I was selling PHP based software around 2009. It wasn’t pirate proof in any way. I was charitable with it too... if anyone was disadvantaged or a student or similar I’d send them a free license. Some kid posed as a journalist for a review copy and then once he had it, started to aggressively distribute it to every leak/piracy site he possibly could.

Attempts to discuss it with him were futile. I was pissed. At the time I was a freelancer and so this was a huge portion of my income. I basically lived off the dopamine hits from each sale, not to mention the actual sale revenue via a PayPal debit card. The OG ones that were that weird blueish silver sparkle. Funds basically went directly from sales to paying bills and feeding myself.

So I used his personal info to track his location. Ended up finding his poor old grandmother who was his caretaker and barely spoke English. I tried to explain the situation to her and explain how unreasonable he was acting. She didn’t understand anything I said but I think the mere act of getting her involved scared him enough to undo everything he did. He was not happy I had figured that out.

Check mate kiddo.

How did you lock a php based software with a license? Could not they just dig into code and remove the license restrictions, since you provided them with the code?

You don't need to lock the software in practice. Your customers don't usually bother with redistributing what you're selling. With few exceptions, resellers (designers, web shops, etc.) don't do so either. Basically, if your customers or resellers screw you badly they don't get to piggyback on what you're building.

That's not to say piracy doesn't happen at all or can be ignored. You will find your software on file sharing websites eventually. But, quite frankly, it doesn't matter that much in practice, because free riders eventually come knocking at your door for support or an upgrade -- at which points you go "Mmm, I'm not seeing you in my customer list". And when they're students, they're really just learning how to use your software -- which you can view as free marketing.

Source: I lived off of selling licenses for OSS that I was developing for about a decade.

As the other comment states there are ways, but given the comment I imagine it went more like "give me $x and I send you the files", just like DRM free music. Technical restrictions aren't required legally or socially, and whether they are useful depends on the context (e.g. full hackability due to source code access can drive a lot of sales and build a community, just like with open source)

Zend Guard[1] was often used for licensing PHP code in mid-2000s.

[1] https://www.zend.com/products/zend-guard

And IonCube PHP Encoder [0] (not affiliated, had positive experience with them as a customer). These apps solve real-world problem - sometimes it makes sense from business perspective to make copying the software more difficult.

[0] https://www.ioncube.com/

>Ended up finding his poor old grandmother who was his caretaker and barely spoke English. I tried to explain the situation to her and explain how unreasonable he was acting. She didn’t understand anything I said but I think the mere act of getting her involved scared him enough to undo everything he did.

reminds about the scene from Godfather II with Pentageli's brother at the hearing.

>once he had it, started to aggressively distribute it to every leak/piracy site

Did it have any measurable effect on your sales, in percents?

I can't say for certain. I could probably count it on two hands... so maybe a few hundred bucks lost at most.

You prefer that he should call the Police and then imagine the joy when the scammer's mother would have when she would be receiving the call from a police officer telling her "we placed your son under arrest for crimes A, B, C and money laundering and he's looking at 5-10y".. imho he did that kid a favour he didn't deserve. If you ask me he saved that kid's life.

To be honest, I found his phone number and just gave it a ring. I had no idea who was going to pick up on the other end.

I had a b2b company with a aggressively rude sales guy calling me over and over. Called his supervisor, and basically got "tough shit, it's a free world" as an answer.

So I looked into what I could do and found that the email contact for their domain wasn't working.

Reported to ICANN[1], and their domain was shut down for several days. Then called the supervisor and let him know I was the one that reported it. The sales calls stopped.

[1] https://forms.icann.org/en/resources/compliance/complaints/w...

Had a similar thing with an illegal robocall advertising a domain name. Whois record revealed personal mobile phone number of the director. She was quite surprised when I called her at 9pm to discuss the legality of out of hours robocalls.

I lived 2 years in a "hutong" (old residential area) in Beijing. Rented an apartment via a middle man that could only get those apartments. After signing the lease, a friend warned me this middle man will certainly find every excuses to not give back the deposit (many stories about it in the foreigners circle).

The week I was leaving, she didn't want to give me the deposit .I warned her I'll public shame her if she didn't gave me back the money, and use "internet magic" to collect other poeople stories so it will stop people renting from her. Nothing happened until 3 months later she sent me a wechat transfer. I've closed the website. But then learned again she was keep doing the same thing with an other business name. I've reopened the website with adding her new business name. She didn't contacted me yet.

She get away since foreigners just don't want to to deal with that when they are about to leave the country or deal with that.

You can Google/Baidu/Bing "courtyard007" or "homeudream"

The usual traditional farewell as a foreigner is to not pay the last rents and she uses up your deposit for that.

