marketdeskebay dot com: a task scam

So this was interesting! The tl;dr is that I got tapped for a Task Scam, which is a thing that I didn’t really know about until now, and I played along because I was curious, and ended up making like $80 (the bait they put on the hook) before I blocked all the scammers and bowed out. Also crypto was involved!

Initial Contact: Jennifer representative

I got a message from a stranger on WhatsApp the other day, saying “Hello, my apologies for bothering you. Can i have a quick chat with you” and I thought that was somewhat unusual, so I said sure. They revealed that they were “Jennifer representative for Recruit AI Limited.” and were recruiting for “an online remote job that will not affect your current job or lifestyle because you do it at your own convenient time” which had inter alia “Monthly salary of 5400 USD (excluding bonuses, benefits, or commissions)” which is a sum of money.

It turns out that there is a real company with the terrible name “Recruit AI Limited”, and they have a painfully generic website, but I doubt that Jennifer representative has anything to do with them. I expressed a mild interest in this opportunity, and Jennifer indicated that the “Company Representative” would contact me soon. “Please pay attention to your cellphone when convenient to do so,” she added suavely, as well as saying “I will like to check up on you later for your feedback.” No one involved here, all of whom might well have been the same person, had an entirely fluent grasp of English. (And Jennifer never did check up on me later!)

Trainer Sarah and the copypasta

A bit later I got a WhatsApp from “Sarah”. I will try not to go into infinite detail on too much of this, but some of it is fun for its level of blather. She described the company:

“The name of the company is Market Desk Research. Our job is to optimize data as users. We have a platform in affilliation [sic] with EBAY on which random products pop up on the workbench. All we need to do is to optimize the Products by completing the click tasks.”

Makes sense, eh? There is a real Market Desk Research, but presumably these people have nothing to do with them. She continued:

“The company focuses on combining artificial intelligence technology with traditional digital marketing. The work is called optimization and it is a click task that we do on the platform. When we do that, we help merchants who sell online promote their products So mainly, the job is to help product marketers increase sales by making their products more popular, without selling any products. This is called product optimization and our position is called product optimizer for consumers.”

So there ya go.

I replied tersely but generally positively to Sarah’s descriptions of stuff, and eventually she had me go to marketdeskebay dot com and create an account (using her “invitation code”, which made me suspect initially that it might be an MLM / pyramid scheme, but I think that’s just obfuscation given what happened after).

Once I’d done that, she created a “training account” using my “invitation code” for some reason, and had me run through the “task”, which is to press “Start” on a web page and then press “Submit” on a popup that appears, over and over. According to an only-slightly-amateurish graphic that she pasted to me, if I were to do this merely 80 times (160 clicks) daily for 30 days in a month, I would get $5,100, not counting commissions and bonuses and stuff. (Which is mysteriously $300 less than what Jennifer representative had quoted.)

I pointed out that that was a ridiculous amount of money for just clicking, and that a program could easily do that without a human having to move a finger. She replied (not quite to the point):

“If someone sits down to optimize these apps from the same location, it will display a single IP address, which might appear suspicious to the app developers. This could potentially lead to lower rankings due to negative reviews from downloads. This is real optimization on each product that pop up to be optimized.”

Seems like they have little copypastas prepared in advance for people like me who might not believe it all immediately. :) So she basically says that the job is doing fake clicks to defraud merchants or advertisers or somebody, and I considered wondering if that was legal, but decided not to press the point.

When I continued to wonder if the clicking activity could possibly be worth thousands of dollars a month, she pasted me a supposed screenshot from some sort of wallet app, showing that she had upwards of $25,000 in USDT. Oh boy, crypto is involved also! What fun!

The Heart of the Scam

While I was doing my clicking (two clicks each for 40 “products” per set) in the training account, I got a mysterious error. When I asked Sarah about it, she said “Oh this is so good. you have helped me reach a combo task. This will triple our profits.” She also sent a bunch of Unicode character U+1F973, “Face with Party Horn and Party Hat”, as a sign of her state of elation.

She said (casually, although it turned out to be Quite Important) that for this “combo task” we would get an extra-big commission, consisting of 6% of the value of the products involved, rather than the usual 0.5% or perhaps 1% (and in any case not exactly “triple”, but hey). The only catch was that we would have to temporarily pay the cost of the products in order to continue, and that payment would be refunded at the end of the set.

