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Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real
- chrisjj 2y agoThis does not add up. How did the Meta CS scammer get in to the PayPal account?
- hnuser0000 2y ago>The woman [from fake tech support] said she would clear the hackers out, but he had to give her access to his phone through an app she had him download.
- mvdtnz 2y agoThat doesn't answer the question. No app on any Android or iPhone phone can reach out and take your PayPal credentials. These scam victims never own up to the most important fact - that they themselves give away the keys to the castle. There's always some hand-wavy techy explanation.
- asadotzler 2y agoEasy enough to drop a remote access app or a fake Paypal app and let the idiot user put their credential into it.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago> These scam victims never own up to the most important fact - that they themselves give away the keys to the castle. I bet they were wearing a real short skirt, too.
- mvdtnz 2y agoWhat?
- krisoft 2y agoI think pavel_lishin's comment is alluding to that what we are reading in mvdtnz's comment is victim blaming. It is a bit coded. Being overly concerned what a female victim of sexual assault was wearing is textbook case of victim blaming. I believe this is what the sentence "I bet they were wearing a real short skirt, too." is evoking to say that the sentence quoted from mvdtnz's comment is blaming the victim of the scam.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoGot it in one.
- chrisjj 2y agoSure, but nothing in story says he did do that.
- sdflhasjd 2y agoLikely by convincing him to install some remote access tool. The scam is just your regular tech support scam.
- chrisjj 2y agoThen you'd expect the story to say he did. It doesn't.
- simonw 2y agoThis one is pretty bad. This guy found a fake Facebook customer support phone number in a Google search, then asked the Meta AI chat in Facebook Messenger if the number he found was a real Facebook help line... and Meta AI said that it was. There's a screenshot of the chat in the article.
- throwaway48476 2y agoI wonder if he has a legal claim like the Air Canada passenger who the AI quoted a ficticious reimbursement policy.
- astrange 2y agoThat incident happened before ChatGPT was released and probably didn't involve AI. Anyone can write a wrong customer support script if they try.
- CoastalCoder 2y agoThis reminds me of that recent issue with a Canadian airline, where (IIRC) a court ruled that their chatbot made a wrong, but binding, commitment to a customer. I'm curious if a Canadian court would hold Meta liable for the man's losses in this case as well.
- jessriedel 2y agoYea, it’s certainly a reasonable argument if the wrong information comes from the company itself.
- hermitdev 2y agoYeah, headline is overly broad by just saying 'AI'. From just the headline itself, it'd be easy to write this off as "duh, this guy's a fool", but the AI in question here is from Meta, itself. And, not only is it from Meta, but it's the AI they've put in charge of support.
- DueDilligence 2y ago[dead]
- not_your_vase 2y agoAs a millenial, I'm more amazed that someone willingly uses a phone for non-mandatory and not-burningly-urgent phonecalls... why on earth would anyone do that is way beyond me.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwaway22032 2y agoAI has kind of fucked this, but for me (also millenial) I prefer to speak to real people because they are intelligent beings with roughly the same motivations as me and usually want to help out their fellow man. For example, I can call a local store and ask "hi, do you have this item in stock, can you check on the shelf and set it aside for me please, I will be there in 25 mins". By contrast stuff like "click and collect" order flows online are super rigid.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago> I prefer to speak to real people Thanks to AI, you will speak to who you think is a "real person"... I remember, some time ago, some scammer tried to get my wife to address an "urgent bank issue." What tipped her off, was how incredibly good their "tech support" was.
- throwaway22032 2y agoYeah, indeed. Time to go outside more :)
- tocs3 2y agoAs someone a little older I remember being able to talk to a person to get issues resolved fairly easily and reliably. The online help is great when the issue at hand is pretty cut and dry. It is nice for a non expert to be able to explain to support on the phone and just have things taken care of. Support from days gone by was not perfect (hold times, support reading off a script)but it was often a nice option.
