This is horrifying. From your perspective, what's the hook that gets a person to hand over the money? Is it to make return on investment, or is it because they think the scammer loves them, or some other reason?
I cannot find the article again, it was posted here a few months ago so maybe someone knows of it but,
A guy intentionally went down the rabbit hole of one of these and wrote about the anatomy of it. In his case it was a young (like 30 something young) woman who graduated at the top of dentistry school in Uzbekistan and got a large grant to start a practice in the UK. Something like that. They talked/flirted for weeks/months, sent pictures, all that. The mark of course lives in the UK and she will need a place to stay while she gets her feet on the ground.
Finally right as she is leaving to come to the UK there is a bureaucratic problem and she needs ~$10k to resolve it quickly before the grant lapses, and she cannot access the grant money for expenses until she is in the UK. Also her bank froze her account because of this mess so she needs to use these alternate means to get the money to her, and she can immediately pay you back upon arrival. You get the idea.
Usually it's a combination of both. The scammer works their mark for months and develops a deep relationship with the victim ("fattening the pig") before moving to the next phase where they mention how they started making tons of money in crypto, or recently got into financial trouble and need help, or similar ("butchering the pig").
I think in his case they simply built up trust, and made it seem incredibly casual. It's hard for me to know exactly because I wasn't super privvy to what was going on, but by the time I talked to him about it he effectively trusted them over me.
It all would have been so clearly a scam to anyone with any internet sense at all it blew my mind he would have been fooled.
> type in anything, and somehow it will read your mind
I think we can go back to the way things were, which had nothing to do with mind reading. In the past, you could type in word, and google would offer 10 million results, and you could page through each of them. That was very powerful, and google does not do that today.
I was in high school 15 years ago and Google absolutely read minds to conclude Briney Spears was not a search for pickles but rather a pop artist. This was significant enough for them to come to go talk about it.
Also a good point. One time I couldn't remember what Minute (multi-app installer) was called, so I googled "the thing what downloads all the things" and lo and behold, Google found it. Their algo used to be really clever.
I don't think you know what you are asking. Do you really want 10 million pages of results, of which 99.999...% are SEO spam for Viagra et al, and on average you will need to browser ~9 million pages of results to find something that's actually "relevant"?
I'm very curious to see how this investigation plays out, especially considering the debt situation here in the US. It appears (according to tether's audit reports) that tether went from about 64 billion in treasuries mid-2023 to about 92 billion mid-2024. That's 27 billion in demand for treasuries over that one year period which (if my math and research is correct) is about 3% of all treasury demand for roughly that time period.
It does appear that tether holds short-term maturity treasuries, and I don't know how that fits into the larger demand picture.
True...but his quoted bit of the article amounts to "why didn't somebody else, on their own time and dime, Do Stuff"? There's no hint that he (or anyone associated with him) had previously cared to even look for such materials. Let alone do a superficial study of them.
The article also notes that the company had previously tried to sell the entire Gollancz collection - vastly more material than just the George Orwell part - to institutional buyers for £1m. None of them were interested. And I don't see any criticism of them for that neglect.
But now, when it's easy for the ass-sitters to score points by screaming about Evil Corporations destroying England's sacred history, there is a huge fuss.
