On a Tuesday evening this past October, I put $50,000 in cash in a shoe box, taped it shut as instructed, and carried it to the sidewalk in front of my apartment, my phone clasped to my ear.
I’m sorry, but this type of scam has been reported on for enough time that you’re a fucking moron for falling for it. How much time can pass between scams becoming what should be common knowledge and people still getting suckered without reading about them? I’m exagerating, but this is like falling for the Nigerean prince emails at this point.
I’ve sent out a fake scam message at work and always have at least two or three clicks. No matter how many times you tell people there’s always a few that just can’t get it through their skulls.
Even if I make it super obvious, spelling errors, poor grammar, and write “do the needful” at the end. They still click the god damn link. Some people just need to have their internet access restricted for their own good.
Sounds more like bad browser programming if it can’t handle all content safely. Any risky action should pop up an administrator password query to activate.
Fascinating story. The most interesting part:
It was my brother, the lawyer, who pointed out that what I had experienced sounded a lot like a coerced confession. “I read enough transcripts of bad interrogations in law school to understand that anyone can be convinced that they have a very narrow set of terrible options,” he said. When I posed this theory to Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies coerced confessions, he agreed. “If someone is trying to get you to be compliant, they do it incrementally, in a series of small steps that take you farther and farther from what you know to be true,” he said. “It’s not about breaking the will. They were altering the sense of reality.” And when you haven’t done anything wrong, the risk of cooperating feels minimal, he added. An innocent person thinks everything will get sorted out. It also mattered that I was kept on the phone for so long. People start to break down cognitively after a few hours of interrogation. “At that point, they’re not thinking straight. They feel the need to put an end to the situation at all costs,” Kassin said.