- finack 2y agoI look forward to this never happening again and not becoming a massive problem for the next 10 years.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoNot to apologize for the irresponsible deployment of this chatbot but it should be noted that the guy got the number from a Google search (think about the results you'd get for "facebook support number"). It's been a massive problem for at least the last 10 years.
- nevermore24 2y agoIt's unfortunate that Google is unable to solve this intractable technical problem.
- _cs2017_ 2y agoSeems like this information came from Quora: https://www.quora.com/Is-1-844-457-1420-really-Facebook-support https://www.quora.com/Is-1-844-457-1420-really-Facebook-supp.... Screenshot: https://postimg.cc/gallery/2nFq5Cm https://postimg.cc/gallery/2nFq5Cm. I suspect the helpful SEO guy who posted this answer was trying to get more visibility on Quora so answered many questions automatically or semi-automatically without verifying anything. This is the beginning of the post: Ruhul Alom Social Media Marketer at Social MediaAuthor has 2.9K answers and 1M answer views6mo My dear ! Yes, 1-844-457-1420 is a valid Facebook support phone number. It is a toll-free number that is available 24/7. You can call this number to get help with a variety of Facebook issues, such as: Resetting your password Logging in to your account Recovering a hacked account [...]
- ceejayoz 2y agoThe "helpful SEO guy" likely is (or was hired by) the scammer. StackOverflow gets lots of fake posts like this promoting numbers. Around tax time there's a lot of Quicken ones.
- dylan604 2y agoSee, this is what confuses me to know end. Not once, ever, have I thought of asking an online forum for a phone number. Maybe I'm paranoid enough after all??? Also, I'm old, so I actually visit companies webpages. We've been through enough "don't fall for phishing" enough now, right? You don't trust links, phone numbers, whatever from anything that is not the official places for that information.
- ceejayoz 2y agoFacebook doesn't provide phone support, and people get desperate. People then Google things like "Facebook support phone". All you'll find is results like https://gethuman.com/phone-number/Facebook https://gethuman.com/phone-number/Facebook or https://facebook-pay.pissedconsumer.com/customer-service.html https://facebook-pay.pissedconsumer.com/customer-service.htm... or the Quora post that all have numbers that almost certainly goes to a scammer. Bonus points when it makes it into the AI models (as happened here) where they repeat it verbatim as if it were the truth.
- maxbond 2y ago> What he didn't know at the time is there is no phone number for Facebook customer support. Part of the problem here is that Facebook (though in fairness, they are not unique here) has left this traditional path of escalation void, leaving only fake numbers. They don't even have a real number to play a recorded message affirming that there is no ability to call. ETA: For instance, I notice Facebook appears to own the typo squat `facrbook.com`. I feel like it's the same principle, though I assume toll free numbers are more expensive.
- chimeracoder 2y ago> Part of the problem here is that Facebook (though in fairness, they are not unique here) has left this traditional path of escalation void, leaving only fake numbers. They don't even have a real number to play a recorded message affirming that there is no ability to call. Contrast with Experian, which has a number for consumers to call, but actually has an elaborate infinite loop in its phone tree that prevents you from actually talking to a human (this is by design). If you're one of their customers (read: a business paying for their service), there's support you can call, but for individuals who have issues with their online Experian account or credit report, you can't, even if you're a paid subscriber to their consumer-oriented credit reporting services.
- throwaway48476 2y ago"Pls fix" proposed a market for bribing meta employees to deal with customer support requests.
- hiccuphippo 2y agoSo lobbying?
- jessriedel 2y agoIt’s untenable from a marketing perspective to advertise a phone line that just talks about the services you don’t offer. One could maybe hope for a statement on a help page that says “Facebook will never ask you to call a support number”.
