Top Scam Messages of 2023
A Year In Review Post No One Needed.
With the advent of ChatGPT, I was expecting better scams. We have deep fakes of voices; we have the ability to generate endless text. We could plausibly do a better job of it…but that is not what I see happening. My love of scams (and debunking them) is a long-standing topic in this newsletter.
This, I suspect, misses the point of scams: scammers are not looking to fool the most savvy of us! They are indexing for the most credulous. Like I am, with my love of gift cards!1
With that brief introduction, I'm going to entertain myself by having an utterly pointless year-in-review post! It reviews some of my favorite scams of 2023.
It's essential to differentiate the lurid, desperate, and vaguely sexual scams on Twitter from the appeals to greed on LinkedIn. But there is some crossover. The most surprising thing to me is that so many of the scams seem to lean into loneliness entirely.
Let's start with the vast number of people who just want to say hello and get to know me if they're real…