I’m not sure I fully understand, in retrospect, the desire to shave off inconvenient corners for large life events you do so rarely. I think there’s real wisdom in some of these things being so slow and old school.
Requiring a hand delivered check vs wire transfer to buy house has a minimal effect on how many people buy a house.
Plus, the US has elections far more frequently than how frequently an average person buys a house.
I think OP meant "efficient" as in "efficient for the people doing the counting." In this case, efficient is not the same as easy. It's efficient to count a bunch of ballots by having people enter their choices directly into a bunch of counting computers that are networked to a central counting computer.
It's easy to vote by getting a ballot (by mail or in person), marking it, and dropping it into a box. But counting those votes is not efficient, or at least not fast.
I'm with you; I want the latter, not the former.
THat's a very rose-colored view on voting, one that conflicts with amount of recounts and outright election fraud that has taken place just in my lifetime. Not to mention the outright denial of some to candidates to attend or speak at conventions and caucuses or having heir delegates ignored entirely.
Ethereum was recently, and succinctly described to be the following by Udi Wertheimer:
“I think that Ethereum is a convoluted mess and I don’t know what it’s good for but fine; other people like it. Good for them.”
That pretty much sums up my perception, at first it was supposed to be a global computer, which made no sense to me... then it was THE Blockchain upon which smart contracts could be created, entirely ignoring Bitcoin's could do that multi-sig txs or nLock. But would facilaite things like smart-contracts for hotels and car rentals, then that faded into obscurity when they knew it was not practical at all given its limitations. Then when Crypto Kitties fad came on I stopped attending the local meetups entirely as I couldn't take them serious anymore.
I was always the 'Bitcoin maximalist' at those events, and while I was using their meetups as a way to grasp why Ethereum even mattered as I was at IBM's Blockchain division where they were openly pushing for ETH based solutions and using an equally complicated things as Solidity was when they mandated everything be done in Hyperledger Fabric.
Ultimately, I realized it was complexity for complexity's sake driven by people who really don't understand this technology at all, and did so with no real reason to justify it other than it fit with the 'it isn't Bitcoin, its this other thing' narrative. IBM really dropped the ball on their advantage to capitalize on the use of this tech to many of its multinational customers, many who seemed eager to explore the possibilities, as a result of this.
I still have some screen caps from the internal study material from the exams and other internal material on a phone somewhere that just focused on how Bitcoin was nothing more than digital currency for criminals online. And how Ripple and Ethereum were some how immune to that with no real explanation to anyone who actually understood the technology [1].
To this day I'm still baffled how anything but greed explains how Vitalik, a former member of Unsystem, was the guy behind this and the subsequent clusterfuck that is ETH/Classic/DAO whatever it wants to call itself.
I kind of wished it had all been a big prank to transfer funds from stupid investors and Putin who were mesmerized by empty claims and buzzwords to fund Unsystem's loftier goals for privacy on Bitcoin but after the DAO I was pretty convinced it was never going to happen. Crypto Kitties made me realize that even they had no idea what they were really building.
1: https://thexrpdaily.com/2020/01/20/ibm-said-ripple-is-unique...
I saw a variation of it first hand at a company I once worked at. The scammers gained access to the lobby of the building, removed the post and replaced it with invoices with different bank account details on.
As an attorney I used to look at a lot of boilerplate skeptically but is a RE attorney told me I had to sign in the presence of a clergy, my mother and law, and three local stray dogs I'm marching my butt to a pet store and making some calls without a question.
Same. I’ve seen people but one car over another just because it was available nearby instead of a half hour bus ride away. How many times in your life do you buy a car that an extra half hour is significant?
If you're buying a cheap car to get you from point a to point b and you don't care about amenities, what does it matter? Will that civic the next town over make you much happier than the corolla in front of you (or vice versa, or whatever)? Some people just don't care about cars, or at least not for the type of car they are buying for that use at that point in their life.
Nobody can care about everything all the time, and sometimes people just decide not to sweat the things other people think are vitally important because they have other stuff they care more about.
The more money you're willing to spend the more good choices there are at that level though, so this becomes harder to do when not operating at the lowest cost tier of cars.
This does change a did if people are willing to consider less traditional choices, like smart cars.
Mind you this is Canada so things are likely different.
The certified cheque was done in 20 minutes. All that was required was two pieces of photo id, producing the debit card and entering my pin to access the account.
This wasn't even my "home" branch, zero prior relationship with this branch and I walked into a random one on my way to work.
I'm guessing there are hoops to jump through if you're clearing out your entire bank account because it could be grounds of suspicious activity by the branch manager.
Perhaps you can build a similar electronic system, but if one of the purposes is to make it slow and make it involve lots of manual confirmations, is there really a purpose to it? It's going to be much more complex than the paper system (replacing physical properties like uniqueness with brittle/complex cryptographic versions). Complexity always begets bugs.
