I Responded to One of the Spam Texts From a “Recruiter”—Then Took the Job. It Got Weirder Than I Could Have Imagined.

The story of “Cathy,” my scammer.

John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue

5 days ago

A guilty pleasure of mine is reading accounts of people who purposely get scammed so they can document the scam. But it hits different now that my former colleagues who did government anti-scam work have been fired.

There’s also the thing that the kind people at the FTC were too diplomatic to say, which is that President Donald Trump has taken a battle-ax to the very departments that once existed to do scam prevention and enforcement, like, for instance, the FTC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and parts of the Department of Justice. The heads of those places have been fired or have stepped down, sometimes replaced by crypto industry toadies. Their budgets have been hit. Trump has embraced the cryptocurrency industry that makes it all go.

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue
5 days ago

Btw, the FTC's tool for reporting scams is a marvelous specimen of civic tech that I used as a pattern for my own work more than once.

If anyone ever scams you, use it

reportfraud.ftc.gov

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Protect your community by reporting fraud, scams, and bad business practices

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I Responded to One of the Spam Texts From a “Recruiter”—Then Took the Job. It Got Weirder Than I Could Have Imagined.

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