How stupid ARE people?!?!

[DrQ]

Americans who cashed in on 'free money' hack amid major Chase glitch get rude shock​

JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in America, has started suing individuals who took advantage of a momentary flaw in its system that allowed them to illegally withdraw money from ATMs using counterfeit checks.​

...​

Though JPMorgan has so far filed three lawsuits in federal court so far, check fraud can be prosecuted at the state level as well.​

​

The maximum punishment for large thefts of money from financial institutions is a fine of $1 million and 30 years of imprisonment.​

Add to that; You will never have another bank account again!

Americans who used Chase 'free money' hack are getting a rude shock

The consequences for those who took advantage of the 'Chase money glitch' are starting to manifest. JPMorgan Chase has filed three lawsuits alleging losses of up to $290,000 from the fraud scheme.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[simpsontruckdriver]

Here is a no-paywall version of the story.

TS

 

[easyrider]

Remember the COVID funding. About $280 billion went to fraudsters and the Fed is going after them.

Bill

 

[Snazzylass]

haha..this headline warms the cockles of heart. I was young and dumb once, but maybe not this dumb!

Should pretty much be open and *bleep* cases with lots of evidence including the photo of the perps since all ATMs have cameras.

 

[DrQ]

haha..this headline warms the cockles of heart. I was young and dumb once, but maybe not this dumb!

Should pretty much be open and *bleep* cases with lots of evidence including the photo of the perps since all ATMs have cameras.

They have cameras AND they retain the forged documents. They could be charged under a federal beef.

 

[AnnaS]

Did people really think they would get away with this?

 

[callwill]

FAFO!

 

[joestein]

Wizards First Rule (From the NYT Bestselling book of the same name and the TV Series 'Legend of the Seeker'). One of my favorite quotes.

Wizard's First Rule: people are stupid.

"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."

So true... think of all the garbage that people believe because they read it on internet 'echo chambers' and pushed towards it by algorithms.

 

[DrQ]

Wizards First Rule (From the NYT Bestselling book of the same name and the TV Series 'Legend of the Seeker'). One of my favorite quotes.

Wizard's First Rule: people are stupid.

"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."

So true... think of all the garbage that people believe because they read it on internet 'echo chambers' and pushed towards it by algorithms.

Elon Musk Fans Are Losing So Much Money to Crypto Scams

Read the complaints filed with the FTC about scams that use Elon Musk's face.

gizmodo.com

 

[jp10558]

I remember back when I was in college HSBC was (to my mind) really nice to people - you could overdraw your checking and as long as you paid it back before the monthly statement generation there was no fee and no complaining. I think the credit card worked similarly in that they just didn't "get around" to calculating interest till the second month after the charge.

Anyway, I still recall one of my stupid college friends, apparently ahead of the curve here, tried a fake check deposit at an ATM. Well, he only did it for IDK $500, and he was so pissed off they called him in to the bank and gave him hell and insisted he pay them back and closed the account. I was like - all they asked you to do was pay them back and stop being a customer? You got off so lightly. He didn't see it that way. He ranted about how crappy they were - and I was like, you could be in jail FFS. I've lost touch, but I hope this time around he was smarter.

 

[jp10558]

I'm astonished anyone still takes NFTs and Crypto seriously - the last like 6 years all the news is "crypto and NFT scams"... I guess these are people who don't read the news.

 

[WaikikiFirst]

think of all the garbage that people believe because they read it on internet 'echo chambers' and pushed towards it by algorithms

Danger. Danger. Will Robinson. THis is from Google's Q3 conf call last PM:
"early testing results from AI Overviews suggest Gen-AI Search features are leading to higher user satisfaction and increased usage, with the highest engagement from younger users aged 18 to 24 when they use search with AI overviews."
So, here's the deal, and don't just go back to bed and cover your face with the pillow, People aged 18 - 24 believe almost everything they read on the www, and they believe it MUCH MORE SO if it comes from an AI model ... which isn't so smart to begin with, but also has been "trained" in certain subjective ways. Fun. Fun. Fun.

