Woman sends thousands of dollars to 'stranded astronaut' who was 'suffocating in space'
If you thought that an hospitalized Brad Pitt generated by AI was the limit of what bad actors could reach when it comes to online scams then you were wrong, as one cybercriminal has taken things into outer space to the sound of thousands of dollars.
The internet has given scammers countless new ways to exploit people and steal information or money, with tricks ranging from simple email deception to terrifying QR code scams that anyone could easily fall victim to.
Rapid development in the world of artificial intelligence has only made this worse too, as scammers can now use AI chatbots and fake generated images to fool people into thinking they're speaking to someone they're not, and it has become one of the leading cybersecurity threats.
As reported by Futurism, one elderly woman in Japan is the latest high profile victim of these online scams, as she was convinced to send a significant amount of cash to a supposedly 'stranded' astronaut so that he could buy oxygen with the money.
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Living in Sapporo, one 80-year-old woman met the scammer posing as an astronaut online earlier this year, unaware that she was opening herself up to what is commonly referred to as a romance scam.
She fell in love with the man who claimed he was an astronaut, but the situation became chaotic when he revealed to her that he was not only suddenly stranded in space, but in desperate need of oxygen with only one way to get it — money.
Understandably this woman who lived on her own wanted to do everything she could to save him from this potentially tragic scenario, and she reportedly wired over around 1 million yen ($6,750) so that he could 'buy' the oxygen he needed to survive.
How he intended to use this money to buy oxygen in space is probably better left unexplained, as even if it was somehow used to keep the lights on at the International Space Station then it would only last a couple of minutes at best, yet the woman soon realized that she was part of an elaborate scheme to part her from her money.
While you might be wondering how anyone could possibly fall for a scam as unbelievable as this, it might actually be by design in order to create a more efficient means of extracting money from the most vulnerable people, of which a large proportion are elderly.
"What people don't seem to get is that the whole idea with these types of scams is they are so utterly ridiculous that even all regular idiots directly dismiss them," one commenter explains on Reddit.
"That way the scammer singles out a few people out of thousands that are at the extreme end of the scale in terms of naivety, stupidity, mental state (or a combination of the above) instead of having to waste time on back and forth with hundreds of people that will not follow through in the end."
There are always going to be people that fall victim to scams no matter how silly they seem, so perhaps going for someone only they would believe helps scammers weed out those not vulnerable enough and potentially even nets them more money in the long run, and that's certainly a frightening prospect.
"Everyone who's laughing at this — just wait until you get a personal education on the effects of mental decline and loneliness," explains another commenter. "Most of us are heading that way. We should be helping this woman not laughing at her."