Because we were still in “training” mode, Sarah would put the required funds into the account, so we did that. (We did it with significant back-and-forth with an entirely unnecessary-seeming “customer service” chat account that she directed me to talk to rather often to do various things, for no apparent reason.) When I finished the 80 clicks, she had me go back to my own account, where something like $84 had appeared as a result of my “beginner’s luck” in getting the oh-so-desirable “combo task”.

The story is that these special tasks are given out at random by “the platform”, and you can’t skip them, so you have to put the required funds in to continue, and then at the end of the set you’ll get that back and also the considerable profit involved. This is the heart of the scam: at some point the funds required to continue, and the promised eventual payout, become quite large, and either you can’t pay and lose everything currently in the account, or you find the money somewhere and get to the end of the set but then they make up some reason you have to pay still more, or they just say there’s a problem with the account, or they vanish into the night or whatever, and they get lots of your money. Apparently people lose thousands of dollars this way regularly, which is a very bad thing.

We hadn’t gotten to that stage in the process yet, though, and they were still setting the hook. So they had me (for reasons I don’t really understand) withdraw the $84 in USDT into a crypto wallet of my own; not wanting to expose any of my existing wallets to these folks, I let her talk me through the process of creating a new one on the “lbank” app which as far as I can tell is legitimate.

(She had me constantly send her screenshots throughout everything so that she could send them back with the next button to press circled; I thought perhaps there was some identity-theft stuff involved there, but I was careful not to include any PII in the ones that I sent, and I think that was also just a red herring; probably for random people that’s actually the best way to get them to press the right button.)

So now I had $84 in USDT, yay! But, she then revealed, in order to continue to the next set of optimizations, I had to have at least $100 in my account. Uh oh! I decided it was worth $16 to me to see what was going on here, so I put in $16 USDT via CashApp (which required quite a bit of PII, but it was actually CashApp, which already knows who I am and which is real, so I was okay with that). Then I put the total $100 USDT back into the “platform”, and did another 80 clicks, and then I withdrew the resulting $100 and change (I didn’t get any more Lucky Combos, so it wasn’t very much change).

Community, Team Missions, etc.

Along with all this, Sarah had given me an invitation to a Whatsapp Group to join (I frankly didn’t even know WhatsApp had groups, not being a big WhatsApp user at all). That group contained a few (likely fictional) people, who would post things like:

“Thrilled to share that I’ve received a refund after successfully resolving my combo🤑 🤑 🤑 “

and:

“I am thrilled to announce that I have successfully received my commission from the team task I participated in. A big thank you to everyone for the collaboration and hard work!😊🤑”

and the suspiciously similar:

“I’m excited to share that I’ve successfully received my commission from the group task I participated in! It’s truly rewarding to see the collective efforts paying off. Great teamwork, everyone!”

Yeah, sure. Apparently there are “team missions” where the commissions are higher, and where perhaps even more scammy elements come into play, but I couldn’t be bothered to investigate.

I was also contacted by someone saying “Hello, good evening. How are you doing? Don’t get me wrong; we are in the same group and I wanted to ask if you have finish your training” in the same odd sort of accent that the other (“other”) people had. They were very enthusiastic about the whole thing, of course, and their vocabulary turned out to contain things like “optimizations”. When I hinted to them that I was nervous about this whole thing where you have to put your own money in, they replied lyrically that “That is when you have to solve it to complete the tasks to get all the profit”. Sure, Jan.

Bored Now

Anyway, next I was supposed to put the $100+ back into the platform again, and do more clicking, likely getting one or more Lucky Combos and having to put in more of my own money. So I didn’t do that, and that quasi-money is sitting in my lbank wallet for the next time I want to do anything with a little crypto (although have you seen how high BTC network fees are lately? zomg!).

I did go over to the Reddit and post a description to r/antiMLM about the scam, since I still wasn’t sure at that point if it wasn’t a pyramid scheme of some kind. I was advised there that it was more a Task Scam than a pyramid scheme, and I should post to r/scam instead, and the mods deleted it from r/antiMLM (I think).

So I posted my description to r/scams instead, and read all about Task Scams, which was interesting. Later on I got a note from the mods of r/scams saying that my post had been deleted because I had described playing along with the scam long enough to run off with a $80ish profit, and that is “scambaiting” which is forbidden in r/scams because it is “dangerous”. Okay, mods.

I submitted a version without mentioning the dangerous scambaiting, and at this writing that is still there, if you want to read, well, basically all this stuff again except shorter :) or make Reddit comments on it or anything.

