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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • ADP is good. Use the iCloud foto upload. In the settings of the fotos app enable unlimited mobile data. In the mobile network settings enable „more data over 5G“. After recording if possible go to the fotos app and tell it to continue syncing if it stops because you are on battery or not on wifi, which it still sometimes does despite the settings. Before someone takes your phone click the side button five times. That disables faceid and makes it harder to unlock with spy tools.

    Also in the Face ID settings:

    Disable masks

    Enable require attention (if the phone still accepts faceid and someone holds it to your face to unlock it, close your eyes and keep them closed. Don’t squint.)

    Enable „erase data“ (after 10 attempts. Makes it practically impossible to bruteforce the phone).












  • That was an interesting read - and indeed a citation. Thank you.

    However, there are one serious and one minor flaw in their arguments:

    That the collection point for the money is constrained to be in Nigeria doesn’t seem a plausible reason either. If the scam goes well, and the user is willing to send money, a collection point outside of Nigeria is surely not a problem if the amount is large enough.

    That is simply an unproven assumption, and a wrong one at that. And it leads me to doubt the depth of that persons knowledge of Nigerian scams.

    While scammers from Nigeria do have methods to collect money that victims have sent to another country (through accomplices or unwitting mules), those come with additional costs and risks. And that is usually not worth it in the initial stages of the scam, when the amount is not „large enough“, usually a few hundred, maybe thousand dollars. Only when the victim is „committed“ by sending a small amount do they usually increase their demands, and then it is of course worth it to produce eg a bank account or even offer a meeting in the west.

    As a side note: there has been a bit of a shift in Nigerian scamming over the last few years. Scammers seem to move from the „traditional“ advance fee fraud over to romance scamming, which they often do under a „western“ false identity, and for which they prefer gift cards and bitcoin as payment. It would be interesting to see if that is more than correlation.

    Only when potential victims respond does the labor-intensive and costly effort of following up by email (and sometimes phone) begin.

    While this is not entirely false, it is inaccurate. Scammers usually have at least the first few emails prepared, so the first few replies (in which they explain a bit more) are nothing more than copy and paste - not exactly „costly effort“. Quite often those first emails also include small tasks for the victim, like sending their passport scan, filling in forms or actively contacting someone else by email, which is an actual filter.

    So you see, it’s a bit more complex than that meme „they are preselecting stupid people“.