting?
because it gives you access to binary options markets with deep liquidity that you can’t get access to in any other way. i guess it counts under various forms of crime because we criminalize offering useful financial instruments
> various forms of crime.
Keep in mind that most of the world doesn't live in a perfectly functioning country with proper rule of law. Being able to use crypto to commit a crime in those countries is a feature. You never know when you will need this feature in your own. (Stupid example: tomorrow Trump wakes up and decide to block all bank accounts of non-citizen until they prove that they are in the US legally: will being able to make crypto transfers be good or bad ?)
But even assuming that all criminal use of crypto is bad, as our money become more digital, we are more and more dependent on a small number of payment processors that get to decide what is good and what is bad, regardless of the legal status (or decide that the legal status that matters is the one of the US, even if you live in Nigeria). This is particularly true for businesses that handle anything sex-related.
For an example of the latter, just a few days ago a payment processor suspended its services to Civitai [1] because it lets people to make ai-generated porn. "The company that had been processing credit card payments for Civitai made the decision to cease processing payments beginning May 23, 2025, due to their discomfort with enabling AI-generated explicit content."
[1] https://www.laweekly.com/civitai-ditched-by-credit-card-proc...
> Cryptocurrency enables at big part of this
Interesting panel discussion on the state of crypto today at the Regan National Economic Forum event.
I believe it is the third panel in the stream:
https://www.reaganfoundation.org/events/videos/2025-reagan-n...
In the past they might have asked you to mail them USD. Same risk there. Not like the post office is funded sufficiently to open all mail. And once that money is out of your bank account and out of your hands it is also gone.
Crypto is hard for most scam victims to buy. Ban gift cards. Gift cards have always been a lame thoughtless gift anyway.
This is what I'm wondering. How do you get the typical person to fall for a scam to open a crypto account, buy it, go through kyc, etc
A friend of a friend (doctor as well) got taken for ~20.000 eur while being kept on the phone for over 6 hours using the "security breach at your bank" story. She said they got her so into the story that she really saw no issues going to the Crypto ATM at the local mall and doing 15 (FIFTEEN!) purchases there because a "police inspector" told her that's the only safe place for her money. They had a fake website where she could "see" her deposits but she was with the guy on the phone and was telling him "I made another deposit" ...
I think they are doing bank transfers directly to the scammers, who give them a FAKE website that shows a crypto balance + great investment returns. I'm not sure crypto is involved at all; it's just the old Spanish prisoner / Nigerian prince scam with a new coat of paint.
>How do you get the typical person to fall for a scam to open a crypto account, buy it, go through kyc, etc
With spam like the below (note that the original contains mostly UTF8 characters to avoid spam filters). I get these every so often on the NOC and postmaster addresses of domains I manage.
It's not even phishing. Just spam blasts to find anyone uninformed enough to believe it, and insecure enough to be afraid of the (empty) "threat":
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unfоrtunate for yоu thаt I ϲɑmе ɑcrosѕ whɑt уоuâνe beeո up to.
I speոt morе tiме thаn neсеsѕarẏ dіԍԍinԍ іnto уоur pеrѕoոɑl datɑ. І'vе
соllected a significɑոt aмount оf ѕeոsitіνе іnformɑtion frом ẏour devicе аnd
reѵiеwеd it thоroughlу. І еѵen hɑve reсordiոgs of yоu еոԍagіոɡ іn ѕoме rather
ԛuеѕtiоnаble behɑviоr аt hoме. I've сoмріlеd viԁеоѕ anԁ sոɑрshots (incluԁiոԍ
іmagеѕ оf ẏour liviոԍ spaсе) ẇhеrе оnе siԁe ԁisрlays the соոtеոt ẏou wеre
viewing, ɑnԁ thе other siԁе shoᴡs you... ԝеll, let'ѕ just saу уоu κոоԝ what I
меаո.
With a singlе ϲlіcƙ, I could ѕharе thiѕ with еѵery оnе оf ẏоur ϲoոtactѕ.
І uոderstanԁ уоur uncertaіոty, but don't eхpect anу leոieոcẏ from mе.
Тhat ѕaid, I'м рrерarеd tо let thiѕ ԍо aոd аllоẇ yоu tо ϲarry on аѕ іf
nothing еνer оϲсurred.
Неre'ѕ thе deɑl - I'm offеrinɡ ẏоu twо chоiсеs:
- Igոore this меѕsаɡe ɑnԁ fіոd оut ԝhɑt hаpреոs next. If ẏоu taƙе thіѕ рath,
I'll ѕhаre thе ѵiԁeo with аll уour coոtaсts.
It's ԛuіtе а reѵеɑlіng ϲlip, aոd I can oոlẏ іmаginе the huміlіаtіоn уоu'ԁ
facе whеn your сollеaɡueѕ, friends, and fаmіly ѵіeẇ іt.
But, ɑѕ they ѕay, аctіоnѕ have соnѕequеnceѕ. Dоn't роsitiоո yourѕelf aѕ thе
νіctiм here.
- Раy me tо kеeр thіѕ мɑttеr privatе. Let's rеfer tо іt aѕ a prіvɑcy fеe.
Hеrе'ѕ thе ԁeal іf you ԍo thіs route: уour sесrеt reмɑiոs sаfe, ոo one еlsе
ᴡіll eνer knоẇ.
Օոcе I reсеіve thе pаẏмеոt, І'll dеlеtе еverẏthіոɡ. Thе paуmеոt iѕ to bе
mаdе eхϲluѕivеly iո сrẏptо.
