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I’ve recently had to deal with my father cognitive decline & falling for scams left & right using Meta’s apps. This has been so hard on our family. I did a sear

I’ve recently had to deal with my father cognitive decline & falling for scams left & right using Meta’s apps. This has been so hard on our family. I did a search the other day on marketplace and 100% of all sellers were scams, 20-30 of them. Meta is a cancer on our society, I’m shutting down all my accounts. Back when TV/Radio/News paper were how you consumed news, you couldn’t get scams this bad at this scale. Our parents dealt with their parents so much easier as they cognitively declined. We need legal protections for elders and youth online more than ever. Companies need to be liable for their ads and scam accounts. Then you’d see a better internet.

olelele 10mo ago
The old, mentally disabled guy in New Jersey falling over and dying trying to get to a date with a meta bot really broke something in me.
- motbus3 10mo ago
  That was horrible. This also makes me think that all those researches on "unhappiness Vs spending"
cedws 10mo ago
My grandmother has been through the same thing. She was scammed out of all of her savings by accounts impersonating a particular celebrity. Thankfully the bank returned all of the money, but the perpetrators will never be caught, they operate out of Nigeria (one of them attached their phone to her Google account.) Unfortunately these fake celebrity accounts are swarming her like locusts again. We tried to educate her about not using her real name online, not giving out information or adding unknown people as friends, but there's a very sad possibility that she doesn't fully understand what she's doing. It was emotionally difficult going through her laptop to gather evidence for the bank. They know exactly how to romance and pull on heart strings, particularly with elderly people. Meta's platforms are a hive of scammers and they should be held accountable.
- Drunkfoowl 10mo ago
  My friend is a bank manager. He says everyday 2-3 elderly people come in confused about a scam. This is a silent crisis impacting almost eveyone. My grandma personally had her gold stolen by a scammer. She is now in a home for dimensia.
  - stogot 10mo ago
    It really is a silent crisis. I warn my family constantly about ones targeting elderly, but even people my age fall for others
    - ryandrake 10mo ago
      Children who are not cognitively and emotionally ready for the Internet shouldn't have access to it. Similarly, any elderly folks who are not cognitively able to deal with social media (or the Internet in general) should be cut off from it, too. You can (and should) have That Talk with your parents about scams on the internet, but if they're still falling for them and not getting the message, maybe it's time to gently steer them off the Internet. We take the car keys away from people who can't handle driving anymore.
  - dagmx 10mo ago
    I don’t think it’s a silent crisis per se, but just one people ignore. There’s tons of media about it, tons of people are aware of elder fraud etc but people don’t want to think about the vulnerable of society. There’s been jokes about it and media about it going back decades. People are aware but solving it requires an uncomfortable level of change in society, training and regulations. As an aside, both Thelma and The Beekeeper are recent movies about elders being scammed and revenge being taken. Both very different but enjoyable.
    - ndj87e 10mo ago
      [flagged]
qwertox 10mo ago
One must also check what YouTube recommends their elderly parents, because it is easy for them to slide into getting recommended harmful content, mostly things like psychological, religious or alternative-medicine topics. Note that not all of them are harmful, but most of them are published by very odd channels.
- zelphirkalt 10mo ago
  YouTube should be held liable for what it is pushing. It literally can kill and seriously harm people.
  - xethos 10mo ago
    The president of the United States of America pushed a horse de-wormer as a preventative during a world-wide pandemic Good luck getting him, his administration, or his Department of Justice, to hold YouTube to a higher standard.
    - cynicalcoder 10mo ago
      That’s dishonest. Ivermectin is widely prescribed to people too. That’s like calling Ibuprofen a horse anti-inflammatory drug. That doesn’t mean it was an effective covid treatment though. The information from the third world that made it appear like it was seems to have been that it was treating preexisting parasites in covid patients, eliminating a comorbidity and thereby improving covid survival rates. But undiagnosed parasites are rare in the US, so that wouldn’t have worked here.
    - tclancy 10mo ago
      Well, let’s post a deepfake about some left strawman and watch him find the time pronto.
    - alex1138 10mo ago
      Ivermectin has scientific evidence behind it. But I can't say that without accruing downvotes, I suppose
immibis 10mo ago
If you really want to hurt Meta, don't delete your accounts - sell these real, aged accounts to spammers for a few bucks.
- vintermann 10mo ago
  That may hurt Meta, but not nearly as much as it hurts the elderly people who the spammers will defraud.
  - immibis 10mo ago
    Then instead use them to scrape your friends' timelines and republish as RSS.
