![]() ![]() YANG: So LinkedIn told me that they are using a mix of artificial intelligence and just human experts, human inputs, to find out which of the profiles are fake and how to prevent them from contacting anyone before people are scammed. What did they say they're doing about it? ![]() MCCAMMON: You spoke to LinkedIn about this. That's why when they find these Chinese-speaking or Chinese descendants on LinkedIn, these people become their easier targets. I think the reason is that these criminal groups, they are originally from China, and they speak Chinese. MCCAMMON: You wrote that something like two-thirds of the victims of these schemes are of Chinese ancestry. So that's why they refer to it as kind of the process of nurturing a pig and eventually for slaughter. That's, like, a really cruel word to use there, but that's how they refer to it themselves because they usually spend months with the victim just to cultivate their trust. So when it started, the scammers themselves actually referred to it as pig butchering scams. MCCAMMON: And you reported that some of these people went to great lengths I mean, really kind of developed an online relationship with their targets. And after a while, you started to lower your guard. We can connect, and we can talk about stuff. And that's why when people see someone - especially when they have, like, a complete profile of their education background, their employment history - you also think that, OK, maybe this is a real person. And these are a kind of genuine person who just wants to know about you or want to connect with you. ![]() YANG: I think a lot of it has to do with how people trust connections on LinkedIn, and there are strangers reaching out. Why does it seem to appeal to some people? I think a lot of us know this, and yet this scheme has been successful in luring people in. MCCAMMON: You know, there are so many scammers online. And after a while, she realized that those cryptocurrencies are completely lost, and she could never withdraw them back. So she agree with it, and that scammer basically coached her to transfer her money to cryptocurrency. And it's there when the scammer asked her whether she knows about crypto and whether she wants to invest in crypto. ![]() And then from there, they were talking about life. It's from someone who also works in accounting, so same as her. So this victim, she received a connection request on LinkedIn. So first, can you just briefly explain how did she get lured into this? MCCAMMON: So you profiled a California woman who fell victim to one of these schemes, and she says she lost more than $1 million. But then if you actually look deeper in there, there are so many red flags to tell you that these are actually just generally fake profiles. They worked in really good tech companies before ending up at SpaceX for a number of years. They graduated from the top universities. YANG: These are, if you just look at their LinkedIn profile, really brilliant engineers. MCCAMMON: The title of your article is "The 1,000 Chinese SpaceX Engineers Who Never Existed." So first of all, who are these engineers who didn't exist? Zeyi Yang wrote about it for the MIT Technology Review and joins us now for our weekly All Tech Considered segment. But how about a colleague looking to connect on LinkedIn? That might sound innocuous enough, but it's the first step in an elaborate scheme that scammers have been using in recent years to steal huge amounts of money from hundreds of innocent people. We've all seen phishing scams pop up in our email - you know, a link to reset your Facebook password, only it's from an email address that has nothing to do with Facebook, or the random text saying hello from a number you don't recognize. ![]()
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