І'м ɑімing for a rеsolutioո that ẇоrκs for bоth оf uѕ, but mу termѕ are
fiոal anԁ noո neԍоtіɑble.
1100 USD tо мy bitcoiո ɑԁԁrеѕs beloᴡ (remove whitespaces if any):
bc1qt30ya4ssczyhzpe03t6jt8524hgfswe7pdxq9u
Onϲe the paymеnt іѕ мɑԁе, yоu ϲаn rеst еɑsy κnoᴡiոԍ І ƙeер му word.
Үou hаνе 50 hоurs tо сoмplеte the trɑnsaсtion, аnd btс іѕ the onlу fоrм оf
pɑymeոt І'll ɑccept.
Thе syѕtем I'vе sеt uр ԝіll ɑutомаticɑllу ԁеtect thе payment anԁ imмedіɑtely
dеlete eѵеrуthіnɡ I hаνe on you.
Don't wаste tіme rеѕpоndіnԍ or atteмрtіոg tо ոeԍotіatе - it wоո't work.
Іf І notiсe yоu'vе sроƙeո to аnyоոе about thіѕ оr ѕоuԍht aԁνicе, thе vіԁеo
will be sеnt to уоur соntaсtѕ withоut hesitatіоn.
Aոd ԁoո't thіոk аbоut turniոg off ẏоur рhonе оr attеmрtiոԍ a fаctоrẏ rеѕеt -
it won't мaκe a diffеrеոϲe.
І ԁon't makе errors, aոd I'm ѕimplẏ ԝаіtіnԍ for the pɑyмent.
I'd expect that each spam recipient is given a unique BTC address, so that they can be identified for further "blackmail"[0] should they actually comply.
And to clarify, the above message was received by a "postmaster@domain" account on 23 May 2025. And since I've been seeing them for at least a few years I can only assume they are at least occasionally successful.
There are other scams that target folks with bitcoin demands too. Likely with similar claims.
[0] https://malwaretips.com/blogs/ive-recorded-many-videos-of-yo...
> I'd expect that each spam recipient is given a unique BTC address, so that they can be identified for further "blackmail"[0] should they actually comply.
They typically aren't, actually. Most of the time when you enter the wallet address into Blockchair or another BTC transaction monitoring service you'll see tons of payments for the demanded amount having been sent to that sole wallet.
Even thinking of it logistically, its a whole lot easier for a scammer to just send literally the same email to every victim, wait some months, then withdraw the funds from one BTC wallet.
It's such a simple scam, anyone who can make a BTC wallet and send emails could pull it off.
Reason of most scams is the absurd level of trust existing in Western countries.
When i first saw Upwork where hours were paid by the tracker in a guaranteed manner and people SIGNED for it, i knew West was doomed. I still find it hard to believe people can be that easy to dupe.
Level of trust in the Western societies needs to be radically reduced through government propaganda, church and other channels. The world has become global. Westerners are now a small minority in an ocean of people where the manner of relationship that will be seen as sociopathic in the West, is the everyday norm and always have been. If they won't adapt, they will cease to exist. The cozy world where one could trust another because they all shared fear of God and had a reputation to lose, is gone.
A high trust society is actually a good trait, not a bad one. It’s rather easy, lazy even, for a culture to devolve into a low trust minima. That’s basically the default state that people have endeavoured to evolve out of.
I think it’s also the kind of thing that can easily overwhelm anxious minds. The kind where “what if it’s a scam?” leads them to never taking a risk, donating to a cause, doing someone a favour.
Not that there isn’t a fight to be fought here. But waving the surrender flag on fostering a trusting society is a very weak move.
"A high trust society is actually a good trait, not a bad one."
100% agree, and seeing it erode is painful (e.g., toothpaste now locked behind plexiglass).
But to steelman the parents point, while it is be good to be high trust society, that society may be poorly adapted when rapidly integrated into a low trust globalized world.
There's little societal trust in e.g. Russia, and yet they're getting massively scammed by Ukrainian call centers every day. People selling their only housing, sending all their savings for “safekeeping” overseas, are daily news. Not just old ladies (but them too), but also middle-aged intellectuals who were supposed to know better.
It's all using the same schemes that have been explained in the news over and over again, there's little innovation on that front. You have to be living under a rock the for past few years to fall for them, and yet people do. I think there's simply a certain amount of marks in every society, regardless of how its members trust each other, and the only reliable way of protecting them is managing everybody's lives DPRK-style.
I think the only reason of why it works is that Ukrainians are an even lower trust culture, and they are better and more cynical at duping people. Plus, in Ukraine many people see it as their patriotic duty, and perhaps rightfully so, so these kind of jobs are likely to attract quite sophisticated people who will be able to pull off very believable scams, not some social rejects or worse, forced labor sitting in Myanmar jungle, as it is in Asia vs USA scams.
Trust is necessary for social development & advancement, and low trust countries & societies are also low on the development index. The development of advanced economies is predicate on the "absurd level of trust" in western countries.
I think the underlying concept you're looking for is corruption versus rule of law. Blaming the victim versus expecting consequences for the perpetrator etc.
The cost world you describe didn’t emerge because of fear of god (which has been prevalent for milleniums, mostly everywhere) but the abondance of cheap energy and goods, basically since oil starts getting processed but other minor factors helped too. Democracy and peace emerges when peoples aren’t scared to miss food anymore.
