Designing Another Scam

My original Designing A Scam post seems to be trending, so I wanted to revisit this idea with some new scammy design I've been collecting. But they all have the same two basic ingredients: urgency and repetition wrapped up in something that feels official.

Ticket Scam

This caused such a commotion at the Circuit Clerk's office the news reported Circuit Clerk Zack Wallace saying, “A lot of people are calling us and the calls are overwhelming. If you get this notice, disregard it.” Very official signifiers include the state seal, a plausible appearing case number and judge, as well as cited MS code numbers. And there are tons of urgent messages here. Mostly in the form of dire consequences – MAXIMUM STATUTORY PENALTIES, Immediate suspension, FINAL JUDGEMENT, Negative reporting, OFFICIAL LEGAL (😂), etc. Lots more. Urgency and repetition on full display along with an immediate way to pay up.

However, Wallace breaks it down, "...Circuit Court doesn’t handle parking violations...No one named Michael Rodriguez serves as a judge in Hinds County Circuit Court...the circuit court does not have a “traffic division"... and that his office will not contact individuals about citations via cell phone." I'm guessing the code number citations are likely made up, and there are many misspelled words such as "surctions" and "proceprocedings." Kudos actually to those folks who called rather than going straight to the QR code. I'm not sure if anyone showed up on April 21. But I imagine there might have been at least a few folks, knowing that they did have a traffic citation, that were sufficiently freaked out by this.

Conspiracy video

I won't post it or link to this here, but a friend sent me a conspiracy theory video and I could immediately see the techniques they were using. There was commentary over top of a video they were replaying. They repeated the same points over and over again. One part of the video shows someone with something in their hand, and ad nauseam they blew up that area of the video, circled it and repeated phrases like: don't you see X, it's right there, I know you see that, it's so obvious. But it was not obvious. The video was blurry, expecially when they blew it up. What they were showing was incredibly vague. It could have been five things. They were happy to guide people to what they wanted it to be. There was less urgency in this instance, because this was not a direct payment scam, but the commentator had a great sense of enthusiasm and urgency for you to believe. Surely making money in the way of engagement.

$900 Food Cards

My dog watches Murder, She Wrote in the afternoons. Don't judge. So, I have become an unwitting expert on these scammy TV commercials for Medicare plans and benefits, some of which offer $900 monthly food cards. If that sounds too good to be true already, it is. Clearly targeted at older folks. Here is a great montage. They seem to come from official government Medicare sources, but they do not. Again, lots of messages about urgency – don't miss out, ending soon, hurry up, hurry up. And the frequency (repetition) of the ad buy is a bit astonishing to me. They are clearly testing people and messages. Lately, the actors talking to camera are all gen AI – younger, older, Black, white. I noticed they were using the same female voice over for multiple castings. I can tell, but can your parents or grandparents?

And speaking of AI, I read this well thought out debate about whether or not we should be building more/fewer/no data centers. And the thing that stuck out to me was the pro-data center side was using some highly consistent, repetitive language that you've probably heard – that data centers (AI) are inevitable, and that if we don't act quickly something terrible will happen. 🧐