obtw, "Google has reduced the cost of AI queries by 90%+ in the last 18 months" so all-AI-all-the-time-me

 

[jp10558]

Danger. Danger. Will Robinson. THis is from Google's Q3 conf call last PM:
"early testing results from AI Overviews suggest Gen-AI Search features are leading to higher user satisfaction and increased usage, with the highest engagement from younger users aged 18 to 24 when they use search with AI overviews."
So, here's the deal, and don't just go back to bed and cover your face with the pillow, People aged 18 - 24 believe almost everything they read on the www, and they believe it MUCH MORE SO if it comes from an AI model ... which isn't so smart to begin with, but also has been "trained" in certain subjective ways. Fun. Fun. Fun.

obtw, "Google has reduced the cost of AI queries by 90%+ in the last 18 months" so all-AI-all-the-time-me

I mean, ideally people would learn in school to not believe everything you read, and I was taught that pre Internet. That said, there also seems to be a lot of anecdotes that people just overly trust "computers". Probably because they learned that they're almost infallible for basic math stuff that humans find hard to do. Then they extrapolate that incorrectly to "all problems". It's also the case that for years a google search would something like 90% of the time get you to a page with "the right answer" for lots of general knowledge cases, and reddit and youtube increased that quite a bit for otherwise "hard to find forums" or "hard to show in text tasks".

So now they're extrapolating one generally OK but sometimes wrong thing with a completely different technology that is at best about 50/50% right. What I think I want from AI search is more a deeper scan of the results to try and derank the SEO garbage and process NLP much better than traditional "weird search language". But the AI summaries just often lead you enough astray that I'm then going on to search again anyway.

People should take AI with a huge grain of salt, but of course it's hyped to hell and gone. It is really slowly getting incrementally better at this point, and if the correctness doesn't have a huge jump up via some new tech I kind of see it basically stalling out at converting natural language into a rough draft of a search or of code or the like.

Cassandra complex away - people have been stumbling along forever with no real idea how any of the tools they use work - it's why we have stories like "The Time Machine" or various OG Star Trek eps, where people don't know how the "machine god" works anymore, and when it starts to malfunction they have no idea what to do. It means there's going to be people who bother to learn decent rules of thumb to have a better life, those who become experts and can repair the things, and those who move the tech ahead. But the masses will struggle to find information because they still don't really know how to do so.

 

[T_R_Oglodyte]

“Most people would rather die than think, and many of them do!” - Bertrand Russell

This always has been and ever shall be. There is nothing new under the sun.

 

[tombanjo]

The stupidity is really significant, it is their account, and their check. Nobody else involved to throw blame on. Did they think in 24 hours for the check to bounce that magically the money would appear ? As soon as the check bounces, the account will be in the red. I suppose you could write an even bigger check to cover the negative balance and take out residual.

Check kiting has probably be around since about 5 minutes after the check was invented, but the pros would use out of state banks and keep the clearing time weeks long. In the digital age, things clear overnight

 

[joestein]

Danger. Danger. Will Robinson. THis is from Google's Q3 conf call last PM:
"early testing results from AI Overviews suggest Gen-AI Search features are leading to higher user satisfaction and increased usage, with the highest engagement from younger users aged 18 to 24 when they use search with AI overviews."
So, here's the deal, and don't just go back to bed and cover your face with the pillow, People aged 18 - 24 believe almost everything they read on the www, and they believe it MUCH MORE SO if it comes from an AI model ... which isn't so smart to begin with, but also has been "trained" in certain subjective ways. Fun. Fun. Fun.

obtw, "Google has reduced the cost of AI queries by 90%+ in the last 18 months" so all-AI-all-the-time-me

I find that a lot of the AI answers I get from google search are outright wrong or it doesn't seem to be able to properly understand the question/search.

 

[jp10558]

I find that a lot of the AI answers I get from google search are outright wrong or it doesn't seem to be able to properly understand the question/search.

