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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1xJAVZxXg Always a classic...
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May 7, 2022 20:28
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Prosperity gospel is one of the most successful scams going, really.
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May 8, 2022 01:28
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How'd it work out for Creflo Dollar? E: yep, pretty well.
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May 8, 2022 18:06
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FMguru posted:Yeah, I thought fly-by-night roofing guys who knock on your door with an incredible deal were a common Irish Traveler scam. My dad grew up near North Augusta and saw some of their classic scams, offering to paint your house & using just whitewash, etc. He had to run some Travelers off from the private golf course he worked at that were using the “resurface your walkway, we’ve got a crew on another job up the road and have extra supplies, we’ll cut you a deal” bit, knowing they would’ve used asphalt on the brick sidewalk in front
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May 9, 2022 16:11
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Awhile back, I got a phone call from "Discover" offering a lower interest rate on my Discover card, which I don’t even have from place filled with suspicious background noise. They ask for my balance and the expiration date which I make up. Then they ask me to read the full 16 digit card number beginning with 6011 which is apparently Discover's starting 4 digits. I make up 4 numbers and the guy immediately starts cursing me and saying I'm wasting his time by making up numbers. What is the purpose of the scam? Do they have a 16 digit card number and a "likely" phone number to try to get the expiration date and CCV code via scamming? It just seems like a lot of effort for nothing viable that I can discern.
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May 10, 2022 00:51
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Jolly Jumbuck posted:Awhile back, I got a phone call from "Discover" offering a lower interest rate on my Discover card, which I don’t even have from place filled with suspicious background noise. They ask for my balance and the expiration date which I make up. Then they ask me to read the full 16 digit card number beginning with 6011 which is apparently Discover's starting 4 digits. I make up 4 numbers and the guy immediately starts cursing me and saying I'm wasting his time by making up numbers. Credit card numbers follow certain patterns that can be calculated, so random numbers won't work. Therefore he could tell you were feeding him bullshit. Don't sweat it.
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May 10, 2022 00:57
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Even if they don't know your specific card number, there are scripts that can determine if a number is viable and what credit provider it belongs to bases on how they're generated. You'll see this on a lot of sites these days where when you start to type in your CC number it will know what type of card it is as soon as you've put in 2-3 digits. So the guy was probably checking in real time if the number you were giving was valid or not and saw it was invalid after you made some numbers up. The scam is presumably just call people up and see who's stupid enough to turn over their full card details so they can use the card for purchases and hijack your account to cash out your rewards.
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May 10, 2022 01:03
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Yeah, this is some C tier garbage level stuff, they weren't even trying hard enough to be B tier
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May 10, 2022 02:07
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The first digit identifies the credit card provider. 3=Amex, 4=Visa, 5=MC, 6=Discover. Discover cards uniquely all begin with 6011, with the others it's just the first digit that's always the same. And Amex of course is 15 digits rather than 16. I would guess Discover is popular for scam attempts because dumb people are likelier to think "oh this must be legit, they know the first four digits of my card number!" when they say "OK, the card begins with 6011, can you read the rest please?"
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May 10, 2022 02:07
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Amex still needs that last check digit though to be Luhn-valid. One of my earliest programming exercises was to attempt to write an algorithm that could produce Luhn-valid numbers. The CVV, however, is a different story. Those algorithms are highly guarded and, if I recall, provider-specific to derive the CVV from the expiry date and the card number.
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May 10, 2022 14:04
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D34THROW posted:Amex still needs that last check digit though to be Luhn-valid. One of my earliest programming exercises was to attempt to write an algorithm that could produce Luhn-valid numbers. The CVV, however, is a different story. Those algorithms are highly guarded and, if I recall, provider-specific to derive the CVV from the expiry date and the card number. Oh, so they're cryptographically weak, I imagine.
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May 10, 2022 14:59
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Looking a little further, into it, the card number and expiration key are encrypted with keys known only to the issuer, then the result is decimalized. Ergo, you could probably brute-force it but if they're using a good 128-bit key, it could take a long time.