    - vintermann 10mo ago
      heh, have you tried scraping Facebook? They really, really don't want to make it easy to hide ads or otherwise filter your feed in "unapproved" ways.
- estearum 10mo ago
  Why would that hurt Meta? The entire point here is that they don't care and if anything benefit from such activity.
yieldcrv 10mo ago
I’m in a group chat and one member is a Cambodian slave that periodically tries to start romance scams and we’re like “you’re free now, go home” (because of the economic sanctions and raid) we recently had a vote on whether she should be booted from the chat, we voted no for the comedic value so anyway sorry you’re going through that, its wild out there
michelb 10mo ago
Unfortunately I have a similar experience. If someone's working at Meta right now, and has been in the past 10 years, they're willingly and actively contributing to making society worse. Some open-source tech is not going to undo any of this, nor any of the past transgressions. I get the pay is probably great, but have some decency.
- stodor89 10mo ago
  But hey, at least the money is good..
- echelon 10mo ago
  I suggested a hiring ban on anyone who ever worked at Meta some years back. It was not met with open arms. Going to try again here... I think it's a valid suggestion that might result in people rethinking working for Meta if it was taken seriously. Working for Meta is ethically questionable. The company does unspeakable damage to our country. It harms our kids, our elders, our political stability. Working for it, and a number of similar companies, is contributing to the breakdown of the fabric of our society. Why not build a list of Meta employees and tell them they're not eligible for being hired unless they show some kind of remorse or restitution? It could be an aggregation of LinkedIn profiles and would call attention to the quandary of hiring someone with questionable ethics to work at your organization. It might go viral on the audacity of the idea alone. That might cause some panic and some pause amongst prospective Meta hires and interns. They might rethink their career choices.
  - rightbyte 10mo ago
    Generally it is a bad idea to punnish defectors.
  - devsda 10mo ago
    What's the end goal of that? Do you think Meta will run out of good engineers to hire ? With that attitude, how long does it take to justify going after the next Meta?
    - 10mo ago
carefulfungi 10mo ago
So many of us have been there - it is brutal. These platforms are ripping us apart from each other, providing criminals easy access to the most vulnerable, and concentrating wealth to an unimaginable degree.
- amelius 10mo ago
  But hey, it's a free market /s Maybe EU's regulation of digital markets isn't such a bad idea after all.
hammock 10mo ago
What did you search for on marketplace to find the scams?
wahnfrieden 10mo ago
One third of all scams in the US are operated on Meta platforms. They have a policy that if a scammer’s ad spend makes up more than 0.15% of Meta revenue, moderators must protect the scammer instead of blocking it. Meta is working hard to scam your dad for ad spend. It’s hugely profitable for them and they are helping to grow it per internal policy. They are only interested in fostering big-time scammers.
- filoleg 10mo ago
  > One third of all scams in the US are operated on Meta platforms. And 100% of all internet scam traffic in the US goes through either US ISPs or US cell carriers. Should those entities be held liable instead? Or maybe, Meta instead should scan users' private messages on their platforms and report everything that might seem problematic (whatever the current US administration in power considers as problematic) to the relevant authorities? My personal take: there should be more effort in going after the actual scammers, as opposed to going after the "data pipes" (of various abstraction levels) like Meta/ISPs/cell carriers/etc.
  - slumberlust 10mo ago
    If the ISP was taking ad money they know were scams...yes they should be liable. International law and extradition has already proven to be too slow and small scale to be effective.
  - gherkinnn 10mo ago
    Meta is not a pipe. Meta curates the feed to maximise their income to the detriment of everyone else.
    - alex1138 10mo ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
  - jddj 10mo ago
specialist 10mo ago
> We need legal protections for elders and youth Offline too. Predation on the elderly is an industry. Our own attempts to do something about (successful) scammers were meant with utter indifference by my parent's state's (Arizona) attorney general, county sheriffs, local police.
Auracle 10mo ago
My dad had fallen for two scams - one through WhatsApp, the other texts. I’m not sure how much we can blame individual companies for this. Obviously they should be doing more - shutting down accounts that message people at random, for instance, but I feel like the scammers will find a way. I also don’t know what else we can do. It should be easier for kids (or anyone else) to shut down their parent’s accounts at least once this happens, stop all wire and crypto transfers, etc. Past that, I really don’t know.
squigz 10mo ago
I don't mean to be rude or anything - and I don't disagree with what you're suggesting - but don't you think at some point you have a responsibility to stop them accessing these platforms yourself?

