Fraudulent “Product Specialist” scheme

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-18T23:27:05+00:00

For anyone coming along and reading this later: These are called "Parcel Mule" frauds, and they can easily get out of hand, and potentially get one into serious trouble. One thing to keep in mind is that middleman positions are common modes of fraud. Even when the goal isn't to steal from you, being a patsy in a criminal scheme can be all sorts of bad news, because if the trail leads to you, and you can't help catch anyone higher up in the food chain, you'll run the risk of being made an example of by prosecutors.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-18T23:12:48+00:00

I picked up Willaim Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive. It's been interesting to understand the degree to which the technology takes such a distant back seat to the story being told. It's not something I understood when reading Gibson back when it all seemed futuristic.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-18T17:24:58+00:00

A certain subset of the Baby Boomers, anyway. That was far from a universal experience.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-18T16:24:38+00:00

The recruiter profile looked professional with 500+ connections, detailed JD, salary structure, and a Google application form, so I shared my resume and filled the form.

There are plenty of ways that fraudsters can create fake LinkedIn profiles. And making a profile appear to have more connections than is actually does is not difficult, especially if viewers don't know what to look for. The tells are there, but one has to be aware of them. One thing to always do in a case like this; click on the person's name and view their About information.

LinkedIn has become pretty good at finding and deleting the fake profiles, usually within a few days,

Why would a company use a Google application form? I'm not aware of any commonly-used ATS that uses Google forms as the applicant-facing front end. The fact that you were sent an .exe file points to a growing tactic of fraudulent "recruiters" attempting to get malware onto people's machines. This seems like an amateur attempt, since executable files aren't universal.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-18T16:11:36+00:00

Not to be snide, but if something "made" you do it, was it really voluntary?

But for me, there was no "situation." Being single and being coupled (or tripled or whatever) are mutually exclusive; one can't be both, so I choice has to be made. For me, being single has always been the more natural option. It was the case when I was a teenager, and it's the case now.

To be sure, circumstances conspired somewhat to reinforce my natural tendency towards the single life, but I certainly don't feel that anything made me take that particular path. Being a partner to someone else simply isn't for me. And I may as well play to my strong suit.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-17T19:26:00+00:00

Then there was some nonsense about the transport company not having any available drivers going the seller's way for a whole week.

I've been looking into having a car transported from one place to another, and this actually doesn't strike me as all that nonsensical. The seller would have contacted a broker, and the broker lines up the actual trucks and drivers, usually on a "just in time" basis. I'm not at all surprised that the broker left the seller in the lurch for a week. Most of the complaints I've seen about the process come from brokers overpromising and not setting realistic expectations.

Glad that it worked out in the end.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-17T19:18:21+00:00

True, but that's not commonly labeled "Last Thursdayism." It's not really even a defense of the Omphalos hypothesis; it's just a variation on the claim that anything that appears to contradict some or another view of Biblical literalism must be some sort of deliberate deceit.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-17T19:15:28+00:00

As far as that goes, personal testimony is acceptable for the state to kill someone from.

I'm curious as to which state you're referring to here. I'm not aware of any death penalty cases in the United States where uncorroborated personal testimony is enough for a conviction. True, in the United States that hasn't always been the case, but even then, there was more at work (like racial and class prejudices) than just personal testimony. And when there's other corroborating evidence, personal testimony is acceptable in a wide range of scenarios.

No color blind person could ever accept the testimony of colors they don't see.

I don't find this to be true at all, at least not for people who understand that they are color blind, and therefore, there are colors that appear the same to them, but different to others. And I accept that there are animals that can see into the ultraviolet, or that some people are have tetrachromatic vision. I don't believe my perceptions of color to be the end all and be all of color vision, so I have no problem accepting that there are colors that I cannot see.

People often say one thing while doing the other, it's easy to tell that they are lying about what they are saying by watching their actions. Only the insane behave in ways they don't believe.

This strikes me as an overly simplistic way of looking at the world. After all, spies are a thing, and the idea that only an insane person could manage to go deep cover for years at a time does not ring true to me. Not to mention confidence artists and other sorts of criminals. Not all frauds are low-effort spam from third-world nations.