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May 10, 2022 15:12
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Since there's only 1,000 possible values for the CVV, what's to stop a bad actor from just trying them all if they have the card number and expiration date? Maybe spread the attempts out over, say, a couple months so you don't immediately get flagged.
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May 10, 2022 15:54
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Yeah it'll be 3 unsuccessful attempts at most before you get flagged and locked out. That's enough to make brute forcing CVVs en masse infeasible.
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May 10, 2022 16:00
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I imagine the card issuer can see you getting 20+ bad attempts and flag the card completely. Even if it's spread out. On a different note, I was trying to see if the the Subaru Outback had a hybrid model (it doesn't) and came across this website: https://subarumodel.com/2022-subaru-outback-hybrid-release-date-price-redesign/ What's the grift? It's like an entire website dedicated to Subaru news? For cars that don't exist and in broken English? I've seen product review sites for knock off instant pots and air fryers and stuff. But it's not like they can just make off label cars to sell.
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May 10, 2022 16:01
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SEO, which has completely ruined most search engines. they want your clicks and point AIs at a list of keywords and poo poo out this garbage to trap your attention for as long as it takes to realize it's nonsense, which improves their SEO and lets them serve ads.
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May 10, 2022 16:11
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Ah interesting. There's hardly any ads though. Or is that like a phase 2 after they start regularly hitting the top of the search results? Seems awfully elaborate. The website really does look quite nice and has a ton of articles, it only turns into gibberish when you try to read them. Looks like they ran a bunch of real car articles through auto translate or something?
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May 10, 2022 16:19
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They point the AI at a bunch of real websites for "training" and then have it poo poo all that stuff out. "Legit" businesses are starting to go this direction too, just with humans polishing up the AI's vomit before publishing. The people just looking to make a quick easy buck by getting onto Google Result Page One then serving ads don't bother with that step.
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May 10, 2022 16:25
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CoolCab posted:SEO, which has completely ruined most search engines. they want your clicks and point AIs at a list of keywords and poo poo out this garbage to trap your attention for as long as it takes to realize it's nonsense, which improves their SEO and lets them serve ads. I was thinking about this the other day, about how terrible search engines have become. I think it's a combination of SEO bots like we're talking about here, and also because the amount of actual web "surfing" (remember that radical term dudes? grab a slow-loading jpg of sunglasses and catch that 4-frame 32x32 gif of a cartoon wave because we are going to surf cyberspace!) that we do has gotten much, much lower. Pre-2005 -- before YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and the like -- the amount of different websites we'd visit was much, much higher. We'd entertain ourselves with all sorts of different content, stuff like SeanBaby, OldManMurray, peoples personal websites that weren't really blogs, tons of different forums... just tons of stuff. So Google had tons and tons of actual content for it's bots to crawl through and index, and it had lots of data because lots of people were searching google to find results from all sorts of websites. As time went on we started spending less and less time on random sites and more on sites like YouTube and Wikipedia so there was a lot less content from people-created websites for the google index-crawlers, and with less searches leading to random websites it also became a lot easier for SEO bots to get basically any result to the top. bamhand posted:Ah interesting. There's hardly any ads though. Or is that like a phase 2 after they start regularly hitting the top of the search results? Seems awfully elaborate. The website really does look quite nice and has a ton of articles, it only turns into gibberish when you try to read them. Looks like they ran a bunch of real car articles through auto translate or something? Are you running an adblocker?
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May 10, 2022 19:07
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It is not inevitable that the evolutionary armsrace of spambots vs search engines will favor the search engine, and it is entirely possible that search engines will continue to grow shittier
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May 10, 2022 19:30
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It's gotten to the point honestly that if I want like a product recommendation or help with a game or something I'll search (thing I want) Reddit, even then sometimes you come across spam both on and off that platform
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May 10, 2022 19:37
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DiabloStarCraft posted:It's gotten to the point honestly that if I want like a product recommendation or help with a game or something I'll search (thing I want) Reddit, even then sometimes you come across spam both on and off that platform When it comes to software I've had good experience with going to a comparison of programs for a task on Wikipedia.
