Tag Archives: spam

A tidal wave of spam

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Head of products at Twitter/x.com, Nikita Bier, said this on February 11th, 2 months ago today:

“Prediction: In less than 90 days, all channels that we thought were safe from spam & automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense: iMessage, phone calls, Gmail.

And we will have no way to stop it.”

Anthropic’s newest AI model, called Claude Mythos, is not being released to the public due to concerns about its ability to uncover high-severity cybersecurity flaws in major operating systems and web browsers. But make no mistake, this AI version and more (some privately owned and some free and open source) will be available in the next month. With this will come a tidal wave of security breaches, identity theft, and corporate as well as personal blackmail crimes.

The fact is that these AI models are professional lock pickers put in the hands of anyone who wants to use them. Almost no skill needed. Unlike the movies where the people doing a heist needed to recruit that one-of-a-kind safe cracker with crazy skills, now a 15 year old in his parent’s basement can do it without leaving the house.

This wave of ‘safe crackers’ is going to be let loose soon. But something else is headed this way and that’s the scammer coming for you and me via our phones, laptops, and social media accounts. These used to show up in poorly written emails, or broken English texts and phone calls that made them easy to detect. Now three things have fundamentally changed:

1. The quality of the messaging is flawless;

2. The ability of spammers and scammers to target you and share enough information to seem legitimate;

3. The sheer volume of spam coming our way. 1 spammer used to mean 1 phone call at a time being followed up with a real person. But with AI agents, one command could unleash wave upon wave of simultaneous emails, phone texts, and messages across many social media platforms.

The biggest problem with AI in the next 5 years isn’t what AI can do on its own, but rather what people with bad intentions can… and will… do with AI. It’s bad faith actors who will be our nemesis. Ultimately, the tidal wave is coming, “And we will have no way to stop it.”

Block and Move to Junk

I might have shared a similar rant before, but I had to deal with this a few times last week and I hope at least one person in sales will learn from this.

If you cold email me with a product or service when we have had no relationship beforehand, that’s a cold call, it’s a virtual knock on a strangers email door. I find it annoying. I understand it’s hard to get your product in front of people and while I don’t like it much, I tolerate it.

However, when you then follow up with an email saying, “I haven’t heard back from you…” Well now that’s just rude. I don’t owe you anything for taking my unsolicited time to look at and maybe even read your first message. You didn’t hear from me because I’m not interested. How many thousands of ‘I haven’t heard back from you’ emails do you have to send to get a positive response? I bet it’s astronomically low. I bet your time would have been better used elsewhere.

On Friday, I got a call from someone who had sent me an email and a follow up. The only reason it got through my secretary is because the product name had the word ‘class’ in it, my secretary thought the voice sounded like a student, and I said to put it through instead of asking her to take a message like I usually do. When he started in with, “Hi, I’m [Name] from [Company], I’m not sure if you’ve had a chance to look at my last 2 emails…” I was already done. I was actually politer than I needed to be and started into a routine I’ve gotten pretty good at. I start with ‘We’ve gone through a lot of changes in the last while and I’m not interested in adding anything new at this time… and I go on for about 10 more seconds on double speed and end with, ‘I wish you all the best but we really are not interested, thanks, bye’. And I hang up even if the person has time to respond.

No, if I didn’t respond to your first email then I’m not interested in your product or even a free trial. A follow up email won’t help. A follow up email then phone call is doubly obnoxious. In fact, you can be sure of two things. First, I don’t want to work with you even if your product is great. And second, I won’t see a third email from you because I’ve blocked you and moved your email to junk. If enough of us did that after second unsolicited cold-call emails, that company email address might even find itself on the wrong side of spam filters… and I’m ok with that because if their first email wasn’t spam to begin with, their second email was definitely was.

Spam call strategy

I don’t know about you, but I almost never pick up a phone call from a number I don’t know. I’d rather listen to a voicemail than listen to spam. However, recently I’ve been trying something new.

I actually do pick up, then I immediately hit the mute button and the speaker button. So far I’ve only had a callback once from someone who was trying to contact me, because the call wasn’t a spam. And one other time I heard a questioning ‘Hello?’ and responded.

Every other call has been silence and then a click to end the call. I think it’s the muting of the call that does the trick. The auto-callers the spammers use waits to hear a greeting to know they have a person online. I don’t get a call back, and I don’t have to listen to the start of a spam message… and hopefully my number is deemed as a bad line, whereas responding and hanging up is confirmation that they have a ‘live one’ to call again.

The call is still an annoyance, but at least it’s less of one and also less rewarding for the spammer.