In China, you usually pay the rent for the next 3 months so it's tricky to do

I once had a landlord in Detroit who stopped paying his HOA dues In a large complex. I had a court order to pay my rent to the HOA and he was not happy about that. He threatened to evict me (not legal), but then his ex girlfriend got involved. His ex girlfriend was a well known real estate agent with a popular house flipping tv show on national television. She threatened to blacklist me with every major landlord in the city and then only got more aggressive. I looked up the realtors code of conduct, wrote a 10 page complaint to the licensing board with cited evidence, and emailed them a draft with the note “all I want to do is continue to pay my rent and legally occupy this unit. I don’t want to fight, but if we can’t resolve this I will submit it tomorrow.” His girlfriend went away and suddenly I had no problems (and apparently he paid his over due HOA dues). I never mailed the complaint, but I did move out within a few months.

You should have sent the complaint anyway; all this does is enable them to continue abusing others. Make a paper trail, tarnish their perfect record, let others know the truth.

not only that, but that may actually be considered blackmail.

One method I use for fighting “friendly fraud” in our b2b business (smb customers) is to message their Facebook page after sufficiently attempting to contact someone more official.

It has always worked.

I hypothesize it’s easy to rationalize things away, but the FB channel typically requires a non-owner employee to ask the owner/purchasing manager why the company isn’t paying their suppliers.

I once bought a set of Bose quiet comfort noise cancelling headphones on EBay. The seller was in the USA and shipping was to Australia. The guy didn’t ship and stopped answering messages. But I had emails from him with IP address. A reverse lookup gave me his company. I called the company and the automated switch asked me to enter name of person I wanted to speak with. I entered his name and it validated he worked there. I have him an email giving him one more chance to do the right thing. He didn’t respond so I sent an email to the CEO, legal counsel and HR with subject “Company X employeeName conducting fraudulent eBay auctions from company X network” with accompanying evidence.

He emailed me a few hours later with an express tracking number.

I kind of felt bad for him but doing he did from his office is extra stupid.

> I kind of felt bad for him

While I understand the sentiment, we sure are softies when we sympathize with the guy who got in trouble for trying to scam us. He earned that consequence 100%.

no sympathy, he had the chance to send the stuff when he was contacted directly

Don't feel bad. Someone from college bought my QuietComfort 15 pretty cheap when I got the 35. I found it odd that he'd buy it as it's pricey there (Brazil), and tried to convince him not to (as he wasn't rich or even working regularly). He told me not to worry and asked to pay in installments. I made the mistake of accepting his offer, and he practically vanished after paying about 50 USD for it (I sold it for about 130 USD). I am someone who he could ask a referral. Instead, now he has a recommendation against him.

This is awesome. I once had an asshole of a roommate. When I had had enough and moved out, they wouldn't return my security deposit. But I had leverage. They had been getting school tuition money from their parents, but not going to school. I tracked down their parents. & politely asked for my security deposit back in exchange for not outing them to their folks. I got my money back the next day.

You probably should have outed them afterwards anyway. Scamming your own parents is a shitty thing to do.

The response to dishonesty should not be more dishonesty, but a model of correct behaviour.

I disagree. There was leverage to balance the sheet. The room mate was trying to steal money from him. Say anything that is legal to get it back and barring that get the cops involved (a last resort since that greatly complicates a situation).

Then assess the situation. Bad behavior shouldn’t be rewarded. There’s no reason the room mate should ever know how the parents learned that information. If the parents were tactful they would use the information to make a plan to bring it to light organically.

That guidance, often framed in religious terms, is a core tool with which sociopaths in power neuter their opponents.

I was happy to get out of there. It's not like I could have reformed them with a good heart to heart talk. Once I went to do laundry and stepped barefooted into a steaming pile of dog poo their dog had dropped on the laundry room floor. When I complained, instead of apologizing for it, they told me I should have watched where I was walking. My roommate was a genuine asshole, and just getting them out of my life was amazing.

Hmm, I seem to have worded my comment poorly? The comment I replied to suggested you should have outed them to their parents while living with them.

I was arguing that would have been an insane thing to do, as you would then have had no more leverage, and would have angered an immoral person.

I.e. You didn't need to do anything more than you did.

Ah, yes. I agree with this.

The anecdote was about getting back the security deposit after moving out.

> When I had had enough and moved out, they wouldn't return my security deposit.

None of it would have been safe to do if they were still living with them.

Just FYI, if you live in the US, what you just described is criminal extortion.

Interesting. Looking up extortion...

https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/extortion.html

"Most states define extortion as the gaining of property or money by almost any kind of force or threat of violence, property damage, harm to reputation, or unfavorable government action."

My IANAL interpretation of that would be extortion wouldn't apply here. Because my security deposit is legally mine, and they were holding it on my behalf, I'm not gaining anything. Demanding my own property back is not the same as profiting. If I had demanded my deposit back plus $1, then it would be extortion. Maybe. Again, IANAL. Fortunately the statute of limitations makes me safe, as this was long ago :)

It's not about whether it's "legally" yours (and even that would be up for dispute) but how you acquired it. You can't threaten somebody to get things, that's extortion

I suspect that this is reading too much into it. As noted by another commenter above:

> "Most states define extortion as the gaining of property or money by almost any kind of force or threat of violence, property damage, harm to reputation, or unfavorable government action."

