Seth's Blog : Scams at scale

Scams at scale

The first things humans invented, before fire, the wheel or baked brie, was trust.

Trusting the others in the village. Trusting that you could get a good night’s sleep. Trusting that what you heard was true.

We’ve expanded the village from twenty people to billions. Walter Cronkite was effective because millions of people trusted him, and he earned that trust. And as the media became more powerful and fragmented, that contract begin to erode.

We’ve created methods of exchange and interaction that were unimaginable just a generation ago.

And, at the same time that we’ve expanded our circles of trust, we’ve pushed to make many of them digital.

Interactions by email and zoom. Documents that are written and certified by unseen intermediaries. Stories and images that feel real and local, but might be neither one.

This only works because we’ve applied our same 20-person trust instincts to each of these interactions, billions of times, around the world.

Aided by AI, the thieves and scammers are now relentlessly working to hack this basic human instinct. They’re stealing more than money.

That email might not be from the person you think it’s from. And that online recruiter, or the text you just got–it might not be worthy of the benefit of the doubt. Even phone calls from people who aren’t who they say they are–AI bots with familiar voices and plenty of specific knowledge.

Like all things amplified by computer chips and the network, this one is going to accelerate–very quickly.

People are going to be deceived, victimized and ripped off. And the sort of intimacy that marketers and institutions counted on will erode fairly quickly.

Halloween is here, and it’s not just little kids who are wearing costumes. If someone in a clown mask walks into a bank, the tellers know something’s up… trust is the first thing to go.

The short-term response is to change our bias about digital interactions–when in doubt, be more human. When in doubt, take your time. When in doubt, ask someone else to double check.

In the long run, I think we’re going to see our circles of trust shrinking. That’s sad, it’s going to fracture networks we’ve been counting on for a long time and it’s going to be confusing since the defaults will be shifting.

Marketers will discover the costs of this, but it’s individuals that will have to rebuild what they think of as community.

Watch out for tricks. All year round.