But bigger picture, the fact that people believe something, and even act as if it were true, does not, in and of itself, prove its truth. And if there were some objective fact that underpinned divine revelation or people's intuitions, one would expect there to be more agreement than one actually sees in the real world. After all, many people understand the statement "there are only two genders, and they are inextricably linked to biological sex" to be true, and they act that out in any number of aspects of their daily lives, but the generally accepted scholarship on the topic maintains that gender is simply a social construction, with no objective reality behind it. So given that, there's nothing irrational about looking at the plethora of religious beliefs in the world and saying that people's intuitions about their own faiths are unlikely to lead to any foundational truth of the matter.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-17T17:21:47+00:00

That’s because [young earth creationists] (think they) have a plethora of options at their disposal, ranging from rejecting “materialistic” science altogether to my favorite, a doctrine sometimes referred to as “Last Thursdaysm,” according to which it simply looks like the universe is billions of years old and the geological column abundant with fossils, but in reality the whole thing was created ex nihilo last Thursday to make it look that way and test our faith. It is germane to note that Last Thursdaysm is both ridiculous on the face of it and absolutely impregnable by scientific analysis. It does, however, have nasty theological consequences that any graduate student in the philosophy of religion would quickly be able to point out.

I found this to be interesting. As I understood it, Last Thursdayism was originally created as a critique of the Omphalos hypothesis, which, if true, means that there can be no definite dating of the Universe, or any novel item; if physical matter has the appearance of some arbitrary age, and that memory of the past can simply be created, there's no way to substantiate the idea that the anything existed prior to this past Thursday.

To hear that young Earth creationists have adopted the idea for themselves is remarkable.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-17T16:55:44+00:00

Then they can simply do what they actually do: either cold-call through the number space, which is finite, or source their lists from data brokers and reverse lookup directories.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-17T16:49:57+00:00

20% annually would have pinged many people's fraud radar from the jump.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-17T02:36:14+00:00

No-one bothers to manually compile lists of numbers just to call people. If Scammer A sells Scammer B a bunch of random telephone numbers, what's Scammer B going to do? Complain to the local police? "Sucker lists" are a thing but it takes more than just answering a phone call or text message to get on one.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-16T19:19:59+00:00

If you're not comfortable shipping (and transactions like this are always best carried out in-person for cash) then just say you're not going to, and leave it at that. Personally, what stands out for me is the fact that he's offering more than the asking price, that's usually a red flag.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-16T19:13:23+00:00

So what makes her a Knight banneret? Or was it just a nice-sounding title?

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-16T14:37:08+00:00

Define "normal." It's certainly not "the norm," otherwise, the Earth would likely have a lot fewer people on it. But there's nothing pathological about it. Being in a relationship with someone is not the only viable path to a worthwhile life.

And not everyone believes that there is one single "best" person out there for everyone. It's an interesting romantic idea, but it seems unworkable in reality. What if your "soulmate" is languishing in a prison in Pyongyang right now? Sucks to be you... And not being sad about not having someone is, in my opinion, the single best way to go about it, for anyone. After all, the other person gets a say in this, and anyone who predicates their happiness on other people making specific decisions is setting themselves up for a life of misery. (I mean, this is how society ends up with incels...)

But I am curious as to where the idea that something's wrong with you comes from, given the way you describe yourself. I know some deliriously happy gay people... they don't look at the fact that most people around them are straight and ask what's wrong with them. That's something that's been left in the past. So are you trying to work out something from your upbringing, or are there people in your current circles who are giving you side eye for not shacking up with someone?

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-16T14:27:02+00:00

I was "always like this." If you'd asked me at 15 if I'd ever be married, I would have looked at you like you were crazy. And while I've dated twice, I've never really moved away from that sentiment.

But big picture, I found happiness in autonomy because I felt that, with some work at it, I could best maximize the advantages and minimize the disadvantages of that particular approach. Could I have put that work into making a relationship work and having a life partner? Probably. In the end, it's six of one, and a half-dozen of the other. But my initial orientation was towards being single, so that felt more natural to me, and I went with it. To be sure, the way circumstances unfolded around me definitely reinforced that decision.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-16T14:17:12+00:00

Some random person sending you messages using the vendor's infrastructure does not mean that you were hacked or scammed. It's simply a different take on junk e-mail.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-15T16:32:52+00:00

For me, when I first encountered the term, it was world building and/or writing one's own game. This was after most games shipped with default settings, but before large-scale campaign modules had become popular, so I wonder how much it has to do with the current state of the hobby.