Under your interpretation, if Alice took Bob's lawn mower without permission and refused to return it, and Bob told her he would call the police and report this unless she returned it, that would be extortion. The police coming and arresting Alice for theft is an unfavorable government action from Alice's viewpoint.

Similarly, if you were contemplating suing someone for damages over a harm you felt they did to you, it would be extortion if you told them you were going to sue to so unless they agreed to settle.

Sometimes moral law and legality differ, and I think he was on the right side of moral law.

This is a complex situation, because another party is involved: the parents. The ethics and morality of accepting a payment (even if it also satisfies a debt) to let the son continue to defraud his parents is certainly something that reasonable people can debate.

By informing the parents you are getting involved in a situation you don't understand. The fraud could be reasonable based on previous actions. Parents know but there is nothing they can do at the moment so they decide to let it slide and confront in person when they make a surprise visit. Telling both parties changes that and removes the parents ability to ambush.

If I get something that I own back, I wouldn't say that qualifies as "gaining" something.

extortion usually involves a threat of force, this sounds more like blackmail?

Perhaps "harm to reputation" as the GP says?

blackmail is extortion

I think it's not only extortion, it's blackmail, and depending on how the parents paid their son it may have been a federal offense: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/873

The son was likely guilty of some sort of larceny (theft by deception) and it may have been a federal offense, especially if it crossed state lines or involved the postal system.

Since that is criminal (rather than civil) wouldn't they have to convince the DA/Prosecutor to try the case, which seems unlikely in practice.

Unfortunately, while technically true we usually just call behavior like this "collections".

Even if you were owed money? I could see if you tried to get money but this is money already owed to you.

Collection agencies (or whatever they are called in the US) hound people for money they owe to third parties. They often call your workplace or relatives as a way to get you pay.

For extortion there needs to be a threat, and the threat needs to be unrelated to the thing of value you want. Collection agencies generally just call up, and even if they do threaten to call, since it's a threat directly related to the debt, that's generally not extortion.

Had a similar thing happen after a guy left me a false review.

The guy was an employee of a local company. He cold called me. I was busy so I just hung up, but I did hear the company name.

Then I saw a bad review left by someone pretending to have been a customer of mine. He used his real name as it was a google review.

I googled, found out he worked for the company that had called me. Spoke to the owner, gave the owner the info. He said he'd look into it.

Called back 30 min later, apologized for his employee's actions, said he disciplined him and got him to admit his action was petty and wrong, and he made him take down the review.

Real life leverage is a powerful thing.

Not understanding this story entirely. You just hung up on someone and then they left a bad review. That's what reviews are for, no?

The person called them trying to sell something (a "cold call"), but then left a bad review claiming to be a customer.

Ah, got it. Thanks for explaining.

He cold called op. So probably wanted to sell them a service/product. By the caller turned around to leave a fake review as though he was a customer of OP.

At least that's how I interpreted it.

Yup, exactly that

Reminds me of the time this lady contacted the mother of a man who sent her violent threats and got him to apologize: https://twitter.com/AGlasgowGirl/status/1188128030268575744

Or the masseur [0] that got fed up with "do you have happy endings?" and started contacting the wifes of her customers.

[0] https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1377985 (in swedish though...)

“Thanks for letting us know about our stupid son” omg this was parenting thing is the wildest game on earth

Great point from the end of the article: Your privacy settings on facebook are only as good as your friends.

This is one of the pervasive dark patterns of social media. Even if you're not on social media, you cant stop people from posting an image of you or tagging your name. That feels wrong to me.

That’s a real life dark pattern, not a social media dark pattern. You can’t stop people from gossiping about you, or sharing information about you without your consent.

The problem is that the ease of discovering private information based on one "loose lips" friend is magnified by about several orders of magnitude by social media.

That’s not what “dark pattern” means. Your comment is otherwise accurate.

"Do nothing anyone could ever disagree with" is what you really mean, and that's a terrible way to live.

Live a moral life is what I'm saying!

Not Stealing, cheating and telling lies that causes other harm is how I happily live my life. What I was taught..were u not taught the same?

My point is that there are plenty of activities outside "stealing, cheating, and telling lies" that people you care about may disapprove of.

Or, for that matter, that governments may disapprove of.

What if you are just a private person? If I go out with a friend who tags me on social media, I get innocuous questions from other friends like "Oh, you were here or there last week with this person"... I don't need people knowing where I was or who I was with. I am not robbing banks in my free time. I just care about my privacy.

The problem is that their friends are broadcasting their whereabouts and activities to their other friends, which causes tension.