In the US food is plentiful. Poor people die of obesity related illness. But trust is plummeting because of a decline in social cohesion. Building a high trust society is hard, and there is no monocausal solution. You can't plug in god, or food, into a low trust society to flip it to high trust.
Food is plentiful here, but unevenly distributed. Childhood hunger is still a serious problem.
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/14/childhood-hunger-food-insec...
During the initial pandemic, great strides were made in the United States to mitigate childhood poverty, but these measures were quickly overturned. Now the administration wants to defund SNAP and other food security programs. Alas.
Classic Russian thinking that the only motivating force is fear. No wonder you get stuck with homicidal tyrants ruling over you time after time.
>Not to start a big argument, but to my eyes the main usecases of cryptocurrency are to bet on them as a speculative asset or to use them for various forms of crime.
What argument can even be had? This is factually true. Whatever other use cases were hoped for when it was invented, they have failed to materialize.
The idea that someone could just beat you with a lead pipe until you open up your bitcoin wallet and surrender all the bitcoins and then there is nothing you can do about it in any kind of legal system or even cryptographically should terrify anyone into boasting about having any kind of bitcoin assets.
I wouldn't recommend boasting about owning bitcoin either but why couldn't you involve the legal system? They can go after the criminals who beat you with the pipe just as they could if they beat you to get to your cash/luxury car/art/jewelry/other valuable stuff.
This stuff makes me so mad.
I know a friend who told me about a loved one getting scammed. Dude meets some girl from a foreign country online. Next thing you know he thinks she got him into some great cryptocurrency, and nothing anyone can tell him will make him realize he is getting scammed.
Sad stuff.
It happened to my father. I told him he was getting scammed. My mom (divorced) told him. So did my sister. It didn’t matter. He lost all of his savings - 300k+. I wish I had taken his phone away, changed his passwords, etc. My mom didn’t want me to take drastic action because she was concerned that if he knew how much I knew he wouldn’t keep telling her things. It doesn’t matter once they’ve lost everything, of course.
To anyone reading this thinking it wouldn’t happen to your parents, don’t be so sure. I thought he was smarter than that, and at some point he was, but age dulls things.
He was a construction worker. That money didn’t come easily; he ruined his body to get it. I think these scams work in part because it’s hard for the rest of us to imagine so many people being so cold-hearted. It’s almost inconceivable.
Sorry to hear that. Makes me angry just reading it, I can't imagine how it makes you feel.
I've mentioned before here wondering if there is a name for this phenomenon, it's similar to sunk cost fallacy, but more emotionally charged. Like, the thought of having been scammed makes you put on blinders and keep going hoping you weren't. It doesn't make a ton of sense to me, but it happens all the time, to people of all ages.
This guy was only 53 and fell for the same traps, rather famously -
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/21/cryptocurrency-shan-hanes-pi...
Oh, I definitely think that's part of it. Nobody wants to be betrayed, or made the fool.
Perhaps simple denial? If you continue having contact with them after giving them some money but they keep elaborating on how the money helped or satisfied their (scammer's) wishes, the victim may not think they have been scammed. Like "look she's still talking to me every day. We're close. A scammer would have vanished by now"
I experienced the same thing in my family. It sucks. I still haven't fully forgiven them (the supposed victim).
As much as I agree it's partially mental decline, it's hard for me to imagine it's not at least also partially a character flaw that would get you into this situation
Sure, but we all have character flaws. I'm certain if he were 10 years younger it wouldn't have happened to him. There's a reason it's almost always older people that fall for scams like these. We need better ways to protect people of a certain age - my mom looked into it and apart from going to a judge to have them rule to give us complete control over his finances there was nothing we could do. Even an FBI office people could call where they'd call/send someone out convince them to stop would go a really long way.
I, tiptoeing here, kind of agree. Am I missing something or do these scams operate on a person's greed?
To be sure, I invest in order to see a return. That's greed, I guess? Or maybe not?
I think having (unrealistic) expectations of doubling your money in anything shorter than ... about a decade ... should be sending up red flags for anyone. "Make money fast" should fire the same neurons as "Put it all on zero and spin".
I had a friend who began to believe he had written code that could play the stock market and rake in the cash on trades (he was testing it on historical data and doing very well). The best way I could try to reel him in was to simply suggest that if it were so easy, everyone would be doing it.
Same goes for any get rich scheme.
Scams operate on any character flaw, with varying degrees of effort required. They exploit the human mind. They might target greed, or loneliness, or insecurity, or even fear of loss.
But we all have character flaws. Everyone. So we are all vulnerable. Not to the same scams, but to some scams.
Sure but can you admit some people are more flawed than others? I don't think it's useful to just handwave this away and act like we are all the same.
Some of these scam victims are duped into trying to help someone they trust with a financial problem. In that case, the victims are being the opposite of greedy. The only character "flaw" I can think of in these cases is being naive/too trusting.
I don't know how common the "savior" victims are vs. the "get rich quick" victims, but they definitely exist, at least according to various mini-documentaries on pig butchering I've watched. Maybe these victims were modifying the story to seem more sympathetic, I can't say.
> The best way I could try to reel him in was to simply suggest that if it were so easy, everyone would be doing it.
Alas, most good entrepreneurial activities violate the efficient market hypothesis. Ditto for many investments. Some people are more alert to opportunities, have better deal flow, etc.
Bitcoin has done 4x in some years and 10,000x in a decade. Unfortunately that has led people to believe that crypto is magic. Classic Ponzis and such mostly don't work any more but if you add in crypto suddenly people are willing to buy in.
