The online world is full of scams, but there's still hope
Last week I warned about pig-butchering scams (a column you should read, and share, if you missed it). But they’re hardly the only scams to be aware of.
Tesla owners, for example, are the targets of an alleged scheme run by the company itself. From Cory Doctorow, Tesla accused of hacking odometers to weasel out of warranty repairs (April 15, 2025):
A lawsuit filed in February accuses Tesla of remotely altering odometer values on failure-prone cars, in a bid to push these lemons beyond the 50,000 mile warranty limit.
The suit was filed by a California driver who bought a used Tesla with 36,772 miles on it. The car’s suspension kept failing, necessitating multiple servicings, and that was when the plaintiff noticed that the odometer readings for his identical daily drive were going up by ever-larger increments. This wasn’t exactly subtle: he was driving 20 miles per day, but the odometer was clocking 72.35 miles/day. Still, how many of us monitor our daily odometer readings?
In short order, his car’s odometer had rolled over the 50k mark and Tesla informed him that they would no longer perform warranty service on his lemon. Right after this happened, the new mileage clocked by his odometer returned to normal.
Wireless updates of the cars’ internal software allow Tesla to wield control of the cars, at a distance, outside the users’ awareness or ability to resist the changes.
Far from embracing a good user experience, Tesla seems to be using digital technology to deceive and exploit users. And they’re not alone.
The online world increasingly is a natural fit for scams. Digital platforms allow fraudsters to scale their operations globally, while the algorithms and code carrying out the crimes are opaque, or even invisible, to users.
Even if users somehow detect the fraud, there’s rarely any effective appeal. Pig-butchering scams are run by multinational crime syndicates – good luck prosecuting them – and Tesla is owned by, well, you know. Power relations online are asymmetric: platforms and fraudsters work hand-in-hand to carry out their schemes, while users, on the receiving end, are all but defenseless.
All of which helps explain the proliferation of all sorts of new threats online. Like the voice scams. The phone rings and it’s your daughter (or sister, or nephew, or whoever) – saying, hey, I’m in trouble, could you wire me a thousand dollars for bail?
Julie Jargon writes about this in a WSJ story (Apr 5, 2025): The Panicked Voice on the Phone Sounded Like Her Daughter. It Wasn’t. That’s a gift link, by the way, so click through and take a look.
Relevant quote:
When the man said he was out a lot of money and needed her to make things right, it crossed her mind this could be a scam. But she had heard her daughter’s voice and her distinctive cry. Hadn’t she?
The man on the phone told Roan if she ever wanted to see her daughter again, she’d have to wire him money.
Jargon wrote a followup story, Nine Ways to Protect Yourself From ‘Impostor’ Voice Scams – that’s also a gift link – in the WSJ (Apr 12, 2025). Essentially what you want to do is prepare ahead of time what to do when the scam call arrives. Keep calm, tell the person you’ll text them back, and if they refuse, ask them for the secret word. (Yes, every family should have a secret word or phrase to establish authenticity in such situations.)
And yet, and yet. From time to time, the internet still serves up the oddball interesting tidbit. Just because I like you, here are three videos I’d recommend. They’re all on YouTube, which means they’re larded down with Google’s intrusive surveillance, but if you watch them in the DuckDuckGo web browser, you can escape the spying from evil G.
5 Lego Walkers vs 7 Obstacles shows various simple robots trying to navigate obstacles. It’s charming to see the robots walking, stumbling, and sometimes making it to the other side.
P.S. From the same creator, there’s also a video on how to construct Lego walkers.
Four-legged Lego walker trying to mind the gap. Pass the Salt is a few years old but it is an evergreen: a Rube Goldberg contraption made out of food and kitchen tools. The camera cuts between sections, so it’s not one continuous take like The Way Things Go – see excerpt – but the level of creativity is mind-boggling. Who knew that common kitchen ingredients could combine in such odd ways?
I Spent 30 Days in a Dead Game is yet another charming video, this time involving a dead – or perhaps not? – 3D-chat platform called There. The narrator buys a one-month membership and gives himself the task of finding other people in what, at first glance, seems to be a totally depopulated online world.
See? Not everything is a scam. If we can protect ourselves from the fraudsters, and amplify the work of people trying to create something good, maybe there’s a future for the internet.
Thanks again for being a Creative Good member.
Until next time,
-mark
Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
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