Photos taken by strangers on the bus or at the bank are not broadcast to their friends, so they do not cause tension.

Also, wearing a mask to the club causes further issues, since your friends will still tag you in their photos, and people who see the photos will now be wondering why you are wearing a mask. When you answer that you were trying to maintain your privacy so that your friends didn't broadcast your whereabouts to your other friends, they will likely point out that your friends still know who you are, and that wearing a mask does not prevent them tagging you.

Doesn't stop people from posting photos you don't want (even if the person posted it with good intentions), or from someone stealing your personal photos and posting them publicly, or things like revenge porn, which no one deserves.

Strangers can take pictures of you in public.

Strangers take pictures of movie stars and sell them for thousands.

That’s not guaranteed, people go on weird vendettas against others for all kinds of bizarre reasons or even target people without any reason or just for having a different view or opinion, so not wronging others doesn’t guarantee that you won’t have any issues. Of course, that doesn’t give you a reason to wrong others, you obviously shouldn’t.

Yup. That explains what happened to both Alan Turing and Donald Trump.

I had a similar story from eBay back in the day, where someone had sold me faulty goods. Was worried I’d have to do a whole fraud process thing, but managed to find his Dad’s contact details, threatened to contact him, and suddenly the guy/kid couldn’t do enough to fix it

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I really think Christian should have gone to the police about this. This scammer was NOT a kid, he was a 22 year old adult who needs to take responsibility for his actions. His "apology" isn't sincere at all and just makes excuses for his behavior and tries to elicit pity with stories of panic attacks and being a broke college student. At this point all that the scammer has learned is to have better op-sec and research his victims better.

Assuming this all took place in the US, the American justice system is pretty horrific. I wouldn't want to call the cops on anyone unless it was absolutely necessary. It's not an action to take lightly.

On the other hand, what if the scammer just keeps scamming? 99% of the population won't be able to do the investigative work Christian did and will just lose their money for good. I wouldn't be able to accept letting a definitely not innocent scammer off free to go scam other innocent people who can't fight back. That is not justice.

I think that if someone wants to avoid interacting with the police, step 1 is not to scam people.

Also, while the police do deserve much of their reputation, it's worth remembering that citizens and police interact frequently, all day every day, across the country, and mostly nothing newsworthy happens.

Interactions can be extremely negative without making the news.

and positive

Or you want a state sponsored hit squad

Check back in a couple of decades, and you might change your opinion of how one defines "adult".

Sure when I was 22 I felt as grown up and superior as anything, yet the same amount of years later I realise how little I in fact knew then, and still do.

Christian did the old kid a huge favour.

Honestly if you haven't learned "do not try to defraud people out of their money" by 22 I doubt a few more years is going to change his mind. Furthermore by 22 the vast majority of people are able to lead healthy adult lives without scamming people. They don't have the experience that older people do but it shouldn't take a lot of experience to know that stealing from others is wrong.

I also don't think Christian did the scammer a favor either. If anything Christian's interaction with the scammer may have emboldened him because even when he got caught he got away with nothing lost other than a potential reputation hit with his family. Can encouraging a known scammer to keep scamming by showing them how to not get caught and that there aren't any consequences if you do manage to get caught really be considered a favor?

Stop infantilizing people. People don't become proper adults until they've had a few years making decisions and handling the consequences. If you just keep giving people easy outs and rationalizing it as them being young and stupid they will never become smart. Yeah, some people are gonna have to go to jail for their screw ups but on a societal level that's preferable to everybody still acting like idiots at 25.

Eons ago when I was on a shared hosting account on bluehost, I had my site compromised few times, and got my account temporarily frozen with the warning that if I didn't stop getting hacked they would suspend my account permanently.

So I started digging into the php files and found some sort of irc bot and noticed the channel it logged on an the admin username that was allowed to issue commands. Logged on the server and channel and hanged out for a bit but no trace of the username. Started asking around for the person, and someone messeged me and asked what's this about, I explained that I just want the hacking to stop so I don't get kicked out of the hosting I was barely paying for. I was met with understanding and the person said they would pass along the message. The hacking stopped. And I was a happy kid 16 year old.

"I will never do anything like this again."

I doubt that.

Spoken with the same sincerity of a politician who is truly sorry for their momentary lapse in judgement.

That being said, back in the early 90s I was playing around with virus generators (total script kiddie stuff) and ended up infecting my own system. That was enough to keep me out of nefarious activities from then on.

He just got a lesson in how to scam properly. Impressively stupid though.

"It's time for some all new tricks."

So wait, the guy just sent the Apple cards and trusted he would be paid on the honor system?

Doesn't eBay make the other party pay first before you ship? I thought that was the whole point of eBay.

They weren’t using ebay, the scammer just used it to prove he’s trustworthy.