Meanwhile I have blocked the three WhatsApp accounts that had contacted me, and left the group, and also reported the group to Reddit. I suppose I could tell the real Market Desk Research and Recruit AI Limited (lol) companies that their names are being besmirched in a scam, but would they be able to do anything about it? I suspect it wouldn’t be worth the effort of figuring out how to contact them.

What a long story!

It was kind of fun, though, in a “feeling superior to scammers and figuring out what the deal is” sort of way. Which may not be entirely karmically healthy, really. But I sat zazen, too, so it all evens out. :)

Trolling for the gullible

Two notable one-liner 419 emails that I couldn’t resist posting:

THERE’S RUMORS AGAINST YOU THAT YOU DEAD AND SOMEONE CAME BANK TO CLAIM YOUR FUND US$30M SENT TO YOUR RELATIVES AND FRIENDS,RESEND ALL YOUR INFORMATION.

and

WHILE PEOPLE GIVE FAKE RUMORS AGAINST PEOPLE THAT YOU ARE DEAD AND YOUR BROTHER, SISTER,RELATIVES FRIEND FUND CAME TO CLAIM YOUR FUND US$30M.I AM VERY SURPRISE

I wonder if they have a little Perl script or something that generates these, or if they’re manually crafted?

(And, does everyone else tend to end “I wonder” sentences with question marks, even though they are grammatically-speaking not questions?)

An interesting paper (widely weblogged, so you’ve probably already seen it) on the general subject of why these things tend to be so hysterically dumb: Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?, from Microsoft Research.

A pullquote:

By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.

Of course there is a certain distribution of obvious dumbness in these things, and some are considerably more coherent. (Got one recently that was a long and almost properly-spelled letter claiming to be from the FBI, telling me to stop communicating with those nasty 419 scammers, and instead work with them at the FBI to get the millions of dollars that is really coming to me.)

But the mean of the distribution seems pretty low lately; a sad comment on something or other…

Monday, October 10, 2011

Why do we have “foodstuffs”, but no other stuffs? What about “clothingstuffs”? Or “drinkstuffs”? “sexstuffs, drugstuffs, rockandrollstuffs!”

It’s an odd world.

The Ghost of Dibble Hollow

So driving the little boy home from orchestra, we heard something on WNYC about Christopher Columbus, and that reminded me of how in at least some movie version of Little Women or something the protagonist would exclaim “Christopher Columbus!”, and that on the old (old!) Superman teevee show Perry White would exclaim “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” (which in at least one episode caused that ghost, or someone pretending to be him, to appear), and that in some book that I read as a child there was a ghost (coincidence, that) who would exclaim “Crimenentlies!” or something by way of a satisfying exclamation that would not get them in trouble with the grownups.

I told the little boy that I suspected the book was “The Ghost of Dibble Hollow”, and I wondered if that book was on the web. It is, in fact it is more or less all over the place, including many copies of the same cover that my edition had.

And for that matter there is even one person mentioning it for exactly the same reason I am here, albeit with the exclamation spelt slightly differently.

That was a good book. I haven’t read any kid books recently; I really should. Doesn’t take long, and is good for the soul. Maybe I’ll reread A Wrinkle in Time or somefing.

The kind of libertarian I still am

So reading Griftopia has, at least for the moment, substantially changed the sort of libertarian I am. The change centers around an observation something like “small government would be great, if we had only small crimes”.

The thoroughgoing libertarian will probably respond to this by saying that the only reason we have big crimes now is precisely that we have big government, but that does not seem very likely to me. Certainly the massive fraud perpetrated by Goldman-Sachs and friends in recent years did exploit the government in lots of ways, but it also exploited investors big and small, and various other parts of the private sector. I see no reason to think that if the government was small, there would not be other things (large popular investment firms, pension plans, leading banks) that would be large, and these (and large numbers of private persons) could easily be defrauded of enough money that the fraudsters would be rich enough to buy off the government and prevent their own prosecution.

So, sadly, I think we need a relatively large and expensive government, if only to keep an eye on the inevitable large and wealthy potential criminal organizations. (Not to mention defending the borders.) Of course it’s still a hard fight to keep it from getting corrupted, too! But at least it seems like there’s a fighting chance.

Tweeting Twits

My Second Life self has a Twitter account, which started out being all Second Life type twitterings, but recently has started to be about more and more political stuff, as I observe with benign interest the Occupy Wall Street folks and etc, and get into the occasional squabble with some right-wing type, one or two of which I follow (“follow”) out of general interest.

