[HN Gopher] How Pig Butchering scams work
___________________________________________________________________
How Pig Butchering scams work
Author : aritraghosh007
Score : 23 points
Date : 2024-04-21 18:52 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.propublica.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.propublica.org)
| barfbagginus wrote:
| I've been recruiting pig butchers and trying to press gang them
| into assistive technology coding for open source, recruiting them
| into my own pre-released projects, where I am the only community
| member they can threaten. The goal is to help them learn to love
| Open source and helping others, like I do. Then I would help them
| adopt revolutionary open source projects - developing free
| services that can replace the need for corporations and states.
|
| But it has not worked, and I'm concerned about the ethical,
| personal, and community risks. So I have stopped the attempts for
| now.
|
| Failure modes
|
| Solicitations
|
| Scammer Assets always try to use coding wins - like a successful
| PR or good unit tests - to shift the conversation to investments,
| get rich quick schemes, or other obvious scam extraction points.
| I call this the "rapport building" -> "solicitation" link in
| their kill chain. They don't value the coding skills they're
| learning, and only see one way to spend rapport: starting the
| extraction phase of the scam.
|
| I reject solicitations by explaining I'm not interested in
| creating money through investments. I am only interested in
| developments that create genuine open source values for humanity.
| I explain I am doing this process with many scammers, and wish to
| teach all my assets to love building open source codes for all.
|
| I explain I realize they're trying to work me into the extraction
| phase of a scam, but won't be revealing their tells, because that
| would increase their scammer skill. I claim to forgive them for
| their attempt, and express that I only want to help them live a
| better life without the need for crime against innocents.
|
| They are usually offended by my reveal that I know they're a
| scammer, and may try the harassment mode of engaging their
| targets. But they continue engaging, assuming I must not be
| certain they're scammers.
|
| Harassment and Threats
|
| Sometimes they taunt or harass me if they're getting frustrated
| in the rapport building phase or have attempted multiple
| solicitations. I call this the intimidation move. I simply
| reflect their tactics, escalating to unhinged and disrespectful
| speech. I explain that I have no problem reflecting abuse at
| them, because I know what they are and what they do to others for
| a living. I explain I will push them until they either return to
| respectful comms or break coms. They apologize when they're
| scared they're going to lose an uncapitalized scam asset. I call
| this process "renormalizing" the asset.
|
| Unfortunately, once it's obvious that assets are willing to
| engage in harassment to work on their targets, I no longer
| consider them safe to take part of an assistive technology
| project, since they could Target and harass vulnerable users. I
| am not sure what good I can expect to accomplish with an asset
| that has passed the harassment -> renormalization phase, so I
| consider this a total failure mode.
|
| Conclusion: Don't do this
|
| My work has not been successful for either my immediate goal of
| supporting open source assistive technologies, or my ultimate
| revolutionary goals.
|
| Most of my scammer assets won't reach the level of making commits
| to assistive projects. None of them reach the level of being self
| reliant open source contributors. And if they did, I'd worry they
| would try to scam users and contributors in the community.
|
| Worse, while I believe my assets are all free individuals, it's
| possible that some are captives. Some assets will volunteer
| information about the structure and leadership of their scam
| orgs, but in those cases they are younger people and describe a
| loose knit team with a single leader and no violent enforcers. I
| have no way to confirm they're not being coerced.
|
| Thus far my efforts in revolutionary reverse pig butchering have
| failed.
|
| Ideas and improvements are welcome. I will not retry this
| strategy until I have a more sound counter kill chain that can
|
| 1) align the assets into genuinely wanting to contribute to open
| source
|
| 2) align the assets into genuinely abandoning the desire to
| solicit victims
| jamilton wrote:
| I don't see why something like this would work even in theory.
| They're scamming to make money, it doesn't sound like
| recruiting them to help with open-source projects aligns with
| that at all, there's no hook.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-04-21 23:01 UTC)