Hello, this is the IRS. You are delinquent $10,000. This is payable with iTunes gift cards. If you do not comply, straight to jail.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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Asklemmy
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yet here we are
(In Chinese)
Hi, I am the emperor of the Qin dynasty (207 BC). I am not actually dead because I found the medicine of immortality. I want to rebuild my empire but I currently don't have any money. Can you send me a few liang (ๅ ฉ, Chinese mass unit) of gold to get started? I must heavily reward you when my empire thrives again.
Edit: I typed this from memory. Apparently this is a reply to another ridiculous scam message of someone pretending to be the son of ่ฃไป็ณ (leader of Republic of China in 1928-1975).
Some asshole selling gold shoes and bibles out of the White House.
Dumbest AND most genius: Fake captchas that get the user to press windows+R, then control+C, then enter.
Dumbest because if you paid attention to what's being pasted, it's usually a call to power shell with an arbitrary script, and it's being pasted into your OS's run box which is basically like a console.
But also genius because there are tons of people that fall for it, and it's a social engineering masterpiece.
John Hammond with more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSa_wHW1pgQ
This really highlights two systemic issues: tons of people don't know what they're doing with computers and don't know basic security concepts like don't run an arbitrary script from an untrusted website, and we should probably do something about that. Which brings me to the second point that Windows is pretty ass for making it this easy. Why can you run an encoded power shell script from your run box, and why would you make bypassing the execution policy as easy as a flag in the command you're invoking? I can't imagine those have a lot of legitimate uses and aren't just being abused by criminals.
That guy doesn't look like the dinosaur guy. Not yet, anyway.
I like how Nichole's last message to Lemmy was just a bunch of crypto wallets and some lame, one-sentence excuse for why we should fill them.
I wonder if it was a romance scam.
The "scam" seemed to be "Look, a woman. Give us money." Like, it was so obviously a scam that I started wondering what was really going on.
It sure seemed like one, yeah. One unusual thing is that there was apparently a Discord channel with multiple marks in it at once.
i wonder if anyone tech savvy enough to use lemmy ever actually fell for that lol
the company i work for
Homeopathy and Esoteric "medicine"
If there isn't a risks and side effects warning, you can be almost certain there isn't any effect beyond placebo at all.
There was a person last year going around to websites posting a whole bunch of hastily-made .onion single-page scam websites that essentially just say "Pay $10 to this bitcoin address for the service". They'd post a series of links, like:
Facebook hacking:
http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14h3kjfu4.onion/
Love potion spell
http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14hfspopd.onion/
Mystery box
http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14fine9ffewh.onion/
[...]
Not only are many of these scam services played out and pretty obvious, like pretending they will hack facebook accounts for $25, and not only were many others ridiculous like a love potion spell, satanic spells, a "mystery box" that you pay $10 to find out what's in it, but their shotgun approach of listing them all in a single post makes it obvious how fake and desperate it is. I'd be amazed if anyone fell for it, but they kept hand-posting these for months until site owners manually blocked them.
Any religion that ever was, is or will be. Dumb for the people that fall for it, smart for the people that run it.
Asiacoin. But, also many other crypto shits.
I believe the dumbness of scams conforms to the Archimedean property.