Tag: scam

The oil Bible of Dalton

more oil appeared almost every time Jerry picked up the Bible, a leather-bound copy of the New King James translation. The oil moved to the back of the book, saturated the endpapers—a heart-shaped splotch appeared over a map of Israel—and then started at the beginning, in Genesis 1. Eventually Jerry had to put the book in a Ziploc bag, and then in a large plastic bin. Jerry Pearce was a regular customer at a nearby Tractor Supply store. And he’d been seen purchasing large containers of clear oil.

APA Meeting Photo-Essay

You know how drug companies pay 6 or 7 figures for 30-second television ads just on the off chance that someone with the relevant condition might be watching? You know how they employ drug reps to flatter, cajole, and even seduce doctors who might prescribe their drug? Well, it turns out that having 15000 psychiatrists in 1 building sparks a drug company feeding frenzy that makes piranhas look sedate by comparison. Every flat surface is covered in drug advertisements. And after the flat surfaces are gone, the curved surfaces, and after the curved surfaces, giant rings hanging from the ceiling.

A Business With No End

His parents had been receiving mysterious packages at their house. The packages were all different shapes and sizes but each was addressed to “Returns Department, Valley Fountain LLC.” I looked into it and found that a company called Valley Fountain LLC was indeed listed at his parents’ address. But it also appeared to be listed at 235 Montgomery Street, Suite 350, in downtown San Francisco. So were 140 other LLCs, most of which were registered in 2015. The names of many of these other companies were baffling and surreal. They included Bropastures, Dreamlish and Your Friend Bart LLC. And on further inspection, each one was associated with an Amazon seller (usually based in a European country) with an equally bizarre but unrelated name, like Ipple Store, DeepOceanStoreuk and GiGling EyE. There was little pattern or theme to what these Amazon shops sold. They had everything from hemorrhoid cream to desk lamps, and there were varying levels of inventory. On sale at DeepOceanStoreuk (a storefront on Amazon.uk associated with Bropastures LLC), I found a book on industrial electricity, a set of fake facial wounds and a “No Stress Tech Guide to Microsoft Works 8” Another storefront called Kingdom Kber, this one on Amazon.de and associated with Agapao LLC, advertised a miniature whale, nail gel and a copy of “Undocumented Immigrants and Higher Education.” When I clicked on these items, though, none of them were currently available. A good number of the storefronts were completely empty.

Threatin

Bands buying Facebook likes is nothing new. The (very silly) practice has been going on for as long as Facebook pages have existed, businesses and bands alike using bots to up their stats in the hopes of improving their social media standing. One LA band, who go by the name of Threatin, appear to have taken this mantra to its most baffling extreme. “At the time, we all felt a little bit stunned with the whole situation as it all unfolded. We didn’t really know what to think as we waited to hear if the venue would close or the show would go ahead. I believed, from what I had heard that evening, that it was the promoter who had duped Threatin and I did feel sorry for him (hence why we watched his set). It wasn’t until the hours and days after that I realized everything about his online presence is a lie and that he probably knew about everything beforehand – even before booking the tour. I feel angry that acts like this exist – who buy likes, comments and YouTube plays and then book reputable venues and lie about ticket sales. It damages the music scene and venues end up out of pocket because of an empty room. It also makes it harder for genuine bands like mine, who work hard, to gain live exposure due to the fact that no tickets were actually sold. We ended up out of pocket due to expenses, van hire etc. as we expected to sell merch at the show. It doesn’t put us off playing live, the owners of the Exchange were amazing throughout – just like many of the venues across the country. You learn from these experiences and we’ll just be more wary in future.”

The fake FB industry

how the gullible are entrapped by fake fb accounts. what works for politics works for scams too, of course.

While investigating the world of fake Facebook profiles, my colleague Marie-Eve Tremblay and I have discovered a massive network of fraudulent accounts that catfish their male victims using stolen photos of young women and adolescent girls. This is the story of the months-long investigation that allowed us to piece together the inner workings of this network of online bandits.

Automated Crowdturfing

Malicious crowdsourcing forums are gaining traction as sources of spreading misinformation online, but are limited by the costs of hiring and managing human workers. In this paper, we identify a new class of attacks that leverage deep learning language models to automate the generation of fake online reviews for products and services. Not only are these attacks cheap and therefore more scalable, but they can control rate of content output to eliminate the signature burstiness that makes crowdsourced campaigns easy to detect. Using Yelp reviews as an example platform, we show how a 2 phased review generation and customization attack can produce reviews that are indistinguishable by state-of-the-art statistical detectors. We conduct a survey-based user study to show these reviews not only evade human detection, but also score high on “usefulness” metrics by users. Finally, we develop novel automated defenses against these attacks, by leveraging the lossy transformation introduced by the RNN training and generation cycle. We consider countermeasures against our mechanisms, show that they produce unattractive cost-benefit tradeoffs for attackers, and that they can be further curtailed by simple constraints imposed by online service providers.

The long con

The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.” There’s another factor at work here: The anti-intellectualism that has been a mainstay of the conservative movement for decades also makes its members easy marks. After all, if you are taught to believe that the reigning scientific consensuses on evolution and climate change are lies, then you will lack the elementary logical skills that will set your alarm bells ringing when you hear a flim-flam artist like Trump.