[HN Gopher] Scammers unleash flood of online gaming sites
___________________________________________________________________
Scammers unleash flood of online gaming sites
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 50 points
Date : 2025-07-30 18:52 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (krebsonsecurity.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (krebsonsecurity.com)
| JoeOfTexas wrote:
| I spent too much time trying to build one of these gaming
| portals, and they pop them up as a scam like nothing. Must be a
| team of people behind it.
|
| The technology behind the scenes and UI design are all well made.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just goes to show the old adage "crime doesn't pay" is
| bullshit. it pays very well, right up to the point of _if_ you
| get caught.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Supposedly there are groups who make build-a-scam-website
| toolkits. The selling shovels model (which might even eliminate
| some legal risk).
| jerf wrote:
| As I like to say in some other contexts on HN, you must not
| underestimate the criminal underground. You should not model it
| as some hacker alone in his basement trying to run scams.
| You're probably a lot closer thinking of the industry as at
| least the equivalent of a Dark Google in size and
| sophistication. If I can imagine a framework where I have a
| strong set of modular APIs that we can deploy rapidly and put
| together some prompts for AIs to customize the frontends and
| graphics hooks so each site looks different, deploying them
| just like you'd deploy a k8s cluster of these things (and,
| heck, for all I know, actually being on k8s), the industry as a
| whole has more than enough firepower to actually implement it.
| There's an entire dark economy out there where you can
| outsource parts of this to specialized businesses and get
| sketchy cloud hosting of all kinds, there's a rich economy
| around who is taking what actual risks and who gets compensated
| for them, everything you can imagine.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Wait, didn't they officially adopted Darth Google as name
| when they drop the don't be evil moto facade ?
| simmerup wrote:
| Must be easier to build them if you don't have to commit to
| building the actual product to be fair
| chihuahua wrote:
| A random website asks me to give them my cryptocurrency, and then
| they refuse to return it? Why, I thought I had seen the most
| shocking thing on earth, but this takes the cake!
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't understand who keeps falling for this stuff. The
| victims are not all 90 year old grannies suffering from
| cognitive decline.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| If you thought you had won thousands of dollars you would
| likely be tempted to pay a hundred to get that out.
| blaufuchs wrote:
| Well there's the problem, who honestly thinks they won
| thousands of dollars from an ad?
| toast0 wrote:
| I punched that damn monkey, where's my prize?
| dhosek wrote:
| EVERYONE KNOWS YOU DON'T PUNCH THE MONKEY!
| alt219 wrote:
| Sadly, I have a family member who is susceptible to these
| types of scams. They've been duped too many times to
| count. They're overly eager to believe they're
| exceptional and that good fortune is due them. No amount
| of explaining has had any impact on their beliefs for the
| past fifteen years. It's heart-wrenching.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I can almost understand the replies to this thread where
| the victim was never exposed to a scam before and didn't
| know what to look for. It still sounds wild but I guess
| people are sheltered. My kid was scammed out of some
| virtual pet in an online game at six years old and
| learned that whenever someone offers something to you,
| but requires you to give up something first, it's a scam.
|
| But how does one get scammed over and over, having seen
| it before and knowing what the playbook looks like?
| jimt1234 wrote:
| I had a girlfriend years ago that was an extreme
| optimist. She was a very intelligent person, very
| outgoing and very successful. She believed everyone was
| good, and no one ever did anything bad. We got into an
| argument once over this exact same thing - she thought
| she'd won a new laptop from some sort of popup ad; all
| she had to do was fill out some sort of form with a bunch
| of private info. I told her it was an obvious scam, and
| she got really defensive, telling me that I'm always so
| cynical and if I expect the worst from people, that's all
| I'm gonna get. I talked her out of submitting the private
| info to the form, but yeah, I can totally understand how
| reasonably intelligent people would fall victim to
| something like that. There's different motivations, but
| for my ex-girlfriend, it was her refusal to accept that
| people can be bad (take advantage of others).
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| It's probably the law of probabilities at play, like with 419
| scams. If you cast a sufficiently big net, chances of
| catching something in it are decent
| ovulator wrote:
| Large of law numbers. There are a lot of idiots out there. I
| had a buddy; super nice, super funny guy, late 20's, but
| financially an idiot.
|
| He sent a $1,000 check as "collateral" to some online "bank"
| to get a $10,000 "loan". I explained to him that this isn't
| how any of this works and he just paused and said, "Huh, so
| should put a stop payment on the second check?" He had sent
| them another $1,000 as some sort of second round of
| collateral for the loan or some other nonsense.
|
| And I've known dumber people than him.
| bena wrote:
| Eventually they would have collected $20k of collateral for
| the loan
| technothrasher wrote:
| I've got a coworker who fell for, "You won a free electric
| drill from Home Depot! Click here and enter your credit
| card". I discovered his predicament when he was telling me
| how he managed to get an overseas vendor to agree to reduce a
| credit card charge he didn't recognize in half. That got me
| to pull a bit on the thread and the whole story unraveled.
| What it came down to, apparently, was simple gullibility. He
| didn't know if the drill prize was legit, but he just didn't
| think he would be targeted in a scam, so he figured, "Why
| not? Worst that happens is I don't get my drill."
| rectang wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I fell for a phishing scam a couple decades
| ago -- my eBay password was compromised (fortunately there
| were no significant consequences). Once upon a time I also
| got tricked by the phone company into ordering stuff I didn't
| intend to. And while I don't think I've fallen for anything
| recently and am pretty security focused, it still takes
| mental energy to avoid all the traps.