This is crazy, for some reason this rang a bell and I checked my email and sure enough, I ended up buying those gift codes from you! Funny how things come full circle :)

Ha! This is a good write up, I had a run in with a "scammer" that was made a fake facebook profile of my friends father, using profile pics my friends father had set to public. Long story short, this really bothered by friends father, so I decided to contact the fake account.

What I did, was set up a basic website with http request level logging, friend the fake account, waited until the scammer contacted me over FB messenger, and ask him to check out my "website". He did, I kept the conversation going for a little bit, he got to the ask, and I said, "hey, you are a scammer, you live in X town in Y country, I know more about you, and if you don't stop using this account there will be problems!" Anyway, this was about 3 years ago, and there has been no activity on the fake account since!

I feel that the lesson at the end of the article should be something more like "don't scam people on the Internet" but otherwise great post.

I had a client that ran a startup who owed me $30K, after months of leading me on and telling me I had to do XYZ, the sky was falling etc. Meanwhile they paid others.

I had put the website up at Amazon and could take it down, but I didn’t want to get in trouble for “unauthorized access” stuff. I considered doing a DMCA takedown since they had never signed any copyright assignment. Would have probably succeeded. Another thing I could have done was introduce a “bug” that happened to hit at a certain day and demand being paid before I do any more work.

But in the end I didn’t do anything. That $30K out of my pocket really set me back for a long time. Lots of people were pissed at this startup, it was a shitshow.

Story 2

A friend of mine was quite mistreated by a girl who went out w him. She liked me so I contemplated inviting her out to an expensive restaurant, ordering a large meal and then skipping out on the check. Never did it.

I even thought of doing something worse. Saying we should get matching tattoos, except mine would be a fake one.

Story 3

Also I had met a girl and texted back and forth, she seemed excited to meet, we made plans, I drove an hour to meet her and then she totally stood me up and stopped answering.

I was pretty upset at her and I contemplated putting up an ad on Craiglist in the “hookers” section (they had one back then) with her phone number and a fake name that would make her realize I did it (“EGreg’s XYZ”). Suffice it to say I never did that one either.

Conclusion:

I know how to be an asshole but seem to never choose to follow through lol

It can be valuable for us to find an outlet to experience control, to avoid escalating the fantasy of taking control over other human beings.

We're all humans and all terrible to each other, but in short bursts sometimes we can anonymously improve the network by not contributing a negative action to experience control. Good on you for not abusing your female acquaintances with trick tattoos or besmirching someone as a prostitute, but it might feel even better to find a way to avoid needing the fantasy altogether.

I enjoy pruning wild bushes. It gives me the pause to re-balance whatever is getting to me. I wander through the woods looking for lopsided wild cherry bushes and give them symmetry. It's still sort of a form of chaos but better a wild bush than a person. It's my dumb thing, but there's millions of activities that might be a good fit for anyone. Thanks for your post! Cheers.

Selling unwanted gift cards online is a huge scammer magnet. I tried to sell a $50 card for $40 recently and wasted a bunch of time with people sending me fake PayPal confirmation messages. Thankfully all of the scammers were pretty stupid and it was easy to tell when they were scamming.

It's just super risky on both sides so very few legitimate buyers want to do it since as a seller you could be giving them fake or used codes.

Good startup idea then to build an escrow service for this? I.e. buy discount cards for 80% of face value, sell them for 90% of face value, and then act as the trusted middle man to verify that the card is good and that payment was made.

Not sure if any KYC/AML or other banking regulations would make this less economically viable.

There’s already several sites like this, or at least there was a few years ago. I think some of them went under due to (big surprise) getting scammed. It’s too easy to just keep the numbers, sell the physical gift card to the company, then use them online after a month or two.

How do you verify the card is good before redeeming it?

Wait I'm confused, wouldn't it have been a better strategy to go half and half if you have two cards?

You send them one card, they receive it and know they can trust you. They send you the money so you trust them, then you send the final card. Worst case you only lose $250.

His final line of the post was "Lessons Learned:" "Use an escrow service like Transpact if you want to make trades via bitcoin"

That's fair, I was quite surprised that he gave both his cards away like that.

Ha, this is awesome. I'm glad that the author got his money back. But use this as a reminder, whether you're doing nefarious activities or not, you can probably be found online with a few hours of research unless you're being incredibly careful.

A better lesson, think what your mother will say/feel about the thing your about to do (with the exception if you are not close to your family)

Yes, true, although I hope most people already have internalized that they shouldn't commit fraud whether or not their mother would approve

This is a good test though. I forgot where I read it from but there was this saying if your doing something you would be ashamed to tell your freidns or family about than you probably shouldn't be doing it

You might have heard it when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was brushing off concerns about online privacy.

Unless your mother is Ma Barker ;)

If you share usernames, that is. I could very well make up a unique username like "Nikatoa" that I never even thought of before, and there's no way you could link that to any other account of mine - short of database leaks containing my email or linking/commenting from one account to another.