Had a bit of a frank exchange of views with one Joe Brooks, who seems to be sort of a halfway sensible conservative, at least sometimes. He is quite anti-Occupy, and more pro-TeaParty, whereas I am rather the opposite. He thinks Occupy Wall Street and so on were started by and are controlled by Communists and Labor Unions and things, whereas I think the Tea Party was started by and is controlled by the Koch Brothers, their (shudder) Americans for Prosperity, and the Republican machine in general.

My impression of the Tea Party is that they took some “stop giving money to rich people!” sentiment around the time of the TARP bailouts, added some “Lower my taxes!” to obtain a general “The Government should tax and spend less!” which could then easily be bent into “Less government regulation!”, which is of course exactly what the rich people want, so that they can continue to become richer, some of them by more or less blatantly illegal and/or immoral means. Quite an ironic circularity there.

I can well imagine someone co-opting the Occupy Wall Street folks’s “stop financial industry fraud!” into “more regulation of Wall Street” and then “more regulation of business” and then “more government power”, which tends to become “more power to the already powerful!”, which is again what various of the bad guys want.

So one has to be careful. But in the case of Occupy, I don’t think that’s happened (yet?).

Here is a very excellent open letter and warning from a former tea party movement adherent to the Occupy Wall Street movement all about co-optation and stuff. Everyone should read it.

The kind of Obama fan I (still) am(n’t)

So I am really not hardly at all happy with Our President.

I mean, WTF.

Got rid of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell; that’s good. But…

He’s surrounded by the same Goldman-Sachs crowd that destroyed the economy for their own personal gain, and they are as far as I can tell now working to make sure that they and their cronies still in the private sector can do it again next time they want another few billion dollars in the kitty.

He’s not turned off the absurd waste of Federal money on the stupid and immoral practice of prosecuting and persecuting medical marijuana providers who are doing things that are completely legal under their state laws. He promised he would do this, and he very simply isn’t.

He’s kept us in stupid wars, expanded those wars, and gotten us into new ones. He pretty much promised that he would do this, too, but I think most of us assumed he was just saying that to get votes. That’ll teach us to hope that someone is being a hypocrite!

(In, ironically enough, his Peace Prize speech, he basically announces that America will wage war not just to defend itself and its allies, but to make sure that every nation in the world respects “the inherent rights and dignity of every individual”. I mean, excuse me? Not with my children, you don’t!)

He has claimed the amazing ability to execute American citizens without trial, on the unilateral say-so of the President. I mean, what the F’ing F? This is completely hideous, unconstitutional, unAmerican, nasty, dangerous, and wrong. We were horrified when Dubya merely claimed the ability to imprison (“detain”) citizens without due process. How can we be calm when Obama claims the ability to kill us?

Anyone who is thinking, well, this was a special case, and it was Obama after all, please consider:

2014, President Romney dies from a bad batch of Botox, and Vice-President Bachmann gets the top spot. Shortly afterward she has a vivid dream in which God tells her that America is at war with atheism.

Two weeks later simultaneous drone strokes take out the national headquarters of American Atheists and the Ethical Culture Society, as well as Richard Dawkins, in the U.S. on a speaking tour. Casualties are in the hundreds.

The Bachmann administration claims that it was a legal national security action, and cites the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki as precedent.

Couldn’t happen? Well, if the Obama administration’s assassination of al-Awlaki was legal, you will have to explain to me why the hell not.

This is why we have warrants, judges, checks and balances, separation of powers.

Phht.

So the President seems to be a not particularly Progressive statist with ambitions of American expansionism. The potential Republican nominees are all either insane, lying hypocrites, or both. I am not overjoyed!

But this, too, shall pass.

In other news

Here is a Stanford (related) AI class that anyone in the world can take and apparently some hundreds of thousands of people intend to. I understand their servers are needing some upgrading. :)

And today’s candidate for Shortest 419 Letter, presented in its entirely:

Be my partner in this huge $17.3M deal.

Enticing, eh?

The evils of convenience

I am pretty fond of this here WordPress theme. On the other hand I am not fond of the right-justification (nearly always a bad idea on computers except in the most thoroughly-typeset documents), nor of the egregious grey lines around all my images. Guess that is the price I pay for not having to hand-code and SCP-upload all these here words!

Hm.