> Here’s how these scams usually go down: A thief hacks into a real estate or title company’s computer system and then studies the transactions, from the language used to the format of the wiring instructions. When the scammer strikes, he or she will often pose as someone from the real estate or titling company to instruct the buyer to wire funds to them.
But they don't care and they are not computer literate.
The receiver account can still be seized by government institutions though, something much harder with cryptocurrencies.
I really don't get it, because I have to provide my ID every year or so for verification. I really don't get how these scammer can get away with that, but obviously every time.
Also you often do not even need to take a picture of an ID to open an account online, just have the info of an identity that you steal. After that, you get an atm card, wear a covid mask, shades and hat, call to raise the limit and take it out asap.
My experience with 4 different banks:
1. Limit of $500 cannot be changed
2. Limit raised to $1,100 over the phone; apparently if I show up at a branch and bring my first born, I can get it as high as $1,500.
3. Limit of $500 suddenly reduced to $200 (!) with the option to call in and raise it to $400.
4. Limit raised to $2,000. Some years later, suddenly reduced to $1,000. Haven't bothered looking into this yet.
I recently learned that some Chase Bank ATMs inside branches used with Chase ATM cards can get $3000 in one transaction. I did it the first time a few days ago.
Back to the topic, we're up to $3-4k now which is more than I thought, but still not enough to pull off this $12k scam.
They could have saved a lot of money on ATM fees (which they always refund me) by increasing my limit, that's for sure.
That is hardly an advantage for the victim. Come to think of it, that's a (rare but realistic) threat for normal, licit commerce.
I receive several cold scam calls per day and I’ve known people who have done things like purchase a home and been inundated by fake calls from “the underwriter” and other scams.
Is there no mail and telemarketing fraud enforcement any more?
A lot of scams do feel like low hanging fruit that would be easy to track down. I think there is a lack of will and capability for resolving "small" scams of up to a few thousand dollars which can be crippling for individuals.
In my view, this mess is temporary. It's caused by a partial transition from an old system (manual via solicitors, cheques, and bank managers) to a new one. The old one was pretty reliable, but involved a lot of expensive people. The new one is like operating in the matrix. When communications happens electronically, the checks built into the old system break down and it's near impossible for a human to know if a electronic message is real.
It is not near impossible for a computer to know of course. A computer validate a series of cryptographic assertions anchored at the titles office relaying what bank to credit, and it can do with far greater accuracy than the old "human relationship" system, and it can do it in factions of second. But right now we use the new system to communicate because it self evidently more efficient to do so, and still use the checks from the old system to validate those communications.
You see this all the time. Phishing fraud, where accounts are sent fake invoices from what appears to be a valid supplier is essentially the same thing - humans using eyeballs to verify an electronic document is valid (which is essentially impossible), as opposed the supplier just signing it and the bank account details it contains.
It's almost comically bad. I was asked by the accounting section of one of the top computer contracting organisations to verify I controlled another bank account. They demanded a bank statement to prove it. Problem: the details on the bank statement were inaccurate. I raised a ticket with the bank to get it fixed, but as seems to happen depressingly often the bank screwed it up. So in the I downloaded PDF, edited it, rendered it to TIFF, added noise, and sent it. It was accepted of course.
Right now most organisations are wide to being exploited because they are communicating electronically, and using eyeballs to validate the result. They seem oblivious to the idea The Matrix wasn't just a move, it was a prophecy. And now the future it prophecised has arrived.
It will change, but only after quite a few companies have been ripped a new one.
When I’ve bought residential property in the past, there have always been various fees to pay in advance, using the same bank details. So when it comes to the final big payment, I’ll have already had the bank details for weeks, and have already used them to send previous payments. Double checking the payment instructions by phone just before making the payment helps too, as that allows confirming the account and the final amount.
It's a principal-agemt problem. Real estate agents hire their friends to do escrow.
And we already know the solutions to that
My advice to anyone buying or selling is to get the attorney's phone number from a known good source in advance, and call them to verify the wiring instructions before submitting. Also compare the bank account name down to the character with the real one (although I don't know how hard it is fake this). Your bank should read off the bank account info you're sending to before you give the confirmation to proceed.
Why was an escrow service not an option?
Checks can be uncleared long after they clear (another common scam, since checks have no security model), so nobody sane accepts checks from stranges for large numbers.
Depending on how sophisticated the scammer is, the MiTM between communication can be transparent to the victim.
This is fraud. It might not be recoverable immediately but it merits a police report. And maybe with that report you can have the receiving bank take action
No affiliation besides having a friend who works there.
And it's yet another party that can get hacked.
The solution is for the parties to talk too each other to verify their relationships, instead of replacing all the trusted people by random websites.
After one hour, wire transfers sent in error are no more recoverable than crypto.
How the thieves knew so much about the process and timing is supposedly being investigated, but no one is holding out much hope. And the attorneys have a strong incentive to cover up any evidence of intrusion on their side, assuming it was their infrastructure infiltrated.