Re: [EXT] Current solutions to prove an issuer is who they claim they are

Manu, you make a very interesting point with whether any identity document
would have helped her, I believe scams like this are less about integrity
of data and more about human nature, it's more about the psychology of the
victim and how these scammers prey on their weaknesses.

I personally know someone who was duped by a similar pigbutchering scam.
People can be vulnerable at times, and vulnerable people are gullible. What
really stands out in this story in particular is how the scammer used
information available on the victim on social media and weaponized it to
gain fake sympathy in her eyes.

I do want to add a comment though, although privacy preserving identity
technology could have helped this poor woman, but I believe the failure was
truly at the part of her bank allowing these transfers to go through, the
bank should have flagged these unusual transfers to a random account in
Turkey, especially if the user doesn't have a history of making such large
transactions to international accounts.

Although I do believe that Identity technology would have perhaps made it
simpler to verify an individual there's a more "human" element here which
cannot be simply solved with cryptography. A lot of these scams are
engineered to prey on vulnerable people, people who are too trusting and
too kind for this world.

There need to be UX warnings which could be added at the application layer
for various services which warn users for common types of scams, scammers
and tech prevent scammers will always be a game of whack-a-mole, you take
one down another method pops up, I think this particular issue needs to be
solved with education and more stringent flagging which takes into account
new scams in the market.

Best Wishes,

Merul



On Sat, Jan 25, 2025 at 10:21 PM Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar..com>
wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 25, 2025 at 11:05 AM Brian Richter <brian@aviary.tech> wrote:
> > Here’s the article
> > https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgnz8rw1xgo
>
> Ooof, how heartbreaking, that poor woman!
>
> I presumed it was going to follow a standard scam with relatively
> small and/or recoverable financial damage. Instead, this person lost
> their entire life savings while in her 50s. Sure, she got scammed, but
> society has also failed her -- all because she couldn't verify the
> person on the other end of the line, and then because the banks didn't
> have proper controls, and now because the authorities might not be
> able to recover her money.
>
> Julien's point is well made in that story. Lots of lessons in there
> about building fraud-resistant  and unphishable systems; we need to do
> better as a society.
>
> Would any of these things have helped?
>
> 1. Asking the scammer for a VP of a selectively-disclosed identity
> document?
> 2. Setting up a communication channel w/ continuous identity verification?
> 3. The bank requiring VPs for sender and receiver of funds in that
> amount? Exposing that information to the victim?
> 4. The bank/money transfer app providing an AI that goes through a
> safety checklist (which includes providing documentation for the
> transfer)?
>
> What else could we build/deploy that would have helped in this case?
>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> https://www.digitalbazaar.com/
>
>