I know of a Thai person who fell for an "e-work" scam over the last year.

The hook was that you pre-pay some amount, do some trival work, then get like 500% return on your "investment". So they filter+train their mark by having them sign up for whatever financial transfer workflow, and figure out how gullable they are by giving them some payouts. A big part of this is some chat-group where lots of other fake-workers post comments saying how nervious/risky it seems and how sometimes the payment is delayed but they all eventually get paid. Eventually they let the mark sign up for some high-value amount, like equivalent of a few thousand USD. When the mark doesn't get paid, they contact the "technical support" team that then tries to social engineer the victim to loose even more money transferring funds the wrong direction (the scammers picked financial apps that make this mistake easiest).

I kind of find it unbelievable that people fall for this stuff, but the obvious proof is that enough people do :(

> I kind of find it unbelievable that people fall for this stuff

I remember reading a headline that being poor is equivalent to losing about 5 IQ points. Don’t know how true that is, but my intuition tells me that most people financially struggle, spend a lot of extra time worrying about money, and in general act a little more desperate and would be a little more aware/skeptical if their stress + financial situation allowed it.

After a few years working in cybersecurity, I viewed EVERYTHING through the lens of “is someone lying to me?”. Emails, text messages, downloading software from a website/App Store, job offers, investment opportunities, etc.the surface area is limitless. There’s exactly zero chance that even an experienced professional with excellent eyesight, who reads up on the newest scams, who doesn’t have lots of family / social events to care for, etc will never get hacked/scammed.

Even in the cybersecurity industry, almost all companies have abandoned the idea that there will never be a breach, and have moved towards thinking about resiliency, where any breaches that do happen are minimized or closed quickly/automatically.

That’s a lot of words to say: even though I thought I would never get scammed, once I spent more time educating myself about how it happens, it seems obvious to me that scams work a percentage of the time and the scale of attempts is enormous.

Different take:

At the risk of accidentally demonizing the poor, I remember reading a think piece that could be summarized as “morals/ethics are a luxury only the rich can afford.” The gist is that if you can’t afford to quit your job on the spot and not worry about paying rent this month, you will always be victim to your boss’s unethical actions lowering your ethical standards.

As an engineer, I have frequently challenged myself to empathize with the VW emissions scandal engineers, who were pressured to meet unrealistic emissions and deadlines. The managers didn’t have to explicitly tell them to build emissions testing defectors — they came up with that as an engineering solution to the requirements they were given. I ask myself: at what point would you have quit, and hopefully told the authorities?

Also more recent example is the staff of the submarine that went down to the site of the Titanic and imploded. The CEO was apparently an unbelievable bully and took extraordinary risks, but the staff didn’t quit. One of them was a Scottish immigrant who moved his whole family to take the job. He was also worried about being blacklisted from the entire private sector submarine industry. There was a lot of friction to being able to exercise his highest ethical standards.

Thailand is more or less at war with Cambodian war lords, who have tens of thousands of poor English speakers from around the world living in captivity, their passports taken away, running long term scams over the internet. When they have no money and no power to run, is it fair to blame the low level scammers for having fallen for a job scam months or years ago?

The more financial pressure you are under, the more likely you are to tolerate an unethical environment.

Always seemed to me that the correct response to this scam is to recruit everyone you know to go through just the first step of the scam and then quit while they’re ahead. Like taking a casino’s offer of free food and then leaving without gambling.

Just an anecdote but this happens in the west too. I literally woke up today to some spam Telegram "job offer" group that was vibrating my phone like crazy. And all of this in my native language of just a few million speakers. I wish I took some screenshots before trashing it, but the messages were just as you described.

Even the best of people can fall for scams. It depends on how much you need the money. No one starts off thinking they are going to be scammed. The design ensures people enter this trap slowly. When people are hesitant they are given a taste of success - the 500%. Some people tap out here. Others want to continue to try their luck. But often they are stopped with reverse psychology that there are no low pay jobs and they need to pitch in more money.

There was a post on HN where someone followed through with a scam like this. It was very weird, the scammer walked the victim through some setup on their computer. They may have actually been selling video views and likes and other social media and advertising engagement fakery ... the process was surprisingly complex and the victim had an account page tracking their activity and payouts.