[jackhuman]

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.

[cedws]

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.

[sokoloff]

> adding unknown people as friends

The number of my outer circle of friends who fall for the “copied profile” adding of unknown people or accept a friend request from the attractive young woman who somehow is interested in them is shocking. (I’m gauging this from looking at the “mutual friends” in the friend request.)

[sizzle]

Why can’t you do a power of attorney(?) over her finances or move them into a living trust, etc. seems like there are legal protections out there if you can convince her it’s in her best interest to let her family manage her estate so she can focus on enjoying final years (obviously don’t say it like that)

[Drunkfoowl]

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.

[michelb]

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.

[echelon]

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.

[stodor89]

But hey, at least the money is good..

[qwertox]

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.

[steveBK123]

Opening YouTube on a new machine / OS / browser / without login is eye opening in terms of the awful stuff that gets recommended by default and how quickly it tilts worse if you watch any of it.

[zelphirkalt]

YouTube should be held liable for what it is pushing. It literally can kill and seriously harm people.

[pabs3]

In case anyone needs to help a relative without a Google account block YouTube channels or videos, the subreddit for uBlock Origin has a wiki that can help. You can block videos by channel or video title or URL using CSS rules. Removing the clickbait and watching a few videos of decent content with them helps a lot.

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube

[sizzle]

Have you seen some of the ads between the videos? There are some shady get rich quick types of influencers selling stuff that might really set them back financially as well.

[olelele]

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]

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

[wahnfrieden]

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.

[wahnfrieden]

I would like to understand the downvotes: is it from doubting these facts? If so, I will post the sources (which were recent mainstream news on the front page of HN). Or is it because of the negative sentiment about Meta? Or disagreement that Meta has any responsibility over moderating scams they promote?

These are verified facts that make up the substance of my message:

- Meta protects their biggest scammers, per internal policy from leadership

- Meta makes a huge profit from these scammers (10% of total revenue; or in other words, their scam revenue is approximately 5x larger than the total Oculus revenue)

- The scams that Meta promotes represent one-third of the total online scams in the US

[cutemonster]

> 0.15% of Meta revenue

That must be a gigantic amount of money, you (or someone else) don't happen to know who any of those people (or organizations?) are?

[filoleg]

> 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.

[carefulfungi]

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]

But hey, it's a free market /s

Maybe EU's regulation of digital markets isn't such a bad idea after all.

[AuryGlenz]

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]

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?

[hammock]

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

[specialist]

> 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.

[immibis]

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

[vintermann]

That may hurt Meta, but not nearly as much as it hurts the elderly people who the spammers will defraud.

[estearum]

Why would that hurt Meta? The entire point here is that they don't care and if anything benefit from such activity.

[yieldcrv]

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