100%. That's why I'm so mad when influential people repeat the "crypto is the future of finance" nonsense. It is this uncritical hype that makes so many people vulnerable to crypto scams. Trump is doing it, Blackrock is doing it, it must be the best thing since sliced bread, right? No.
Classic Ponzis are still very much around too. The SEC prosecuted a fun one last month (https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025-71) where they raised $91 million pretending to trade international bonds.
My dad isn't a gambler. He invested in the stock market, but never anything like options. I've never known him to buy a lottery ticket. He's not greedy.
He is, however, pretty trusting. It took them months to get to the point where he was putting money in. I think he (naively) just trusted them. I wish he would have trusted us instead.
> I think he (naively) just trusted them. I wish he would have trusted us instead.
Probably he trusted people who spent more time talking to him. I don't mean it as an way to blame anyone, I just think it's the way the trust mechanism is wired into the human brain, and this is why these scams work so well.
Ironically this mirrors the parent's frustration of "I wish my kid trusted me and not his dumb-ass friends".
No, you're absolutely right. I had the same thought afterwards - but also, we're both introverted and definitely not phone-talkers. I don't really blame myself on that front.
The difference between a good salesman and a fraudster is intent. This is weaponised grooming.
These scammers don't have code of ethics, they will push whatever emotional button they think will get the result they want. You're conditioned by society to respond to certain patterning, they take advantage of that in full.
That's a common enough take, and I think there's some truth to it, but I think it's overly simplistic. I think there is certainly a motivation that such scams target, but I don't know if "greed" is necessarily the right word. Some of it is not necessarily knowing what is or isn't realistic, given the stories that we hear on the news. Some of it is feeling stuck, and trying to go out on a branch, and picking the wrong one. Not all of these cases are immoral, or at least not the same level of immoral.
With romance scams it's ego, especially with men. My neighbor needs to beleive that 25 year old blondes taking selfies on yachts are interested in him. Nothing in the universe could convince him otherwise. He would have to change so much of his personality and life to accept who he is or become who he would need to be. It's impossible. I think this is actually a question of thermodynamics at this point.
Disagree. I used to work with a guy that got scammed by a girl in Vietnam. They met online. He flew there to meet with her multiple times. He met her "family". They were even intimate. After a few months, she convinced him to invest in some sort of restaurant. He even went with her to talk to "lawyers" (in Vietnam; she never came to the US). Then she took all the money and vanished. I think it was close to six-figures.
He's a reasonably intelligent, humble guy. But he was also the perfect mark. He had just gotten divorced from a 10-year marriage, and he was lonely. So I wouldn't call his situation ego. I would call it loneliness. And I think that's how a lot of people get scammed. Everyone wants to feel loved.
I should have said it's often* ego. It can be either or both and other factors. I wouldn't rule it out entirely in your case though but you didn't mention the relative attractiveness of the people. I was talking about a 65 year old man, out of shape, in debt, poor skills with and understanding of women.
> character flaw
It's usually greed. The aphorism isn't entirely true, but you can't cheat an honest man.
No, older people aren’t greedy. They are insecure about their age and doing things they perceive younger more successful people as doing reduces their existential angst and fear of mortality. Wanting to live and be loved is also not greed. The actual flaw is a society that permits crypto currency, and encourages trade and globalization at any cost. Gotta give all the elderly 5g cell phones and Facebook accounts, and be saddened when millions of Indian scammers reach out and touch someone.
Awww, I don't know that that's true. If by "greed" you mean "it'd be nice to not have to clip coupons before doing my grocery shopping", sure, there are a lot of old people who would like things to be less tight.
But it's not greed in the sense of Ebenezer Scrooge or finance bros. All it takes is some pie-in-the-sky naivete and trusting the wrong person.
Disagree. These unprincipled scammers often exploit character flaws, sure, but also exploit positive traits - trust, a desire to help, the desire for love and belonging, or (in the case of cyber trafficking victims that are then forced to scam others) the desire to find a good job to support one's family.
One should not hesitate to attempt to obtain a conservatorship if they can when this happens. It’s the only thing that will stop someone from losing it all. Unfortunately, if a court deems them mentally fit, there’s nothing to stop them.
The bar to get that done seemed too high before he lost all of his money. Now that's done there isn't much of a point, apart from protecting his house. My mom is on the deed as well so there shouldn't be too much risk there, though I've tried to convince her to put it into a trust for multiple reasons.
Recommend setting up deed monitoring/property alerts if your local property records/recorder supports it, should notify you if any documents are recorded or transfers attempted without your knowledge against the property.
Sorry for your loss.
I hear you. Same with my dad. Found out after he gave his old phone to my mom without logging out. Tried to show him he was falling for MS-clipart certificates and bossofbigbank@gmail.com but to no avail.
After tracing 250k wired in just 6 months, we detangled my mom out of potential liability and reported him. He was put into financial stewardship (= personal finances done by an attorney). He appealed and the court ruled he seems normal, so he could also be in charge of his finances with only a monthly checkup. We still had his email access. He contacted his scammers the day after promising more money soon...
Fast forward to today, he's broke, likley evicted from his auctioned off appartment in a couple of months at age 79 and dividing his pension between wiring it to scammers and eating just enough to stay alive. Lost all his friends (many borrowed him money), doesn't see his wife or grandkids grow up. The opposite of a happy end.
