Mark Rober
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2021–2022
23:14 · 102M views · Mar 18, 2021
Mark Rober sets up elaborate glitter-bomb traps to go after phone scammers, working his way up their chain of command, and ends with a scammer being arrested. He also points viewers to fraud-reporting resources and to scambaiter Jim Browning's investigation.
HN mentions it in robocall and scam threads as an entertaining look at how phone scams work and how vigilantes fight back.
4 comments from Hacker News
This is exactly the point. I happen to have a landline which somehow is associated with a demographic profile of a senior citizen. I’ve had this number for over a decade now. The number of scam calls targeting seniors is staggering. Of the 200-300 spam robocalls I receive every month, about 50-80 are blocked by my cell phone (the landline rings to my cell) and I also subscribe to nomorobo on the landline, which I assume blocks even more. Still, that’s some 200 calls that make it through even with two levels of blocking. The scams are terrifying- serious sounding people on the line saying your social security number will be cancelled and you will be arrested unless you speak immediately to an officer; Medicare advantage scams; IRS and treasury scammers... and since my personal info is published by the phone company, many times the scammers have all my personal information as “proof”! It’s a sickening information asymmetry that can totally fool an unsuspecting older person who doesn’t entirely understand what’s going on. If you’re curious about what these scams look like and how vigilantes actively work to combat them, I’d recommend two videos to start: Jim browning at [LINK] and mark rober at this video .
> If you are arguing that some people will be tricked into installing malware from other sources then you are right that this change would allow that but it will still require user to go through few steps which should raise red flags for them. Some people just can't resist pushing that button without thinking and regardless of the consequences and in that case app store safety net is just temporary anyway, they are still exposed to the real world where that will harm them in a more serious way. I seriously could care less what we as HN want out of a phone in a way. We are head strong enough to do something different for ourselves -- literally look at PinePhone, etc. What I'm concerned about is the trickery that is sinister beyond belief, getting access that they never earned and do not deserve. Here's an example: this video This 'hack' is quite insane... Brillant and horrid... and I foresee it happening left and right.
1- You don't, but it's not a real problem since non-cryptocurrency payments are reversible and trackable, so scammers won't use them. They'll rather exploit analog ways to get money out of you, recent example: this video 2- You don't, but sandboxing should be enough to isolate untrustworthy apps from OS-level APIs that could do what you're afraid of.
There are also scams costing people money without using iOS, for example where the person is tricked into thinking they have a debt and sending thousands of dollars in cash to a random address[1]. What’s your point? 1: this video (it’s the Mark Rober phone scammer video)