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May 10, 2022 19:44
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DiabloStarCraft posted:It's gotten to the point honestly that if I want like a product recommendation or help with a game or something I'll search (thing I want) Reddit, even then sometimes you come across spam both on and off that platform What, you ain't gonna rely on the reviews on the product's own page!? I mean look at those 5 star reviews, there are like 46 people who liked that thing so much they signed up just so they could make it their first review. And oh wow some of them were so smitten with it that they didn't have to buy a single other thing. But yea I do the same. I remember I was looking for a decent flashlight and was hoping to find a thread or two and ended up finding an entire subreddit dedicated to them lol it's also good for tech support, one time my TV went all purple and weird and I thought it was dead. I searched the problem and a reddit comment popped up with that exact problem on the exact same model with the solution posted a few comments down. Tumble fucked around with this message at 19:59 on May 10, 2022 |
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May 10, 2022 19:56
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Tumble posted:I was thinking about this the other day, about how terrible search engines have become. I think it's a combination of SEO bots like we're talking about here, and also because the amount of actual web "surfing" (remember that radical term dudes? grab a slow-loading jpg of sunglasses and catch that 4-frame 32x32 gif of a cartoon wave because we are going to surf cyberspace!) that we do has gotten much, much lower. Pre-2005 -- before YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and the like -- the amount of different websites we'd visit was much, much higher. We'd entertain ourselves with all sorts of different content, stuff like SeanBaby, OldManMurray, peoples personal websites that weren't really blogs, tons of different forums... just tons of stuff. We were privileged to have been there in the Elder Days, when the internet was young. e: vvv I was being lighthearted with the Tolkien reference but I was not joking actually! Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 21:03 on May 10, 2022 |
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May 10, 2022 20:56
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Eric the Mauve posted:We were privileged to have been there in the Elder Days, when the internet was young. You joke, but we actually were. Tricking people into opening goatse used to be a viable thing to do to friends, because every link was a mystery waiting to be discovered. Your family interaction with your extremely racist uncle was limited to Thanksgiving. YouTube was just weird fun stuff instead of HEY DONG LOVERS YOUR BOY DONGLORD HERE WITH ANO-, etc.
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May 10, 2022 21:02
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The internet was a lot better when every activity wasn't centred around being served ads and/or having your data harvested to tweak your ad servings tomorrow
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May 10, 2022 23:08
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I'm struggling with SEO right now. 1 year ago my site popped up from "townname translator" and now it's buried under paid ads for keyword-generated sites of faceless national competitors. Adding my business to Google Maps helped, but there are still a lot of people who use Bing or Yahoo instead. Last month I signed up for a "easy homepage" service through my local Chamber of Commerce, it's fugly and inflexible but all I need on there is some photos and a link to my .com site. It was on page 1 of Google within 24 hours. It's a huge help. I'm also going to distribute paper flyers through the Chamber of Commerce monthly newsletter. Maybe twice a year. Maybe I'm just a huge idiot irl because I can get good work online but rarely get contacted by local companies. peanut fucked around with this message at 00:10 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 00:05
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greazeball posted:The internet was a lot better when every activity wasn't centred around being served ads and/or having your data harvested to tweak your ad servings tomorrow Counterpoint https://www.cars101.com/
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May 11, 2022 00:55
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Another thing is that the age of a site matters to SEO, so if Subaru DID announce a hybrid, that site could rapidly publish real content and strip out the garbage and be better ranked than others trying to spring up out of nowhere. It's kind of like a slightly more effort parked domain. Google definitely made some big change a few months or so back that made a lot of new sites start showing up in search results, many of which suck rear end, and I've been seeing a lot of talk in marketing circles about how bad it's been getting. I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of things shuffle around in the next few months, like this is a big trial run for a bunch of sites and when they don't prove themselves they'll drop off. We'll see though, it could also just be Google finally starting their downswing.