If you find yourself in such a situation: - I received a lot of valueable advice from the local anonymous addiction hotline (how to react, where to seek help). Best call you can make. - In Switzerland, the KESB (govt authority for protection of elderly and children) can help you. They had a neurological assessment made and a court put him financial stewardship. It would have saved him from himself if not for his appeal. - Think ahead and have one person act as "bad guy" - everything I tried was in consensus with the whole family, but I played bad guy. Of course my dad broke with me, but he keeps sporadic contact with everyone else - his only social contacts - priceless.
I see legislation improve hereabouts - my bank (in France) now requires to watch a screen for 3 seconds and confirm you're sure to wire X to Y and you are sure Y is Y before oking a transaction. Far from enough. We infortunately won't convince our dads that they are getting scammed, but better consumer (and boomer) protection is something we can lobby and vote for.
Sorry to hear. Heartbreaking. I truly don't understand why we as a society give these scammers (a $500bn a year industry, according to The Economist) better tools for their trade, crypto, with virtually no other use cases.
This is horrifying. From your perspective, what's the hook that gets a person to hand over the money? Is it to make return on investment, or is it because they think the scammer loves them, or some other reason?
I cannot find the article again, it was posted here a few months ago so maybe someone knows of it but,
A guy intentionally went down the rabbit hole of one of these and wrote about the anatomy of it. In his case it was a young (like 30 something young) woman who graduated at the top of dentistry school in Uzbekistan and got a large grant to start a practice in the UK. Something like that. They talked/flirted for weeks/months, sent pictures, all that. The mark of course lives in the UK and she will need a place to stay while she gets her feet on the ground.
Finally right as she is leaving to come to the UK there is a bureaucratic problem and she needs ~$10k to resolve it quickly before the grant lapses, and she cannot access the grant money for expenses until she is in the UK. Also her bank froze her account because of this mess so she needs to use these alternate means to get the money to her, and she can immediately pay you back upon arrival. You get the idea.
I found it again: https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/security/seducing-a-r...
Pretty simple, for women; the promise of companionship, romance, someone to listen to them.
For men; sexy pictures, flirting, promises or chances of physical intimacy.
Older, single or widowed people are especially vulnerable.
Usually it's a combination of both. The scammer works their mark for months and develops a deep relationship with the victim ("fattening the pig") before moving to the next phase where they mention how they started making tons of money in crypto, or recently got into financial trouble and need help, or similar ("butchering the pig").
I think in his case they simply built up trust, and made it seem incredibly casual. It's hard for me to know exactly because I wasn't super privvy to what was going on, but by the time I talked to him about it he effectively trusted them over me.
It all would have been so clearly a scam to anyone with any internet sense at all it blew my mind he would have been fooled.
I think in a world where slitting someone’s throat for few thousand dollars (in some countries for few hundreds to just few) isn’t unheard of, I don’t know in what way people would find such scams inconceivable. I think the reason squarely is people being naive, or stupid, greedy, desperate (for love, better X times returns etc) etc - or a combination of these. And yes, they are victims, yes.
Keep in mind some of us still grow up in places where we can leave our cars/homes unlocked. Obviously extending that feeling to the entire world is naive, but it's also pretty understandable for our now elderly population..
My mother is exceptionally vigilant, which is great, but her partner ... I've never met anyone who gets targeted so much, or who needs it spelling out to him so much that he doesn't really have $2m in a crypto wallet somewhere he forgot about that a helpful person can send him. I think it's a fixed personality trait. If they split up, and doesn't have her watching him like a hawk, I worry he's toast.
I'm a big fan of YouTube anti-scammer vigilantes. They bait scammers, expose their tactics, humorously waste their time, or even manage a counter attack.
I believe these guys can be a big part of the solution. YouTube creates a financial incentive for individuals to go down this route, and apart from being entertaining to viewers, it broadens awareness of scammer tactics, which hopefully means more people detect scams early.
I wish these guys success and hope to see more anti-scam YouTubers appear.
Examples:
> YouTube creates a financial incentive for individuals to go down this route
No, YouTube creates a financial incentive for individuals to produce videos where they seem to do this. The problem of this is obvious, and if, as you hope, more of this content appears, there will not be enough people to check them all and keep them honest.
The worst part is, these scams flourish during bull markets, like now, when alts start shooting up 10-20% everyday. Stay safe.
Pig butchering gets additionally horrible when you consider the other side. People who actually handle the chatting are kept in inhuman conditions and physically cannot leave. Laundered profits go to criminal bosses at the top (corrupting various local governments, given they constitute a significant percentage of their economies at this point).
See Number Go Up by Zeke Faux for a glimpse into that (and how cryptocurrency, in particular stablecoins, in particular Tether, facilitate it). True, much of book is largely about the weird cryptobro culture and FTX collapse, but research into pig butchering and personal travel to scam compounds was the most visceral part for me.
Since hearing this I have stopped insulting or berating them. I just reply "Kill your masters, you outnumber them" and then block.
> People who actually handle the chatting are kept in inhuman conditions and physically cannot leave.
I think there might be a word for this.
But I was informed that ended in 1865.
And that's why the term is "modern slavery".
The world's a big place.
On a more serious note, you might want to be aware that slavery is still legal in the US as a punishment for crime. For further reading, you might be interested in the prison industrial complex.
i think the degree to which this is fully true is overstated from when i've looked into it. a lot of it is not the best working environments, but people are still scamming people for pay and are largely not forced to do so.
The difference here is that Zeke wrote a book chok full of sources (a significant chunk of the book in the end is basically pages of references), while you so far supplied none.
