Phone Addictions

On the 9th of June 2024, I noticed that the BBC ran what were superficially unconnected stories .....

Teens Are Often Victims Of Scammer
Factories Like This One In Zambia.

.... in that they were by different journalists, but they all focused in one way or another on the prevalence of Cyber Scams from West Africa, and increasingly South East Asia.

The first story to grab my attention, was that of a North American mother describing how Nigerian scammers posed as a white girl, to entice her 17 year old son to send nude pictures of himself to them, then blackmailed him. He sent them hundreds of dollars, but eventually committed suicide, all within a few hours of the first demand for money.

This after he had warned the sextortionist's that he would kill himself if they spread the images. The criminals replied: “Good… Do that fast - or I'll make you do it.” ..... Unusually, there were 3 arrests in this case, with two of the arrested extradited to the US to face trial, where the two brothers from Lagos - Samuel Ogoshi, 22, and Samson Ogoshi, 20 are now awaiting sentencing after both pleading guilty to child sexploitation charges. The third man arrested, is still fighting extradition from Nigeria.

The second story was that a Chinese led gang of cyber scammers were arrested in Lusaka, Zambia (West Africa) and sentenced to fairly lengthy prison terms. Li Xianlin the ringleader for instance, received 11 years in prison. The Zambian authorities seem to have acted, after growing numbers of Zambians were losing money to the gang, which operated against victims both overseas and locally.

So much harm is now claimed to be caused by social media, that some groups in the USA have launched a lawsuit for damages against Meta (the owner of Facebook and Instagram) - TikTok, Google and Snap Inc (the owner of Snapchat). The death of Molly Russell in London, where the Coroner stated that the schoolgirl died while suffering from the "negative effects of online content", is cited in many of the lawsuits that have been launched against social media providers in the USA.

This follows on from a federal lawsuit against Meta, by dozens of US states for allegedly breaking consumer protection laws, by engaging in "deceptive" conduct, and that Meta used addictive features to "ensnare" users, while concealing the "substantial dangers" of its platforms. This after a study by Harvard University, suggested that using social networking sites, activates the same part of the human brain that is also triggered when taking an addictive substance.

Finally there was a story about a trend amongst some teens and adults alike towards adopting 'dumb phones'. These are phones that are restricted to a limited numbers of Apps (tailored to users requirements e.g work or school etc) to cut users screen time. Usually the dropped Apps are social media ones: Facebook. TikTok, Instagram etc, which tells you something about the amount of time spent on these apps.

Dumb Phones - The Next Big Thing?

This of course would stop a lot of the West African scammers in their tracks, because its via these types of Apps that most random contact is initiated by the love scammers, sextortionists and the straightforward fraudsters. Like most people, I still have some old Nokia's etc lying about, so in effect I have ready made dumb phones to hand.

Dumb Phone?

Of course it wouldn't stop the old Yahoo boys email Scams about a prince wanting to transfer money out of the country (illegally ... so aiding him was a criminal act and so falling for that scam meant that were not actually just a victim, but also a co-criminal conspirator), or winning the Spanish Lottery (even though you had never bought a ticket) .... but I think I can resist those more easily than some Lolita contacting me out of the blue.