olelele 10mo ago

The old, mentally disabled guy in New Jersey falling over and dying trying to get to a date with a meta bot really broke something in me.

motbus3 10mo ago
That was horrible. This also makes me think that all those researches on "unhappiness Vs spending"

cedws 10mo ago

My grandmother has been through the same thing. She was scammed out of all of her savings by accounts impersonating a particular celebrity. Thankfully the bank returned all of the money, but the perpetrators will never be caught, they operate out of Nigeria (one of them attached their phone to her Google account.) Unfortunately these fake celebrity accounts are swarming her like locusts again. We tried to educate her about not using her real name online, not giving out information or adding unknown people as friends, but there's a very sad possibility that she doesn't fully understand what she's doing. It was emotionally difficult going through her laptop to gather evidence for the bank. They know exactly how to romance and pull on heart strings, particularly with elderly people. Meta's platforms are a hive of scammers and they should be held accountable.

Drunkfoowl 10mo ago
My friend is a bank manager. He says everyday 2-3 elderly people come in confused about a scam. This is a silent crisis impacting almost eveyone. My grandma personally had her gold stolen by a scammer. She is now in a home for dimensia.
- stogot 10mo ago
  It really is a silent crisis. I warn my family constantly about ones targeting elderly, but even people my age fall for others
  - ryandrake 10mo ago
    Children who are not cognitively and emotionally ready for the Internet shouldn't have access to it. Similarly, any elderly folks who are not cognitively able to deal with social media (or the Internet in general) should be cut off from it, too. You can (and should) have That Talk with your parents about scams on the internet, but if they're still falling for them and not getting the message, maybe it's time to gently steer them off the Internet. We take the car keys away from people who can't handle driving anymore.
- dagmx 10mo ago
  I don’t think it’s a silent crisis per se, but just one people ignore. There’s tons of media about it, tons of people are aware of elder fraud etc but people don’t want to think about the vulnerable of society. There’s been jokes about it and media about it going back decades. People are aware but solving it requires an uncomfortable level of change in society, training and regulations. As an aside, both Thelma and The Beekeeper are recent movies about elders being scammed and revenge being taken. Both very different but enjoyable.
  - ndj87e 10mo ago
    [flagged]

qwertox 10mo ago

One must also check what YouTube recommends their elderly parents, because it is easy for them to slide into getting recommended harmful content, mostly things like psychological, religious or alternative-medicine topics. Note that not all of them are harmful, but most of them are published by very odd channels.

zelphirkalt 10mo ago
YouTube should be held liable for what it is pushing. It literally can kill and seriously harm people.
- xethos 10mo ago
  The president of the United States of America pushed a horse de-wormer as a preventative during a world-wide pandemic Good luck getting him, his administration, or his Department of Justice, to hold YouTube to a higher standard.
  - cynicalcoder 10mo ago
    That’s dishonest. Ivermectin is widely prescribed to people too. That’s like calling Ibuprofen a horse anti-inflammatory drug. That doesn’t mean it was an effective covid treatment though. The information from the third world that made it appear like it was seems to have been that it was treating preexisting parasites in covid patients, eliminating a comorbidity and thereby improving covid survival rates. But undiagnosed parasites are rare in the US, so that wouldn’t have worked here.
  - tclancy 10mo ago
    Well, let’s post a deepfake about some left strawman and watch him find the time pronto.
  - alex1138 10mo ago
    Ivermectin has scientific evidence behind it. But I can't say that without accruing downvotes, I suppose

immibis 10mo ago

If you really want to hurt Meta, don't delete your accounts - sell these real, aged accounts to spammers for a few bucks.

vintermann 10mo ago
That may hurt Meta, but not nearly as much as it hurts the elderly people who the spammers will defraud.
- immibis 10mo ago
  Then instead use them to scrape your friends' timelines and republish as RSS.
  - vintermann 10mo ago
    heh, have you tried scraping Facebook? They really, really don't want to make it easy to hide ads or otherwise filter your feed in "unapproved" ways.
estearum 10mo ago
Why would that hurt Meta? The entire point here is that they don't care and if anything benefit from such activity.

