It’s really incredible how easy some of these scams appear to pull off. “I’m your oldest child and no my microphone doesn’t work so I can’t talk to you and I need $2000 immediately” and the parent bypasses warnings from the bank about possible fraud and shoves the transaction through…

It also shows how many of these scams can be defeated with a few simple precautions. Most of them would be defeated by calling the bank back… in other words don’t answer your phone, make all your calls outgoing. Others are defeated by simply not doing anything hastily and under duress (like urgently wiring all your money to an external account for “safekeeping”).

This is one of my actual fears for deep fakes - imagine actually being able to perfectly imitate someone's child to scam them. My parents and I long ago set up a codeword system as a way to delegate trust, but imagine actually hearing your child in distress - it could short circuit your skepticism pretty quickly.

> Even in todays traditional banking system there are a litany of cases where people refuse to take responsibility for their gullible actions and expect their bank to bail them out.

Yeah, but in today's traditional banking system people don't have to contend with currency-changing ATMs that change dollars to euros, and when you feed euros into them by mistake they just shred your money in stead of spitting it back out.

That's not the user being gullible (or OK, maybe that too, but mainly), it's the system being moronic. Or perhaps rather, evil.