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May 11, 2022 04:36
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Nighthand posted:Another thing is that the age of a site matters to SEO, so if Subaru DID announce a hybrid, that site could rapidly publish real content and strip out the garbage and be better ranked than others trying to spring up out of nowhere. It's kind of like a slightly more effort parked domain. Amusingly, this happened recently in the Nintendo community - someone created a Twitter profile, set it to private, then tweeted every possible rumor they could think of for an upcoming Nintendo press conference well in advance. After the conference, they deleted all the inaccurate rumors, set the account to public, and boom - a Twitter account that appears to be a legitimate, previously unknown leak. https://twitter.com/waddledeeknows/status/1491915837476855809?s=21&t=0WICN0K-zNVngMwsV6MFzA
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May 11, 2022 05:31
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Blue Moonlight posted:Amusingly, this happened recently in the Nintendo community - someone created a Twitter profile, set it to private, then tweeted every possible rumor they could think of for an upcoming Nintendo press conference well in advance. After the conference, they deleted all the inaccurate rumors, set the account to public, and boom - a Twitter account that appears to be a legitimate, previously unknown leak. another example of this is pretty much any one-and-done sports game prediction on twitter. one of the world cups a few years ago had it happen
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May 11, 2022 07:03
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I've heard that described as the stock market prediction scam. Where someone would send out letters to 1000 people, 500 saying a stock would go up, 500 saying it would go down. Then to the 500 who received the correct prediction, 250 saying another stock would go up, 250 saying it would go down. After a few rounds of predictions, you then offer some high price stock tips to the people who received only correct predictions.
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May 11, 2022 07:24
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Volmarias posted:You joke, but we actually were. Tricking people into opening goatse used to be a viable thing to do to friends, because every link was a mystery waiting to be discovered. Your family interaction with your extremely racist uncle was limited to Thanksgiving. YouTube was just weird fun stuff instead of HEY DONG LOVERS YOUR BOY DONGLORD HERE WITH ANO-, etc. hey click this link some weird alt right poo poo that is way more offensive than goatse
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May 11, 2022 07:47
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Volmarias posted:You joke, but we actually were. Tricking people into opening goatse used to be a viable thing to do to friends, because every link was a mystery waiting to be discovered. Your family interaction with your extremely racist uncle was limited to Thanksgiving. YouTube was just weird fun stuff instead of HEY DONG LOVERS YOUR BOY DONGLORD HERE WITH ANO-, etc. greazeball posted:The internet was a lot better when every activity wasn't centred around being served ads and/or having your data harvested to tweak your ad servings tomorrow Tricking people into clicking stuff died as a prank the day "never gonna give you up" became monetized and started playing ads before the song.
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May 11, 2022 15:42
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Don't forget Last Measure, I think I'd rather be goatse'd/lemonparty'd/tubgirl'd/1guy1jar'd in sequence rather than get Last Measured again 
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May 11, 2022 16:43
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Tumble posted:Tricking people into clicking stuff died as a prank the day "never gonna give you up" became monetized and started playing ads before the song. google puts ads before nonmonetized stuff now, welcome to the future
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May 11, 2022 16:54
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So how many people fall for your cars warranty is about to expire? I find this the most exhausting, just because I have to pick up my phone, hoping for work, and nope, it's a scammer. I can always shut them down with a simple question, "What kind of car do I own?" And yet they never stop. thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 19:42 on May 12, 2022 |
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May 12, 2022 19:34
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And in Our defense, back in the day, you couldn't check what the link lead to. You were happy for a Rickroll instead of goatse.
thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 20:00 on May 12, 2022 |
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May 12, 2022 19:57
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I just checked my voicemail and it was nearly full because Android identifies an incoming call as spam, keeps my phone from ringing, allows it to go to voicemail, then doesn't tell me. Thanks, Google.
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May 12, 2022 20:54
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thrakkorzog posted:So how many people fall for your cars warranty is about to expire? I find this the most exhausting, just because I have to pick up my phone, hoping for work, and nope, it's a scammer. I've done something similar with the "this is microsoft support there is a problem with your windows computer" call - "be more specific - I have seven computers running various windows OSes right now."
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