yieldcrv 10mo ago

I’m in a group chat and one member is a Cambodian slave that periodically tries to start romance scams and we’re like “you’re free now, go home” (because of the economic sanctions and raid) we recently had a vote on whether she should be booted from the chat, we voted no for the comedic value so anyway sorry you’re going through that, its wild out there

michelb 10mo ago

Unfortunately I have a similar experience. If someone's working at Meta right now, and has been in the past 10 years, they're willingly and actively contributing to making society worse. Some open-source tech is not going to undo any of this, nor any of the past transgressions. I get the pay is probably great, but have some decency.

stodor89 10mo ago
But hey, at least the money is good..
echelon 10mo ago
I suggested a hiring ban on anyone who ever worked at Meta some years back. It was not met with open arms. Going to try again here... I think it's a valid suggestion that might result in people rethinking working for Meta if it was taken seriously. Working for Meta is ethically questionable. The company does unspeakable damage to our country. It harms our kids, our elders, our political stability. Working for it, and a number of similar companies, is contributing to the breakdown of the fabric of our society. Why not build a list of Meta employees and tell them they're not eligible for being hired unless they show some kind of remorse or restitution? It could be an aggregation of LinkedIn profiles and would call attention to the quandary of hiring someone with questionable ethics to work at your organization. It might go viral on the audacity of the idea alone. That might cause some panic and some pause amongst prospective Meta hires and interns. They might rethink their career choices.
- rightbyte 10mo ago
  Generally it is a bad idea to punnish defectors.
- devsda 10mo ago
  What's the end goal of that? Do you think Meta will run out of good engineers to hire ? With that attitude, how long does it take to justify going after the next Meta?
  - 10mo ago

carefulfungi 10mo ago

So many of us have been there - it is brutal. These platforms are ripping us apart from each other, providing criminals easy access to the most vulnerable, and concentrating wealth to an unimaginable degree.

amelius 10mo ago
But hey, it's a free market /s Maybe EU's regulation of digital markets isn't such a bad idea after all.

hammock 10mo ago

What did you search for on marketplace to find the scams?

wahnfrieden 10mo ago

One third of all scams in the US are operated on Meta platforms. They have a policy that if a scammer’s ad spend makes up more than 0.15% of Meta revenue, moderators must protect the scammer instead of blocking it. Meta is working hard to scam your dad for ad spend. It’s hugely profitable for them and they are helping to grow it per internal policy. They are only interested in fostering big-time scammers.

filoleg 10mo ago
> One third of all scams in the US are operated on Meta platforms. And 100% of all internet scam traffic in the US goes through either US ISPs or US cell carriers. Should those entities be held liable instead? Or maybe, Meta instead should scan users' private messages on their platforms and report everything that might seem problematic (whatever the current US administration in power considers as problematic) to the relevant authorities? My personal take: there should be more effort in going after the actual scammers, as opposed to going after the "data pipes" (of various abstraction levels) like Meta/ISPs/cell carriers/etc.
- slumberlust 10mo ago
  If the ISP was taking ad money they know were scams...yes they should be liable. International law and extradition has already proven to be too slow and small scale to be effective.
- gherkinnn 10mo ago
  Meta is not a pipe. Meta curates the feed to maximise their income to the detriment of everyone else.
  - alex1138 10mo ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
- jddj 10mo ago

specialist 10mo ago

> We need legal protections for elders and youth Offline too. Predation on the elderly is an industry. Our own attempts to do something about (successful) scammers were meant with utter indifference by my parent's state's (Arizona) attorney general, county sheriffs, local police.

Auracle 10mo ago

My dad had fallen for two scams - one through WhatsApp, the other texts. I’m not sure how much we can blame individual companies for this. Obviously they should be doing more - shutting down accounts that message people at random, for instance, but I feel like the scammers will find a way. I also don’t know what else we can do. It should be easier for kids (or anyone else) to shut down their parent’s accounts at least once this happens, stop all wire and crypto transfers, etc. Past that, I really don’t know.

squigz 10mo ago

I don't mean to be rude or anything - and I don't disagree with what you're suggesting - but don't you think at some point you have a responsibility to stop them accessing these platforms yourself?