Attention! Financial scam targeting Less Wrong users

I would probably use better spelling in the messages. It reduces credibility of the scammer.

I agree. It is bad to do what scams say, even if you think that you can trick the scammer. Plus, they will put you on a "vulnerable" list and you will get more scams.

I was messaged by and responded to both. I suspect they're different people.

Update: they are different people, but the first one was working for the second one.

I also am not sure they're scams in the traditional sense.

If there is nothing fishy, why do they contact people via private messages instead of posting in the forum?

Typically the reason for contacting people individually, when the public announcement would be the natural way, is to prevent the contacted people from seeing each other's reactions.

Let's not break our arms patting ourselves on the back, at least not until the data's in. At the moment we could be more, less, or equally susceptible to scamming than our demographics generally are.

It'd be interesting to see which, though.

Yes, scammers do the homework needed for this kind of project. I know someone who lost around $8,000 due to a scheme like this, through a letter which seemed completely familiar with my friend's interests. However, when I saw the letter (after the money was already lost), I informed him that it should have been evident from the beginning that it was a scam.

It does mean that not-scams should find ways to signal that they aren't scams, and the fact that something does not signal not-scam is itself strong evidence of scam.

"We have a pretty stupid banking system if you can..."

Yes, we do.

It's a complicated system that developed slowly, piece by piece, influenced by legislation, commercial pressures, other (contradictory) commercial pressures, and customers' needs. The need for backwards compatibility makes it impossible to rip up the old system and start again, and no one person is in charge of designing it. Naturally it's messed up and has inconsistencies.

---Meta comment: At first I was writing this with the intention of saying, basically: "Duh! isn't that obvious?". Now I realize that that's really unkind and unfair.

You've encountered something that you hadn't known before, and you "noticed you were surprised". That's a good thing, and it's good that you expressed it so that other people can realize the same thing.

I am not an American, and the American ways of transferring money are mysterious to me. When I want to send money from point A to point B, I log into a web page, fill in the required data, confirm the data, and in a day or two the money is there. If I understand it correctly, the American way to do this is to personally go to the bank, take a paper form, write the data on the paper, deliver the paper to the target, and the target must take the paper to their bank.

It was a huge surprise to learn this, because I automatically assumed that the American ways of dealing with money must be more advanced and more convenient, just because of having more experience with internet and capitalism in general. But now I guess that the American system is simply a victim of its own inertia: these methods were invented and became a norm before the internet, and now people are resistent to the change, because no one wants to experiment with the new methods when their own money is involved.

Still, I agree that the second transaction should be cancellable after the first transaction was cancelled. Not sure what is the trick here. Maybe the scammer wants the part of their money returned using a different method (one that does not allow cancelling, or has shorter deadlines). Maybe the plan is that most people will not notice the cancelling of the first transaction, or be busy enough that they miss the deadline for cancelling the second one. Maybe there is some psychological trick preventing the victim from cancelling. Really, I don't know (and not being familiar with the American system, even if I read an explanation, there is a chance I would misunderstand it).

It is promoted now, so it will stay on the main page for a longer time. (I don't know how long the scammers will stay here.)

I reposted it in the facebook group.

None that I'm aware of.

I suspect that no one actually fell for the scam... or if they did, they are too ashamed to admit it... so there is nothing specific to investigate.

I think it can be taken for granted that people on this site have an elevated sense of skepticism

They also have an elevated sense of contrarianism. I suspect it's not enough to make them literally send money to a scammer, but enough to argue publicly about giving the benefit of doubt.

My long comment was written for the audience. To make people potentially swayed by clever arguments remember the context -- that this is a website where we publicly talk about donating to MIRI, publicly talk about money in general, already have a lot of quality financial advice, and no one is preventing our mysterious benefactor from posting an article.

Rationality isn't just about being skeptical, though, and there is something to be said for giving people the benefit of the doubt and engaging with them if they are willing to do so in an open manner. There are obviously limits to the extend to which you want to do so, but so far this thread has been an interesting read so I wouldn't worry to much about us wasting our time.

"I think it can be taken for granted that people on this site have an elevated sense of skepticism"

I disagree. Being a participant on this site implies that one has accepted some or all of the central premises of the community: that we can significantly improve our lives by thinking differently, that we should be willing to think and behave in ways that are very counter-intuitive to the average person, and that we can learn to do all of this by reading and talking on a website.

A great many 'normal' people would dismiss Less Wrong as a silly venture. Likewise, they'd be willing to dismiss something that looks like a scam immediately, without any thought at all. Those of us who pride ourselves on being clever, being willing to embrace an idea that other people would reject, and want to exploit loopholes and inefficiencies that other people have missed? I suspect we're less skeptical than the average person.

Being on the site only signals that we want to be rational, and like to think that we are. It doesn't necessarily mean that we're good at it.

Some companies do donation-matching, so if an employee donates $X to a charity then the company will also donate $X. The scammer is pretending "I don't work for such a company, but I'd like to double my donation, so I'd like to send money to you and you donate it and then your company also donates".

No, if we're rationalist, we should figure out if the cost of doing the tests is worth the expected gain from getting the test results. If we're fairly certain that it's a scam already (so test results won't change the situation much) and if the tests are expensive, it might be a better idea not to test.

Surely, as rationalists, we should

So awkward it hurts that this is even a thing.

Surely, as rationalists, we should do a controlled test to determine if these are scams?

Why? Why do you believe that spending resources to run a controlled test is worth the effort?

Hi, welcome back!