Reminds me of gaming journalist Alanah Pearce, who would report her online abusers to their mothers.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2...

I wonder if this would work with patent trolls.

Did he say he was sorry he took the money?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF_sahvR4mw

no he was just sorry he was caught

Any more blogs like this? I'd be happy to know more about such incidents.

something similar from the same blog about a malicious raspberry pi in a network closet and in the end the person who put it there was found out because their wifi credentials were still in the Pi

https://blog.haschek.at/2019/the-curious-case-of-the-RasPi-i...

Reminds me of the time I was found out for changing my colleague’s desktop wallpaper to My Little Pony, which is standard punishment for leaving your machine unlocked.

Disk not ejected properly

Eject "STEVE" before disconnecting or turning it off.

Not exactly this kind of scam but, there is the classic scambaiting community at 419eater.com

Wiki about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/419eater.com

Also live scambaiting on Twitch from Kitboga:

https://www.twitch.tv/kitboga

He is trying to waste the time of scammers while having fun and providing entertainment for his viewers.

I wrote a blog post about an Upwork contractor trying to scam me. I found her Facebook but never contacted her family:

https://mtlynch.io/upwork-scammer/

He should have gone to the Police. He's just going to do it again.

The US justice system isn't known for reforming people, if anything it turns small-time criminals into hardened criminals. The parents probably have a better shot at doing something good.

> He's just going to do it again

And after he graduates criminal university, he's probably going to do far worse.

dont mess with this guy

> I think the mere act of getting her involved scared him enough to undo everything he did. He was not happy I had figured that out.

Most people only act evil under anonymity, thinking they can get away with it, and can't withstand the risk of public shaming.

This applies not only to the internet, but government officials, entertainment industry execs, etc, anyone who thinks themselves safe from scrutiny.

I think you can formalize this statement with game theory around how reputations work among social organisms. This applies even to dolphins and chimpanzees.

It doesn't mean you can't be evil in public, but it does mean it's a suboptimal strategy for your own best interest.

Scarily if the public moral compass gets warped enough, then you can be evil in public and get away with it because according to the public you're not doing evil. Like Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany. The definition of evil itself changes.

> Scarily if the public moral compass gets warped enough, then you can be evil in public and get away with it because according to the public you're not doing evil. The definition of evil itself changes.

Luckily their social superset, the rest of the world, saw them as evil.

Makes you wonder, what are we currently doing that is evil but the entire world supports it?

China's treatment of Hong Kong and minorities comes to mind. And all the wars and massacres going on that have the full support of the first world and its media.

^^ Eating animals. Firmly convinced we're on the wrong side of history on this one - when the world finally stops doing it en mass, either because clean lab grown meat has become economically more viable or environmental concerns are too overwhelming, etc., very convinced we'll look back on it as a horrific practice just as we might slavery today.

Aside: this thread escalated quickly from scamming Apple gift cards on reddit

> Firmly convinced we're on the wrong side of history on this one

We're omnivores, we eat meat and plants, meat is thought to have been what gave us our big brains.

https://paleoleap.com/human-brains-evolved-meat/

Hardcore vegans already think it's a horrific practice, but for most people it will just be a diet of the time, especially if future people are eating imitation meat.

I don't think many vegetarians or vegans would disagree that meat was historically important for human survival and development. Meat was (and still is in many parts of the world) one of the easiest ways to attain calories and important nutrients.

The difference for you and I -and everyone else reading this- is that we now have easy access to meat-free alternatives. Plant proteins and mycoprotein are readily available in most developed countries. Machine pressed oils give us cheap access to plant-based fatty acids. Today we can easily get all of our calories and important nutrients without factory farming and/or slaughtering animals.

What I always find odd about this argument is that almost all of those animals wouldn't even have existed if we weren't going to eat them.

If you believe in sentience, and the value of it, given their low awareness, either you support never even letting them live or what?

I can understand supporting low suffering, but non-existence seems even worse somehow?

Easy to wrap yourself in weird arguments and end up in the absurd, a la Douglas Adams Restaurant at the end of the Universe.

You're comparing life with non-existence. We (as a vegetarian I include myself in those making this "odd" argument) are comparing a more happy life or non-existence with being a slave, having your offspring forcibly taken from you, living only a few years in often terrible and freakishly unnatural conditions to then be slaughtered, possibly in another freakishly unnatural way, just so that someone who might not even pay any attention while they're eating your remains, can eat lazily, often in a suboptimal way for taste and nutrition.

I doubt ours is the odd position in all of this.

They have no concept of freedom, and for most animals living in the wild is a terrifying existence where they can get killed every day and struggle to find food. Putting aside battery farming, they have a life of luxury compared to their wild cousins.

It's like you believe animals are like humans, they're not, stop anthromorphising them. They're not like Mel Gibson screaming "you can take our lives".

It also makes we wonder if you've ever lived in the country and met wild animals. They are generally not a happy bunch like you see in kids cartoons.