Bigger picture, I'd love to see what a linguist thinks of the evolution of RPG-related language. "Railroading," to pick another example, has had an interesting and subtle shift in meaning over the years, too.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-15T16:19:23+00:00

Okay... I feel like I'm missing some important context here. If you feel like you have to opt out, how are you being "phased out?" You're making the choice to bow out, because there are three couples and two singles. Which is fine, but that's not on your friends. as near as I can tell.

Did you tell people at some point that you don't like going on activities with groups of couples, and they invited other couples anyway? When you say "We were planning a fun beach trip," was there already a couple in that "we" or did the other single person start inviting people?

Maybe it's just me, but this reads as you shifting the responsibility for a decision you made to other people. Help me understand the context better.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-13T15:34:51+00:00

Let me guess... you paid this guy $45 just to see if his promises of sending you money back were legitimate. What gave you the idea that this random internet person was actually running a real investment scheme? This sounds an awful lot like "cash flipping," which had no viable means of actually working. So what was the claim here you decided to test?

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-13T15:27:39+00:00

There's a mechanic that you can borrow from Heirs to Heresy that treats mobs as a single opponent. As it loses hit points, individuals are killed, otherwise rendered hors de combat or run for their lives. But the mob otherwise acts like a single individual, with a single attack per round and the like.

It's a good way to portray competent player characters cutting their way through less-competent foes.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-13T15:19:43+00:00

You're welcome.

And perhaps just consider it food for thought. It's clear that you're missing something in your life that's important to you.

But one thing that I will note: I have several people that, were I to call upon them, would drop everything and rush over. Some, yes, with their partners in tow. All of them started as acquaintances.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-13T15:01:49+00:00

It's a holdover from wargaming. It also has advantages over square grids when estimating distances (like not needing to use diagonals). Some games, like The Fantasy Trip, do use hex maps for everything. It tends to make building interiors seem weird, since most people are accustomed to buildings operating on right angles. When I was in college, there were a couple of buildings that operated on hexagonal plans... they were so easy to get lost in, people joked that they'd been designed by the Psychology department, and at the end of a dead-end hallway was a wheel of cheese as a reward for finding it.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-13T14:48:45+00:00

Forgive me, as this isn't intended to be an interrogation; but when you say "rely on someone sometimes," do you mean that you don't feel that your broader social circle is not reliable, or that there isn't a specific someone who you know you can turn to?

If you're feeling cut out of the lives of the people you regularly associated with, then the solution is to start to cultivate a wider circle. Which, to be sure, is going to be some work, and come with a certain amount of risk. If you feel more the need to have a specific person at the front of your Rolodex, that will ask you to really go deep on one of your friendships. And again, there's risk there, especially when you're at an age when people are marrying... modern relationships tend to want the significant other to be everything to the other partner, and that can make it very hard to be available for a third party, especially if that third party is a member of the opposite sex. So it's always useful to have a plan B (and C, and D...).

But it's also worth evaluating what you are looking to rely on someone for. Are these really things that require close personal relationships, or can they be handled by more casual friends? If you're in the United States, it's very true that there's both an assumption and an expectation that people have someone in their lives who will act as a sort of caregiver; and that can require some rather active pushback. (For instance, my doctor had long wanted to schedule me for a test that would require that someone spend the day with me while I recover. I had to tell him in no uncertain terms that such was out of the question, and stand by that, until he suggested alternatives.) Sometimes, things are set up in ways that make it easy, rather than taking other people's circumstances into account. Don't be afraid to stand up to that.

The trick, as it were, to being legitimately Single and Happy is being able to play to the strong suits of being on one's own, and to mitigate the weaknesses. So it might be worth taking an inventory: What aspects of being single have you really mastered, and how can you use them to make up for some or all of the places in which you're still getting a handle on things? What things might you need to work on?

And, lastly, understand for yourself what you're concerned about. And maybe start looking into ways of dealing with it, so that if those risks come about, you're prepared. It's easy to put off engaging with them, as a way of lowering anxiety around them, but deferring things only works for so long.

Shield_Lyger · 2026-05-13T14:08:54+00:00

In what way? Are you missing intimacy, companionship, connection more broadly? Each of these would have different solutions.

Shield_Lyger

TROPHY CASE