While I don’t know anyone personally, a local semi-famous person was abducted in Thailand and sent to one of these compounds (except in Myanmar). He was rescued by a combined rescue mission of his country’s and Thai governments. This made big news a few months back, and resulted in a drastic reduction in Asian tourist travel to Thailand (which itself doesn’t run these compounds, but is a big destination for tourism), so much so that Thai government was (maybe still is) in panic mode because of it.
Remember how Thailand tried to enact measures even technically abroad, like cutting off electricity and Internet connections (and how these compounds are controversially using Starlink now)? This was all posted on this site in the year leading up to today, and the reason for it is that pig butchering related abductions driven by crime nearby states made it unsafe for most Asian-looking people to travel to Thailand. Does it create an impression of voluntary labour in your mind?
Perhaps in near term LLMs will allow them to reduce headcount so much that the bosses become willing to pay and less inclined to keep them captive, but so far claims that it’s all mostly voluntary labour just don’t compute with available evidence.
(For the sake of completeness, I should add that Thailand’s crackdown could potentially be motivated not only by tourism revenue but also by the pressure from the government of PRC, which in turn could be motivated not only by its poorer citizens being among those kidnapped but also by its richer citizens being a target of pig butchering scams. Still, I don’t know how common the latter is—from my observations, in Western cultures people are more inclined to trust strangers compared to Chinese cultures—and in any case this does not make the well-documented kidnappings and forced labour less real.)
Various stories from people who have been on the other side of this tend to concur. I unfortunately cannot find the story, but a Pakistani call center scam artist who was hired by one of these crime syndicates went on record recently talking about the experience (I think it was in a podcast) and he said that he was recruited into a well paid, well organized machine and the workers themselves were treated well. He painted a picture of a hyper-competitive Glengarry Glen Ross-esque environment with leaderboards and the like, where people fought over and protected their "leads" (marks). The only struggle for him was not the working conditions, but rather with the moral aspects when he realized what he was doing.
Usually, as you would expect, the employees don't really realize until after they are recruited in what they are doing, and oftentimes the money and job is cushy enough they are willing to set aside their morals to do it.
The US does not do enough in this space to punish companies. It feels like such low hanging fruit too that would significantly help the elderly population.
Reported to Vercel a bank phishing site weeks ago, no response still. It’s amazing how little companies care.
Forcing telecos to authenticate phone calls would probably be the single most important change.
But instead of forcing them, we have been letting them drag their feet while while regular people are losing billions to scams.
The whole phone system is ancient and long deprecated. When I get a call from my bank I should see their name and a badge of authentication. Not a random phone number.
Imagine you could register irs.gov and start sending e-mails from that domain. That is pretty much the current state of the phone system.
Un-fucking-believable no one is forcing change here.
Telcos have systems in place that are specifically to allow international phone calls to appear as if they're local calls. This is to "facilitate business".
They have these services and continue to offer them because they get paid for having them, despite the double decker bus sized hole this provides for scammers.
I agree 100% that there should be much tighter regulation on telcos.
What I'm not sure of is actually whether it's possible without having to rebuild a lot of their networks almost from scratch.
Phone numbers should just be deprecated and move towards a DNS like system.
Phone numbers have nothing to do with the spoofing problem. Hierarchical identifiers would have the exact same problem. The problem is that VOIP callers can set whatever phone number they want. Email is also vulnerable to spoofing.
The solution is to roll out signing for phone numbers. The owner of each phone number is known. It could even be published in DNS with ENUM. Most phone calls are from big companies like telcos and mobile providers. The VOIP callers would be harder to update, but could be restricted so can't spoof known numbers.
If going to roll out new identity system, easier to use existing phone numbers than make a whole new identifier system.
Afaik, VoIP is just the easiest onramp to spoofing numbers.
Anyone with BGP-equivalent access to the phone network can spoof numbers, even if they're coming from a landline. Might even be able to when you have a business landline terminated in a PBX.
i.e. the phone network backend is built on trust.
The older I get the more I realise how much of an anchor legacy systems are, so the more I appreciate forward planning in many contexts.
I like to do things in a modular fashion; sectioning off related parts.
I admin the phone system for my phone company, for any user I can change the outgoing CLI to be literally any number in the world, I can even call out as "1" if I want to.
It's worse than that.
I got a call with the caller id of my (credit union) credit card company. They had my name and address, knew I had a card, and were claiming they were investigating fraudulent charges. It sounded more official than my actual credit card company. The only real things to tip me off was that the list of fraudulent charges kept changing, and they were super keen on me reading the entire credit card number back to them.
There were never any fraudulent charges, and the actual fraud department didn't seem to care.
I'm guessing it was due to the Experian leak.
Until we put people in prison, the cyber crimes will continue.
Declaring states that do nothing about these criminals as harboring terror is a good start. This is the same legal principle that resulted in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars which stopped Barbary pirates enslaving US sailors.
(I work at Vercel) Send me an email at dustin @ vercel dot com and I'll dig in here. Sorry about that.
Same with captcha providers (google et al) that these scams often hide behind. They don’t care, they just want money just like the scammers.
But this would interfere with freedom of entrepreneurship! And since no amount of government regulation can reduce fraud to zero anyhow, the current amount of it is economically optimal. Besides, every person has the unalienable right to ruin their life, gosh darn it. /s
Don't fall into the trap: Government penalizing private parties without due process can be appealing when it's a private party you don't like, but even those people deserve due process - that's the point, everyone does. Also it's arbitrary, unchecked power that is used for corrupt purposes, and by supporting it in a situation where you like to see it, you are legitimizing that power in every case.
