Most New Yorkers who’ve recently received unexpected texts directing them to pay $2.50 for a “parking ticket” at an official-looking website probably knew immediately that it was a scam and we thank Mayor Adams for pointing that out.
Unfortunately, scams done at this scale need only a small fraction of the targets to fall for them for the effort to be lucrative for the scammers, who might just as well be sitting in Brooklyn as halfway across the world. This is why they keep happening, and why they’ll just get more numerous until there are sharper consequences for the scammers.
Fraud has become the de facto background noise of our existence. People fret over how to stop elderly parents or grandparents from handing over their life savings to some fraudster pretending to be them, or posing as an agent of Social Security or an insurance company or a bank.
Some don’t answer their phones anymore, convinced that any unknown number will just be a scammer. With the ease of spoofing calls, even known numbers are suspect. Peer-to-peer sales on e-commerce sites like eBay, Craigslist or Facebook marketplace are fraught with the danger that a seller or buyer is trying to pull a fast one. Scammers are even posting fake obituaries of living people to profit off of the unnecessary grief of their loved ones.
The consequences are great. People don’t know what info is official or if they’re actually in trouble for something or not, like by the fake parking ticket. People are more paranoid and less trusting of each other. Systems that depend on people responding to unsolicited calls and texts — from public polling, which still largely works through cold-calling registered voters or others, to emergency alert systems that can literally be a matter of life and death — get less and less effective as time goes on.
All in all, we end up with a society that, despite all the promises of technological openness, interconnectedness and freedom, feels less connected and more predatory.
Some of this is inevitable, and certainly the intent and ability to swindle people out of their property has been around just as long as people have had property. But technology has made it possible to target people at scale, and technologies like generative AI are only going to make the problem exponentially worse. Allowing these scams to run rampant over our society is also a choice, one of having regulatory authorities move too slowly or be understood too narrowly to tackle it.
That’s why we applaud moves like a recent Federal Trade Commission rule allowing the agency to more easily go after scammers that, among other things, spoof government or business seals and credentials, and take more aggressive federal action to recover victims’ money. The numbers are staggering; just one recently unsealed FTC complaint alleged that two groups of scammers stole more than $200 million from consumers, and like this there are many such scams.
We need more. There must be real diplomatic pressure for countries that disproportionately originate these scams to take action to shut them down. Those behind them should face not just civil but real criminal penalties when caught. Social media companies and phone providers must commit to helping shut them down. Let’s reclaim the promises of a connected world.