this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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me_irl
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Idk about "never prepared" so much as "getting this shit constantly and finding it annoying".
Shit's so farmed out anyway. There isn't some singular guy who is manually typing out ransom demands for random shit. There's a call center in a bombed over region of Kyiv or a slave compound in the Philippines where some schlub sitting in front of a dozen ipads is being whipped until they send 100 texts a minute.
Then all these places are being replaced by even more shitty and incoherent AI datacenter virtualizations anyway.
The thing is, they're looking for the stupid people.
If you're smart, you might get scammed out of a couple hundred bucks. Maybe in the low thousands if they're very lucky.
When you're stupid, you can end up selling your house to give money to the scammers because you've bought into the scam.
And I don't mean stupid as in low intellectual capacity, I mean stupid as in, you have not been educated on what scams look like, what they feel like, or how they act.
When I lived in Florida, this old woman hit the news because scammers called her claiming to be the police and they asked her to help them with a case by putting $5000 of her own money in a paper bag and leaving it at a shopping mall. She did this so they called her again and said they almost got the guy but that they wanted her to leave another five grand in a paper sack at the mall. So she did it again. She only ended up calling the police because the scammers called her a third time and when she left the paper bag full of money nobody came to get it. They must have figured at that point that nobody could possibly be that gullible and lost their nerve.