> They have no concept of freedom

Trap some and I'm pretty sure you'll find they want to escape. They certainly understand the concept of captivity.

> It's like you believe animals are like humans, they're not, stop anthromorphising them

You could instead stop with the childish mischaracterisation of my views, of which you know little. I do not believe they are humans. I do, however, know via increasing amounts of evidence that they suffer and can experience complex emotional and social lives, and that our treatment of them is largely an unnecessary cause of their suffering.

> It also makes we wonder if you've ever lived in the country and met wild animals.

I worked in a butcher shop, I've been to working farms, I've been to cattle auctions. I wonder if you've only ever got your meat vacuumed packed in plastic and tell people you "love" bacon - but I wouldn't use that as an argument because it would be irrelevant and crass, especially on a forum like this that's supposed to represent discussion based on a higher level of reasoning amongst respectful peers.

> most animals living in the wild is a terrifying existence where they can get killed every day and struggle to find food. Putting aside battery farming, they have a life of luxury compared to their wild cousins.

You're using the same arguments people used to justify keeping slaves. They weren't any good then so I'm not sure why they'd be any better now.

> If you believe in sentience, and the value of it, given their low awareness, either you support never even letting them live or what?

If we accept that living is always morally desirable, no matter how much suffering is involved, then it leads to absurd moral conclusions. For one, it would mean that it would be ok to have a baby, then kill it to sell its organs: after all, the baby wouldn't have existed otherwise. For another, it would mean that we should try to increase the world's population as much as possible, even far past the carrying capacity of the earth, because it's better to exist in a world of extreme poverty, starvation, and war than to not exist at all.

Animals might not be aware of things like love or beauty, but I'm pretty sure that a male chick has an unpleasant experience when it's being macerated, and I don't think the couple of days it's allowed to live make up for it.

What about other predatory animals? Are they also morally culpable? Should we stop them?

Preventing wild animals from killing each other would require by far the largest ecological intervention the world had ever seen, which would involve humans either exterminating half the species on the planet, or domesticating them and feeding them engineered vegetarian diets. In either case, it would certainly cause massive ecological damage, and I don't think we have the technology to do such a thing even if we wanted to.

This suggestion sort of like saying "Oh, you think our country should outlaw wife-beating? Well why don't we conquer the entire world and stop every country from practicing wife-beating?"

As for domesticated animals, I think we absolutely should try to find ways to feed them without killing other animals. There are companies out there trying to make vegan cat food, and although I'm not sure whether it's good enough to keep cats healthy yet, I definitely wish them luck in achieving it.

Do you use this kind of formulation to wonder why you or people you know don't go out raping and murdering?

If not, why are you worried about what other animals do? You are a sentient being with the greatest ability to reason and empathise compared to any other species on the planet - their behaviour has nothing to do with your choices.

Mostly agree but would change to factory farming.

Yeah, and it constantly changes. Like slavery in recent history, or discrimination by race or sexual orientation.

I also wonder what I just take for granted that future generations will see as evil. Probably eating meat, and not being responsible for negative externalities (burning hydrocarbons).

The evolution of society to eliminate slavery and discrimination can be boiled down to a fundamental equality across all of mankind.

I don’t see eating meat ever getting to that level. It’d take the elevation of the rest of animal world to our level.

I think that as we automate more things we can comfortably afford to model more beings as being worthy of our consideration. People of the past divided humanity into subcategories they could more easily rationalise the exploitation of. We do the same to other parts of the biosphere. I'm not saying the two things are of equal ugliness, but I think they exist on the same continuum.

I recommend Peter Singer’s writings about widening circles of empathy as a description of moral progress.

> It’d take the elevation of the rest of animal world to our level.

In my estimation they're already there. I'd be interested to here how you measure the level upon which you gain the right not to be killed for food, as we obviously measure it differently.

Seriously, how would it be measured?

Rights are not a priori truths. They are a human creation, a game of language. Just like gods, reincarnation, gender pronouns and mythology. What makes you so sure that you and your dog have a right not to be killed for food?

Who suggested that rights were a priori truths? I certainly didn't. Who suggested that rights aren't a human creation? I certainly didn't.

I wouldn't put rights - those things based on reasoning and experience, much like the rest of the vast body of law - into a category with gods, reincarnation, gender pronouns and mythology, but that's just me.

The reasoning also necessarily falls back on experience. Personal experience is all we have. You’re admitting that your estimation is subjective. Why are you so worried about others eating animals, then? Because a lot of other people now are too?

> The reasoning also necessarily falls back on experience. Personal experience is all we have.

Thanks, as a Buddhist I'm glad to hear that there are others catching up with Nagarjuna's insights, though you've still a long way to go.

> You’re admitting that your estimation is subjective.

All objectivity exists within subjectivity, I don't need to admit something I've not claimed to be otherwise.

