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USPS text scammers duped his wife, so he hacked their operation

(blog.smithsecurity.biz)
460 points wglb | 1 comments | 08 Aug 24 23:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.239s | source
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0xEF ◴[09 Aug 24 08:27 UTC] No.41199904[source]▶
I hate that it kicks off with "DISCLAIMER: This is not my work. I would never and don't condone illegal hacking of scammers"

You know what? I do. We all should. These scammers are awful people and deserve to be attacked. I am tired of toothless authorities like CISA and the alphabet agencies in the US doing next to nothing about it unless some YouTube scam baiter does the work for them. Scammers destroy people, not just financially, but emotionally as well, even driving some victims to suicide. As far as I am concerned, any wannabe hacker out there should be using these scammers for target practice.

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1. kelnos ◴[09 Aug 24 19:16 UTC] No.41204583[source]▶
The solution here is to fix the law enforcement apparatus, not condone vigilantism. Yes, I know that's a hard thing to fix.

But think about "IRL crime". Would we condone someone pulling out their gun and going after someone who they believed had stolen from them? I hope not.

The problems are the usual ones with vigilantism: ensuring a proportionate response to the alleged crime is impossible (vigilantism usually has a large emotional component, so good luck restraining someone there), and ensuring the vigilante is actually going after the right person, and hasn't screwed up their investigation, causing them to target someone innocent.

Certainly holding law enforcement accountable is difficult and sometimes impossible. But at least there's a process to fix that, and people are constantly working on this problem. There's no process to fix cases where randos botch an amateur investigation and mess up the life of someone innocent.