|
| I assume that the "people who fall for this stuff" are
| "people like me". Even the best among us are only
| statistically less likely to get snookered, not immune.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Im gravitating towards tge 12 year old problem: while theres
| tons of other demographics, 12 year olds drive a lot of the
| grift economy. Its easiest to see in gaming with
| microtransactions and preorders. You can read hundreds of
| well articulated reasons not to engage these things yet they
| continue unabated.
| nottorp wrote:
| Not online gaming. Online gambling.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| This (i.e., gambling specifically) is a very common definition
| of the word "gaming". Certainly that predates online video
| games, obviously.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| You can't call negative things gaming. You can gamify
| anything, but if it's negative you can't call it gaming.
| Gaming is always good and never causes any problems. Plenty
| of research shows that gaming is good. Please stop
| villainizing gaming. Gaming is good. If it's negative, just
| call it what it is. Gambling, addiction, radicalization, etc
| all are just that. They have nothing to do with gaming.
| Gaming is good. Media has no affect on people.
| nottorp wrote:
| > You can gamify anything
|
| Actually gamifying is as predatory as gambling so what's
| your point again?
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| Don't call it gaming. Gaming is good and has nothing to
| do with gambling. What is _your_ point?
| dylan604 wrote:
| "We were being spammed relentlessly by these scam posts from
| compromised or purchased [Discord] accounts," Thereallo said. "I
| got frustrated with just banning and deleting, so I started to
| investigate the infrastructure behind the scam messages. This is
| not a one-off site, it's a scalable criminal enterprise with a
| clear playbook, technical fingerprints, and financial
| infrastructure."
|
| This quote does not read like something I'd expect from a 17 year
| old.
| erikerikson wrote:
| 17 year olds come in many flavors.
| dylan604 wrote:
| possibly, or possibly someone brushing up the original quote
| on the 17 year old's behalf.
| tantalor wrote:
| > the gaming site will reject the request and prompt the user to
| make a "verification deposit" of cryptocurrency -- typically
| around $100 -- before any money can be distributed
|
| This is called "advance fee" scam. It is hundreds of years old.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Well, anyone who has $100 crypto bucks has already been scammed
| once.
| tantalor wrote:
| A fool and his crypto are soon parted!
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| Its a good thing that cryptocurrency transactions are easy to
| reverse.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| Who exactly is online gambling? And out of that subset, who is
| doing super shady appearing online gambling? I don't mean to be
| flippant, but who exactly is falling for this slop? At some
| point, permit me to victim blame, the victim is somewhat to
| blame.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I would hazard a guess is that a generation of youth has been
| addicted to gambling by mobile game companies and even some
| desktop game companies like Valve (which has worked to limit
| it, but only when it was forced to by bad publicity.)
|
| Gambling is a dangerous addiction for some people. I don't
| think victim blaming is an effective response.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling
| citizenpaul wrote:
| >a generation of youth has been addicted to gambling by
| mobile game companies
|
| I think you nailed it. I made a comment about the new
| "religion" of games in the current youth in another
| discussion a while back. It really seems to me that there is
| an incredibly strong illogical loyalty to game companies in
| the current youth. So much that they ignore bad actors
| assuming that they must be just another game company, even
| after they get scammed. I'm guessing it has something to do
| with zero real value nature of loot box and skin gambling
| that is prevalent.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| There are a lot of people using the internet with different
| physical and mental disabilities that make it difficult for
| them to identify these scams that might seem super obvious to
| you or I.
|
| When I had cancer and I was in the hospital getting chemo I
| fell for a scam for the first time. It was an instagram ad for
| a cool steampunk looking keyboard with a price that was too
| good to be true. It was almost christmas, and I had felt guilty
| for not shopping, but my brain fog made it difficult to reason
| about. I ordered it and forgot all about it until it was too
| late to challenge. It was only $60, but it made it very clear
| to me how easy it would be to fall for something like this for
| a significant part of the population.
| jerf wrote:
| I think it's better to think of these things as relative. Not
| that I personally am absolutely invincible against scams, but
| that there is some scam of some level of sophistication that
| would get me, there's some threshold.
|
| And that threshold will move over time, and as you say,
| depending on conditions. Even our personal defenses should
| not be predicated on being perfect all the time, and that's
| completely impractical at a societal level. And I worry about
| AI making it practical to target more people directly at
| scale and raise the sophistication on their end over the next
| 10-20 years.
|
| Today I think I can say with a straight face that I'm quite
| sophisticated against this sort of scam. But the day will
| come, unless something gets me earlier, when my children will
| have to take my email account away if they want to inherit
| anything. Old age makes fools of us all. And who knows if
| something will get me earlier some other way. Unfortunately,
| invincible confidence in the here and now won't protect me.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Half the population has a sub-100 IQ.
| dagw wrote:
| _who is doing super shady appearing online gambling?_
|
| At a guess, mostly people who for various reasons aren't
| allowed to gamble on more 'legit' sites, either because of
| their age or other local laws and jurisdictions. If you 'need'
| to gamble and are forbidden to gamble legally, then you will
| find a way to gamble illegally. Just look at the 'offline'
| world, before sports gambling became basically legal, lots of
| people would place bets with very shady operations.
| MattSayar wrote:
| Tangentially, I haven't received a Pig Butchering opening text
| ("hey") in quite a while. A quick scan through my Spam & Blocked
| doesn't show much either, just a lot of political spam. Did
| something happen to improve the situation, or am I just lucky?
| don_neufeld wrote:
| I get between 5-10 per day, so I'd say you're just lucky.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Are you recently divorced? Just curious if public filings
| like divorce decrees would make someone a target for pig
| butchering scams.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-30 23:01 UTC)