Dose of Paranoia - 2025-04-07
It gets worse before it gets worse...
Important Stuff
I know the Dose is late this week, but Saturday, Americans all over the nation were out on the streets for coordinated HANDS OFF! protests to tell Donald Trump and Elon Musk that they don’t own America. I was out on the streets of Weehawken with my over 300 of my neighbors - in spite of a cold rainy afternoon. It was inspiring to be with fellow Americans who are also fed up with the systematic destruction of what makes America truly great by greedy, corrupt, criminals. On with the show…
Infosec/Scam Stuff
Scam of the week - Trump’s tariffs - I really *hope* that the dirtbags around Trump are orchestrating and playing the stock market bloodbath and fully expect the Felon in Chief to back down as usual - at least this would indicate that there is a plan (albeit an evil, illegal one) behind all of this. If not, we are in even deeper trouble than we think. At least we will not be screwed over by those elitist, globalist penguins of the Heard and McDonald islands any more! I’m sorry, but the tariff math just doesn’t work if you take more than a second to look at it.
Junior Achievement, 2025 Style - Think kids these days are lazy, good for nothings not interested in making a buck? OK, Boomer, I say to you… here’s an interesting and somewhat horrifying look at how teens are setting up their own (fraudulent) businesses on Discord selling counterfeit goods, Uber Eats bought with stolen credit cards, and suspiciously low priced gaming PCs. I think we are going to see more of this kind of thing as the economy craps out and as kids see more and more evidence that scams and frauds are now “business as usual” in America. Making America Great Again!
Scams Made in China - Does it seem to you that the scamiverse has exploded in the US in the past few years? You’re right - and according to a research paper analyzing cryptocurrency scam payments, the move from small timers stealing a few bucks to big organized crime syndicates running scam factories full of slaves in Southeast Asia raking in hundreds of thousands from each victim was the direct result of China’s regaining control over Hong Kong and Macao. This video tells that story more succinctly than the 50+ page paper - worth 20 minutes of your time.
SMS scams version 2 - Scammers have figured out a new way to use SMS messages to scam bank customers. Apparently, messing with the header of SMS messages can cause them to look like the emergency alert messages sent by government and law enforcement to alert us of lost kids, found tornados and other such things. These messages take over the screen of the phone and can be quite alarming. So far this seems to be something happening outside the US, but you can be sure that scammers are taking note.
Cops are not ready for AI scams - A report from the UK Turing Institute notes that British police fighting scams and frauds are woefully outgunned by the AI tools now available to scammers and fraudsters. I can’t imagine that US law enforcement is doing much better, especially with a government both in chaos and under the control of a fraudster/scammer.
And with friends like this… - Yeah, didn’t see that one coming…
Fun Stuff
These days I am spending a lot of time reading history to escape from the agita caused by what’s going on in the present… one place to find some really wild and interesting stories that you probably did not hear about in History class is Weird Historian. This guy covers all sorts of interesting tales about UFOs, sword swallowers, the paranormal, and just plain weird stuff from our past.
Book of the week is Simon Schama’s Citizens - A Chronicle of the French Revolution for absolutely no reason. And those guillotine parts I have ordered are just for experimentation purposes…