- croes 2y agoThis will get worse when scammers get good at data manipulation for AIs. After SEO we'll get AIO. Same with prompt injection by malware.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ItCouldBeWorse 2y agoThe tolerance of society for social experiments, entrepreneurial and ai is something we consider allmende, but we are currently building up a solid "anti" sentiment against all of it, liberalism, disruptive technology and i can imagine a "Luddite" party like MAGA shutting it all down hard and fast in the future. I can already imagine some future bureaucracy, evaluating any business idea suggested for scam and harm potential and ending most of them before they even start. And this stuff right here is, where it was born. The prison holding your future self, it was planted right here. _____________________________________________________ Everything ever worth reading was written in the Pre-Collapse internet. So why not become a software-archeologist - digging for the golden past? Exhume it, get it back running, bring it all back, perfectly fine, software, books, games, our decadent ancestors abandoned and threw away to write off as rust. You too can help, rediscovering a past that worked better, untainted by AI, not yet riddled with Add-HD-Adds, when developers still had to be competent and companies still competed. Meet hot dig-site-teams near you- now. Join Past-Querries-Quary Inc. Can we dig it, yes we can!
- 29athrowaway 2y agoThat's what you get by trusting a stochastic parrot.
- Bluestein 2y agoTwice scammed: Once by throwing away his life by having an F'book account. Then, the support scam.-
- fckgw 2y agodamn dude you got his ass good
- ffhhj 2y agoZuck must be proud.
- Bluestein 2y agoI understand the downvotes and that it might be an unpopular position, but an empire built on stealing people's attention, through addiction, and one scientifically proven again and again to cause serious mental issues on vulnerable demographics (teens), deserves to be shamed.-
- RecycledEle 2y agoThis reminds me of the time I reported a fake PayPal email saying my account had been suspended to PayPal. The woman who answered the phone for PayPal told me very emphatically that I HAD BETTER HURRY UP AND DO EVERYTHING THEY TOLD ME TO!
- CrazyStat 2y agoMy bank's phone reps have repeatedly asked for the 6-digit 2FA code that comes in a text saying WE WILL NEVER ASK FOR THIS CODE OVER THE PHONE.
- wasimanitoba 2y agoTheir answer to me is "but you called us", which is fair, but they could just rephrase the message to "WE WILL NEVER CONTACT YOU TO ASK FOR THIS CODE"
- CrazyStat 2y agoExactly!
- baobabKoodaa 2y agoWhen I worked on a customer facing chatbot at my previous employer, we specifically wrote in the prompt "our customer service is not reachable by phone", and we tested that the chatbot was able to use that information and respond appropriately. But I guess you can't expect a tiny startup like Facebook to invest money into having 1 employee part-time tweaking the prompt of the chatbot to respond appropriately to commonly recurring user questions.
- resoluteteeth 2y agoWas the chatbot you worked on using an LLM?
- baobabKoodaa 2y agoYes
- bilalq 2y agoAgain and again we see that LLMs are great for creative output and terrible for anything where correctness matters. You should only use it for the latter scenarios when generating answers is slow/hard/expensive, but verification of answers is quick/easy/cheap. Probabilistic and non-deterministic answers have their place, but these companies marketing them in products need to do a better job expressing the limitations.
- mrweasel 2y agoIt shows an amazing lack of understanding for what an LLM is, even from the people selling and implementing them. You're exactly right in that they are terrible if correctness matters, but that should be obvious. If they where 100% correct, the size of the models would be much larger, as they'd need to retain all the original training data. You can use the LLMs for language understand and interpreting questions, but the would need access to databases containing authoritative answers and not answer anything for which they don't have an answer.
- Magi604 2y agoI'm terrified of this happening to my elderly parents. It's why, even though it can be time consuming, I always have them run "tech support" issues (no matter how small) through me or my bro in law so some foreign scammer doesn't drain their accounts.
- noAnswer 2y agoAn older client got scammed by a fake Amazon-Hotline. They bought a XBox-gift-card while on his PC via Teamviewer, till he pulled the power cored. He then called me and I tried to find the official Amazon-Hotline on amazon.de. Since I was unable to find it I had to asked a search engine. The only results where third-party sites. It where from journalistic magazines I recognize (like chip.de) but still yet another gamble.