Edit: It's tough to give due processs to foreign individuals, especially those who don't want to be found. But there are many ways, including via their own government, or via the fact that American company resources are used for these crimes - everyone in the US connects through an ISP operating on US soil.
Seems like some process was followed here to me.
FBI investigated a bunch of scams and found somebody assisted scammers. It's not like they pulled a name out of a hat and sanctioned them.
Where’s the judge in all of this?
Due process just means following pre-written law. ex. There's no judge involved when a cop shows up to a fight and arrests both people.
It's the same law [1] that everybody is talking about w.r.t. Trump's Tariffs except that global trade isn't emergent while Funnull is a new actor.
[1]: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-201600880/pdf/DCPD-...
They arrest people to put them in front of a judge. This is nothing like that.
I'm sure the treasury department would love for the guy to appear in front of a judge.
However, he's also welcome to email an appeal [1].
Note: This is a civil penalty. Much like a traffic ticket and does not require a judge.
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You won't necessarily show up in front of a judge if you get arrested. You may get released with no charges. You might also not get court time until a year+ from now inwhich case you'll probably plead guilty to time served regardless of the crime since it lets you out now.
Due process does not mean "judge approved". It just means consistent with written law.
[1]: https://ofac.treasury.gov/specially-designated-nationals-lis...
> a traffic ticket and does not require a judge
Yes it does. You can have a trial for your traffic ticket.
> Due process does not mean "judge approved". It just means consistent with written law.
That's just false. In fact, courts overrule laws and the procedures they authorize because they lack due process.
Can you cite where in the US code of law a foreign criminal is afforded due process in a sanction action?
KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development v. Geithner and Al Haramain Islamic Foundation v. U.S. Department of the Treasury
In both of those cases the designated entity was incorporated in the US (KindHearts in Ohio, AHIF-Oregon in Oregon).
Those are names of cases, not laws.
Precedent fills out the finer points in how laws apply, or don't.
Perhaps you’re not familiar with the common law system and its reliance on case law?
I didn't say it was illegal.
That's more of a problem with the US code of law than with the point GP is making.
I have 0 issues with the US sanctioning criminal organizations that are defrauding Americans. It’s not a slippery slope, it’s common sense which is why literally nobody is trying to defend the perpetrator in a court of law.
Evidence of active harm, if they were in the US they would have been raided. They get sanctioned and can sue instead.
> They get sanctioned and can sue instead.
Do you mean, if the government 'sanctions' you, your remedy is to sue the government?
The government can't sanction you without due process. Executive branch agencies have internal legal processes, with administrative judges, that can be appealed to the courts.
Also, you can't sue the government in most cases due to sovereign immunity.
I’m sure the folks running that scam center or the cloud service provider can afford to hire attorneys and argue their case.
The process is that they need to be designated by specified cabinet members based on published criteria. If Funnull believe that they weren't lawfully designated (e.g., because they're actually in Peoria or whatever), they can hire a lawyer and sue.
While we're at it, we should also tax all foreigners living abroad. All this due process stuff is expensive.
“These French resistance fighters can’t shoot the German soldier — what about due process?”
There are laws about when you can shoot someone during warfare. For example, you need to be a uniformed soldier, in most cases, of a party to an active conflict. The declaration of war and your uniform make the homicide legal.
The US has not declared war and these aren't acts of war.
> The declaration of war and your uniform make the homicide legal.
Declarations of war have very little international importance any more, since the recognition of the crime of aggression; either you are engaging in aggressive war, which a declaration does nothing to legitimize, or you are engaging in defensive war against an aggressor, where it is the aggression, not any declaration, that gives your fighting legitimacy.
They are a foreign company. They have no due process rights. We could hit their data center with a cruise missile tomorrow and it would be perfectly legal.
> They are a foreign company. They have no due process rights.
That is part of my point; there needs to be due process.
> We could hit their data center with a cruise missile tomorrow and it would be perfectly legal.
That is false. It is illegal to take military action against another country without a declaration of war.
Related: Interpol urges to stop using "Pig Butchering":
> INTERPOL argues that the term ‘pig butchering’ dehumanizes and shames victims of such frauds, deterring people from coming forward to seek help and provide information to the authorities.
"Romance baiting" is proposed instead.
https://www.interpol.int/News-and-Events/News/2024/INTERPOL-...
It's not always romance related, sometimes it's just a promise of massive crypto investment returns.
"Pig butchering" is more apt as the long con is like fattening up an animal before slaughter.
I agree, meanwhile sometimes words not only describes thinks but influence those using them.
Spending their time wisely I see.
If it increases the number of people coming forward then why not. It’s not that this is was the only thing Interpol was doing.
Sue-Lin Wong has an excellent 8 part podcast series "Scam Inc" about pig butchering scams, the first three episodes are free to listen: https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc
Listened to the whole show, and I am very disappointed that they don't put enough effort into stressing how much cryptocurrency facilitates all these. They talk about cryptocurrency as if it's just a way to transfer money, and it happens that bad people use it for scams. No, it's almost the sole reason pigbutchering works so effectively these days and works as the perfect tool for scammers in obscure corners in the world.