One thing I also find confusing in these discussions is of course the AI tech varies a lot. All my comments should be understood in the context of Kagi Ultimate - so mostly I'm actually referring to using their Assistant, which tends to back end to Claude 3.5 or GPT 4o, with added integration with Kagi's own search for real time info. A very few times I'm talking about the built in AI reply to an actual search in their search interface.

That said, I do not tend to see it as bad as you report - or at least it certainly seems to understand my questions quite well, and can be right on a lot of general sort of questions but is probably 50/50 on technical questions. That said, in many cases it's at least as good as chatting one of my co-workers for off the top of their head info or guesses. So ... is that a "win"? IDK.

 

[RX8]

To answer your question:

“Half the people you know are below average” - Steven Wright

 

[davidvel]

Lots of banks have floated checks with available balances as soon as deposited to an ATM. This was not a hack or glitch, just simple check fraud. I doubt these people ever thought that they would get the money free. They are just common criminals fanned by the digital mobs.

 

[TolmiePeak]

The entire timeshare industry is propped up by stupid people. Tuggers freely take advantage by buying up their contracts on the resale market for pennies on the dollar.

 

[billymach4]

No Comment on the relative stupidity of the human race.

 

[jp10558]

The entire timeshare industry is propped up by stupid people. Tuggers freely take advantage by buying up their contracts on the resale market for pennies on the dollar.

I don't see that as the taking advantage part. We "take advantage" by getting lower MFs because there's people paying without using, or renting out. We "take advantage" by getting better bookings because of those people not using their TS well or at all. We "take advantage" via the RCI deals or II deals or great exchanges because people don't use the TS but pay the MFs.

Buying a TS off of someone at the going market rate resale however IMO IS NOT taking advantage at all. Not only that - there's really almost never any flim flamery or pressure on the TUG side to make anyone sell you a TS "at pennies on the dollar". Instead, usually it's very appreciated by the seller to adjust their ownership to their current life situation OR it's through a broker and is just business.

 

[TolmiePeak]

I don't see that as the taking advantage part. We "take advantage" by getting lower MFs because there's people paying without using, or renting out. We "take advantage" by getting better bookings because of those people not using their TS well or at all. We "take advantage" via the RCI deals or II deals or great exchanges because people don't use the TS but pay the MFs.

Buying a TS off of someone at the going market rate resale however IMO IS NOT taking advantage at all. Not only that - there's really almost never any flim flamery or pressure on the TUG side to make anyone sell you a TS "at pennies on the dollar". Instead, usually it's very appreciated by the seller to adjust their ownership to their current life situation OR it's through a broker and is just business.

If the industry had to rely on Tuggers for the initial purchase most of the those resorts would never have been built.

 

[T_R_Oglodyte]

The entire timeshare industry is propped up by stupid people. Tuggers freely take advantage by buying up their contracts on the resale market for pennies on the dollar.

I don't see that as the taking advantage part. We "take advantage" by getting lower MFs because there's people paying without using, or renting out. We "take advantage" by getting better bookings because of those people not using their TS well or at all. We "take advantage" via the RCI deals or II deals or great exchanges because people don't use the TS but pay the MFs.

Buying a TS off of someone at the going market rate resale however IMO IS NOT taking advantage at all. Not only that - there's really almost never any flim flamery or pressure on the TUG side to make anyone sell you a TS "at pennies on the dollar". Instead, usually it's very appreciated by the seller to adjust their ownership to their current life situation OR it's through a broker and is just business.

Not at all taking advantage of them. Most people who sell their timeshares at resale prices are happy to be rid of them. If it weren't for people like TUGgers, those people would still be stuck with something they don't want. It's more accurate to say that those people were taken advantage of in their initial purchase.

They also get taken advantage of again when they use an upfront listing fee site to try to resell their timeshare. Or when they use an exit company.,

 

[WaikikiFirst]

To answer your question:

“Half the people you know are below average” - Steven Wright

depends on who you know & whether they are Normally Distributed & whether you compare to themselves as a group or to the entire population & the attribute being discussed. Generally speaking, to ignore all that, Median might be a better metric, but with Median, that is technically true only half the time

My apologies to S Wright. He is an oldie but a goodie. Love the seashells joke.