- jug 2y agoYes, AI in its current form is going to be a problem. I'm sure we haven't heard the worst yet. An AI may eventually kill a user. I believe the heart of the problem is that corporations are riding a hype wave as long as they can, and an AI chat looks like super convincing, next level stuff thanks to the simple interface that hides the fact that you cannot communicate with this one as you would with a human being. You use natural language and it responds with natural language, which makes it not only convenient, but also dangerous. There's money to gain on all this. While at the same time, hallucinations are an unsolved problem as well as making AI humble enough to realize and tell users that they just don't know. The combination of hallucinating, raising convincing arguments, being confidently incorrect, and not knowing the boundaries of your knowledge base, is a terrible one to let loose as officially sanctioned products.
- e40 2y agoMy 89 yr old data called "AMEX" and was scammed. He googled the number for AMEX and took the top result (he says, I did not witness this). I'm across the country, so that zoom session was quite tedious (it took us an hour to get the permissions straightened out for zoom to be able to share his screen).
- ADeerAppeared 2y ago> (he says, I did not witness this) He's speaking the truth. Google has, for a long while now, let scammers just buy advertisements to get their fake scam page to the top of the results. And not just major banks, various open source software have been subject to this exact attack. It's imperative for security that you install adblockers on all their devices.
- e40 2y agoYep, I had. uBlock Origin, but he uses Safari sometimes. He doesn't really know the difference between Chrome and Safari. I'll check it this weekend when I zoom with him. Thanks.
- bitnasty 2y agoThis is the real danger of AI, forget the “singularity” or any of that sci-fi crap. AI is going to destroy the average human’s already suffering reasoning ability.
- lupire 2y agoThe AI information was 99% correct. Only 1 word was wrong.
- noman-land 2y agoYeah it said "kill" instead of "save". Oops.
- jay-barronville 2y agoOne of the things about LLM-based AI that concerns me the most is realizing that the average person doesn’t understand that they hallucinate (or even what hallucination is). I was listening to a debate on a podcast a while ago and one of the debaters kept saying, “Well, according to ChatGPT, […]”—it was incredibly difficult listening to her repeatedly use ChatGPT as her source. It was obvious she genuinely believed ChatGPT was reliable, and frankly, I don’t blame her, because when LLM’s hallucinate, they do so confidently.
- jhawleypeters 2y agoIf it did that, it’s not intelligent, not “AI”. Let’s agree to stop abusing the term AI, for the sake of people like this.
- cmcconomy 2y agoif companies are held liable for LLM provided info, we will begin to see appropriate use
- nojvek 2y agoThis right here is where AI safety counts.
- davidjnr0987 2y ago[dead]
- Etherlord87 2y agoI'm not a native English speaker, so I don't know how it is in any English-speaking country, but when I ask my Polish friends about the word "epistemology", they just don't know it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology According to Google: the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion. Even though they wouldn't know the term, we all learn how to figure out what's true and what's not: we learn it when watching cartoons about lying, or when interpreting texts in school and so on. But imagine you go to a doctor, and have a small talk in which you say "I was always fascinated by medicine", to which the doc responds "What is medicine?" - you probably would run away from that doctor. And yet here we are, living in the "Information Era", and yet we're still missing the very basic techniques of figuring out the truth: if you look at the statistics of religion/atheism, no group holds over 50% of population - meaning THE MAJORITY IS WRONG - and not on a nuanced thing like the majority not being able to tell the average distance between the Earth and the Moon with 1 meter accuracy. No, on something as important and world-view defining as the existence and character of God, most of us are wrong. The percentage of flat-earthers in America is a 2-digit number... So the problem here isn't that Facebook doesn't have a support number. The problem is much deeper, and in a way, it's good that people suffer from their stupidity: it's like programmers suffering from errors - in the end of the day they end up with their logical thinking improved. Question is: how do we reshape the society to replace production errors with compilation errors, or how do we educate ourselves to minimize the frustrating error messages.