While I agree that cryptocurrency can make the process much easier for scammers, I am wondering what exactly is the proposed solution? Something like 28% of adults in the US own cryptocurrency, and that number increases every year. A few years ago I could see path to some kind of global crackdown on crypto by governments around the world, but it now seems to me that cryptocurrency has reached terminal velocity and it's now too late for something like that to happen. Coinbase is in the S&P500, Circle is floating an IPO, and there are dozens of ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum sitting in the 401ks of average Americans.
Perhaps the solution is trying to better understand how victims are acquiring and transferring their funds? Perhaps we need to regulate centralized exchanges to better protect their customers. In the U.S. it's necessary to pass some simple online questionnaire before trading advanced financial products like options/futures. Perhaps we need something like this for cryptocurrency? I'm just throwing out ideas, because I don't know the solution. But even if you think regulating it out of existence is the ideal outcome, that is simply not going to be possible at this point.
In China, cryptocurrency is effectively banned -- mining machines are confiscated, banks are not allowed to do any transaction with crypto exchanges. Effectively you cannot turn money into crypto or the other way via normal means in China. Of course some people still find ways, and pig butchering exists in China, but it is much harder via the crypto route.
I don't know if there will ever be a global crackdown, but I know it's definitely not going to happen in the US, because, well, freedom, and the man in charge is all-in in crypto.
But at least some governments in the world see clearly that crypto does more harm than good and take action accordingly -- surprisingly China in this case.
It may not be the best solution, but it is a solution.
I believe China's cryptocurrency ban is more about fighting capital flight than scammers. There are restrictions in China on everything from foreign exchange, overseas investments, domestic property, and cross-border payments. They have two separate currencies in part to prevent money from leaving the country.
That said, China is one of the most authoritarian countries in the world. It has some of the most effective controls in place around media, speech, technology, and capital of any country. I'm not sure whether that model could be easily copied, and whether it should be copied is maybe a different conversation altogether.
John Oliver has an informative episode on it as well.
They still used AWS servers in the USA to avoid some blocking. Baader Meinhof but just heard this episode https://www.npr.org/2025/05/23/1253043749/pig-butchering-sca... where they tracked down organization in Cambodia that specialized in targeting USA and China citizens for pig butchering and explained the mechanism of the scam using Tether cryptocurrency.
I kind of wonder why ISPs haven't already started offering value-add security services that have various levels of filtering to provide a cleaner-feed internet experience.
From my limited research there seem to be a surprisingly large number of bad actors that own moderate swathes of ip address ranges and even Autonomous Systems (AS) that are known and can therefore be blocked.
I use OPNSense, which seems to allow AS blocking in the firewall rules, and also have some automated blocking based on external malicious IP address lists. My not very well maintained project can be found here: https://github.com/UninvitedActivity/UninvitedActivity
I have no idea if these sites would have been blocked by my setup.
Another concept I like but haven't put the research time into is blocking recently registered domains (RRDs). It would appear to be the case that RRDs probably aren't crucial to the average persons daily browsing experience, so blocking them for a certain period of time shouldn't cause too much hassle. There are some services that list them - problem is that there can be tens of thousands per day, which can be difficult to manage into lists compatible with various blocking softwares ( I haven't found how to automate it for pihole yet - but I haven't tried very hard either).
NextDNS has an option to block RRDs.
I don't know if it does anything for suspicious AS.
Sounds like begging for censorship…
I've divided my stuff into four layers: basic, recommended, aggressive, and paranoid.
Choose your own level of "censorship" or choose none at all.
All such things can descend into the political mudpit, it just takes effort to keep the pigs noses out of the technical experts trough.
I suspect they're saying ISPs doing it would be begging for censorship, not that your project is
From a glimps of Funnull website it looks like an anti-DDoS provider.
Many of the less-known providers are doing shady business, they provide shield for cracked MMORPG servers in the 00s, the most infamous one was "Legend of Mir" and was quite popular in East Asia underground market especially those Internet pubs.
It's a known malicious actor.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/polyfillio-ja...
Oh snap! The same group behind last year’s Polyfill.io supply chain attack are back!
Krebs doesn’t mention it but The Register makes the connection;
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/30/fbi_treasury_funnull_...
I mean there name is literally “Funnull”. They know exactly what they’re doing.
I wonder what kind of scam my generation will be falling for when we get old. At least I have smart, trustworthy kids. If I didn’t, I’d be making smart, trustworthy young friends, and soon.
As a millennial, probably the exact same stuff. I see my friends, especially the genz ones, addicted to cracktok. And ofc cracktok advertises endless cheap crap for them to buy, by dropshippers with huge margins, or Chinese sellers who have realised why bother with a Western middleman when you can up your factory price to dropship retail & make the most money.
Plus with advancements in AI, people are gonna have to finally get pretty good at seeing anything and thinking "I don't know if this is real, I should fact check it" but I personally think that'll never happen, people will continue to go on believing whatever they see as evidenced by YT/TT comments that I've seen on obviously fake or scripted videos.
I wonder what kind of scam my generation will be falling for when we get old.
There was a study recently (last year?) that found Millennials are more likely to fall for online scams than Boomers and Gen-X.
The reason is because Boomers and Gen-X grew up during the advent of the internet, when there was a lot of media about the dangers online. Millennials (and presumably Z's, too) never knew life before the internet, and didn't get all those warnings when it was spinning up, so they trust what they see more.
Interesting. As it happens I’m Gen X, and possibly we’re more wary than millennials now, but I fully expect cognitive decline to affect that.
> Silent Push found Funnull was a criminal content delivery network (CDN)
Should be (CCDN) then