> Why are you so worried about others eating animals, then?

There's no then, you've provided a non-sequitur, plenty of proponents of schools of thought that say all things are subjective - including us poor nominalists, the Buddhists, though not only us - find it actually strengthens our moral arguments, not obviates them.

> Because a lot of other people now are too?

Do you eat meat to be popular? Please. That kind of jibe is low grade and not for HN.

There are animals, they suffer, humans have agency, we can do better, and I care to do better. I do not act simply because I can, and I do not lack consideration for others - especially those less powerful than me - simply because those around me think it's okay. Which is ironic given your jibe about wanting to be popular, meat eaters are the majority.

The concepts of "better" and "suffering" are a matter of opinion, as you have agreed. I eat meat because that is acceptable to me and also because supermarkets still sell it. Who am I to claim what people objectively should and should not do? Not even Buddha did that.

What I am trying to get at when referring to other people also not eating meat is: Are you really motivated by a moral cause, or are you taking the easy route, signalling away your guilt like many of the western middle class on this forum and elsewhere?

Does your choice not to eat meat and prevent animal suffering, not really just mirror a realisation that you yourself are at the wrong end of the hierarchy?

I thought we'd agreed that objectivity exists within subjectivity? To keep banging on that everything is subjective is to miss the point - there's objectivity too, and there is suffering (as The Buddha rightly pointed out) and it can be objectively measured.

I also have not made any claim about what others should do - are you going to keep up with the straw men? It's getting a bit long in the tooth. My initial response was about the way Koobla makes the distinction.

> Are you really motivated by a moral cause

I wouldn't call it a moral cause but a choice between suffering and not suffering.

> or are you taking the easy route, signalling away your guilt like many of the western middle class on this forum and elsewhere?

No, I'm not guilty and I'm working class and I've no need to signal virtue, I'm not religious.

> Does your choice not to eat meat and prevent animal suffering

It does reduce and prevent animal suffering, good of you to… admit that.

> not really just mirror a realisation that you yourself are at the wrong end of the hierarchy?

No. The realisation was and continues to be that my choices can reduce unnecessary suffering, for myself and others.

"Wrong end" is subjective. "Hierarchy" is subjective… Either you're going to start using terms in a normal way or you're going to remain inconsistent in your use (or, more precisely, convenient in your application) and continue to provide no argument at all.

We’re speaking a different language. I’m tapping out. I wish you the best.

IMHO it’s measured on a binary scale with humanity as a one and everything else as a zero.

And may I so humbly request the reasoning behind it?

Put simply, we’re above all else in existence and they’re existence is purely for our furtherance.

That doesn’t mean I see have no empathy for other creatures of this world. Of course I do. Suffering or torture of animals would never be justified. But I’d never put their existence itself ahead of a fellow human’s. That’s, to me, totally asinine.

I meant, what is the reasoning behind the scale. You already made the binary nature of it clear. In what way do humans make the grade and animals not?

PG has a pretty good essay on this: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html?viewfullsite=1

>> Makes you wonder, what are we currently doing that is evil but the entire world supports it?

Nearly everything.

Trees / old-growth forest. It's unconscionable.

> I think you can formalize this statement with game theory around how reputations work among social organisms. This applies even to dolphins and chimpanzees.

Interesting, any references about this reputations ?

I agree to your statement, but just want to add, that also Hitler had to try hard pretending. Germany was allways only self defending. And people believed that. Some still believe it. Even though "Mein Kampf" was pretty plain speaking, in the concept of conquering the east.

Amazing how much this applies inside of standard corporate situations that are technically within the letter of the law. The savvier managers and executives, if they want to act in such a manner, tend to do it outside the watchful gaze of anyone else and browbeat peers and subordinates into silence.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21491777.

Does anonymity change us, or does it reveal our true selfs?

When I first got on the Internet it was great for me since I was ultra shy. I felt like I could reveal my true self.

But now 25 years later I see the Internet as a tool to allow people to be downright evil. I can't believe people are or would act this way in real life.

This implies the existence of one true self. It might be defined as a function of many parameters, many situational. One might even be the degree of anonymity you’re currently experiencing.

Yeah, people's behaviour and personality tend to change based on the setting they're in, and the audience they're with. You probably all act very differently around your colleagues than your friends, and either of those and your boss, parents, spouse, etc.

Which is where a lot of issues on social media are coming from. People are seeing behaviour that would previously be fine among friends/with one audience broadcast to all these others, and it's revealing everyone's flaws and multiple sided behaviour to the world.

That doesn’t feel like the right question to me. I’d say you’re your “true self”, given your environment, in each situation.

Even if one is under the influence of alcohol/drugs?

All the more so, if you ask me :)

I'd rather live in his world, than yours.

Besides, I've met few moms/brothers who weren't curious what their kids/siblings were up to. Perhaps Christian helped him to become closer to his family in the end.