Spam and the end of my contact form

I’ve had a contact form on my blog since 2007. For the last few years, this has only been used to spam me: ‘Improve your SEO’; ‘I notice the content of this page and think you’d like to backlink to us… we’ll pay you’; ‘Would you like to become a distributor for…’; and even; ‘I’m horny’ with a link to some porn, dating, or mail order bride site. I can’t remember the last time someone used it to actually contact me for any legitimate reason.

Instead of deleting my contact page, I just deleted the contact form, and the first line on the page is:

Would you like to contact me? Great! I’m @datruss on Twitter. You can also leave a comment on my daily blog, “Daily-Ink“.

Hopefully I don’t drive spammers to my blog, in which case I’ll have to change that too. It’s a shame that there is so much spam that I need to do this. I’ve read that as much as 85% of all email is spam. I think responses to contact forms would be much higher than that.

I wish there was a way to spam spammers such that their job became unmanageable. Instead of them filling our inboxes with a waste of time and energy, we should figure out a way to send them ‘smart’ spam back. If they want a back link from my site, they get hundreds of responses from hundreds of fake email addresses saying, ‘Yes I’ll add a back link to your blog’ and linking to other spammer’s websites and fake PayPal accounts. Drown them in so many fake but positive responses that they can’t determine what’s worth pursuing and what’s not.

Spam the spammers.

Without a definitive attack on their livelihood, they don’t have an incentive to stop.

But for now, they win… no more contact form from me. Fortunately, I’m pretty easy to get a hold of on social media and here on my Daily-Ink, and so while removing my contact form won’t affect people’s ability to connect with me, it will reduce how much spam comes my way.

Scams and spam

It’s unreal how much spam comes our way. Recorded phone calls and emails that get by our spam filters, trying to get our attention or steal information or money.

Occasionally, I enjoy watching videos of people wasting the time of a scammer. They let them control a virtual and empty computer after 30 minutes of delays, or even fool the scammers and take over their computers. I like the idea of distant scammers doing bad things to good people being punished in some way. Especially since these scammers tend to take advantage of the elderly and vulnerable.

But that’s minimal entertainment compared to the damage they do; the hurt they cause. It seems to me that they undermine trust in a way that is harmful to society. They cause us to act from a standpoint of distrust as a default. They make the world more sceptical.

Email is broken. I get too much of it, and the relevance to my priorities is low. I don’t answer calls unless the number is in my phone or I’m expecting a call. But that doesn’t mean a spam call isn’t still a distraction, a thief of my attention and time. I’m not sure how, but this needs fixing. If not, I only see it getting worse.

Stealing attention

Yesterday I received 3 spam phone calls. I also deleted a number of emails that were basically advertising products and services. Daily we are bombarded with unsolicited requests for our time and attention. Sometimes I take the time to block phone numbers and mark items in my email as junk and block the sender. Other times I just move on.

I wonder about the people behind these messages, especially the malicious ones designed to fool someone into giving up money in some form of scam. How do they rationalize their behaviour? What motivates them?

I can’t imagine waking up in the morning hoping to swindle someone as part of a successful day. I similarly wonder about jobs like paparazzi and gossip writers. And people who troll others on social media.

Our attention is limited, and there are people who spend their time trying to steal this resource (and other resources) from us. As much as we try to avoid it, it’s there. Sometimes it’s easy to skip, other times or I find these interruptions take too much energy.

If you want to be entertained, watch videos with a search like, “wasting scammer time”. It is entertaining to watch, and while somewhat vindictive, it feels like a worthy endeavour… not one I would do, but one I appreciate. I like to know that there are people out there making the effort to slow down and frustrate people who are malicious; people who are time and attention thieves. They deserve their attention being stolen too!

Preying on your fears

It works because we don’t fully trust big companies with our data. It works because we value our privacy. And it works because it convinced people you trust to share it.

It’s a hoax. It’s fake. Versions of it have surfaced and resurfaced for over 4 years now, (see this article from June of 2016)

Here is what Facebook has to say:

I did a quick DuckDuckGo search for: Snopes “Facebook permission”

…and found this on the Snopes website:

“…In both cases the claims were erroneous, an expression of the mistaken belief the use of some simple legal talisman — knowing enough to ask the right question or post a pertinent disclaimer — will immunize one from some undesirable legal consequence. The law just doesn’t work that way.”

These kinds of messages play on our fears, and spread easily. Do your part not to spread fear… if you’ve already shared this hoax, don’t delete it, edit and add a note at the start of the post, and/or add the following image to your post so that it becomes a weapon against the spreading of such fear.

Thank you!

PS. I give you permission to copy all or any part of this post without needing to attribute or link back etc… Share this information any way that you please.