Coyote Cartography

https://tacit.livejournal.com/677700.html

My dad called me yesterday. He received an invoice in an email for $899 for something he didn't remember ever ordering, and it upset him pretty badly. Fortunately, I've worked very hard over the years to educate him about scams, so he calls me before he does anything like call a number or click a link.

The invoice he described was basically identical to one I received a few days ago myself:

These scams are incredibly common right now; I'm getting about 4-6 a month. The scam is the “customer support” number I circled.

The mark calls that number and is greeted by a kind, helpful, polite voice on the other end who says “yes, I’m very sorry, sir, I will take care of it right now, sir, please give me your name and credit card number, sir, and I will be happy to reverse the charges. Oh, was this a PayPal invoice? Okay, can you give me your PayPal name? Yes, sir, perfect, I’ll need your PayPal password too, please...and do you have a passcode on this PayPal account, sir? Yes, yes, thank you, sir, now, do you have a bank account linked to your PayPal? Oh, you do? Can you give me that account number and routing number, sir? Okay, yes, got it, I’ll reverse the charge immediately, sir.”

$$$cha-CHING!$$$

But I didn't come here to talk about Internet scams. I came here to talk about design, and specifically, how entire generations of people were raised to be gullible and easy to scam, all because of design.

In ages past (like when I first started in the design world), design was hard. Making a simple letterhead was hard.

A company would go to a graphic design studio. They’d bring a copy of their logo as either a camera-ready slick or a square piece of negative film.

A designer would typeset the letterhead using a phototypesetting machine, then output it to a sheet of photographic film. Then, using an XActo knife and a light table, the designer would cut rubylith and use it to burn the letterhead and logo together onto another sheet of film, which would then be used to burn a printing plate for a press.

This was difficult, expensive, and highly skilled work. When I started working prepress professionally, the building I worked in had an entire huge film stripper's room where people spent their workday sitting at enormous glass light tables, XActo knives in hand, surrounded by sheets of film and rolls of rubylith, doing this work.

Design was hard.

Because design was hard, only large, well-heeled companies could afford good design. Shady fly-by-night scam businesses were largely locked out of the world of design, which is why scam ads in the 70s, 80s, and 90s tended to have that cheap, low-quality “look” about them.

Good design became a proxy for reliability, for legitimacy, for dependability. Only legitimate companies could afford it, which means generations of people, including the Boomers and those of us on the leading edge of Gen X, ended up trained to associate design with a company’s legitimacy and trustworthiness.

Scammers could never afford something like this.

Enter the era of desktop publishing.

I was in on the ground floor. Desktop publishing revolutionized design and prepress. I was working in the industry during the transition from light tables and rubylith to QuarkXPress and Photoshop, and I cannot overstate how much DTP democratized design. I helped publish small-press ’zines in the 90s and early 2000s, something that was all but impossible to do with any quality before the 90s. 

Suddenly, design that would’ve been out of reach to anyone but Fortune 1000 businesses became possible for two dudes right out of uni working from an apartment. (In fact, that’s why my website at xeromag.com exists; it started as the site for a small press magazine called Xero.)

This is unquestionably a good thing...but just as it empowered small-press ’zine communities and business owners, it empowered scammers.

Suddenly scammers could create official-looking business stationery, logos, websites, ads, fake invoices, fake receipts, all completely effortlessly.

I talked to a person online a few weeks back who’d fallen for a pig butchering scam—a fake Bitcoin scheme where marks are lured to “invest” in what seems like legitimate Bitcoin sites, only to have their money stolen. “But the site looked so official!” she said. “It even had graphs and charts of real-time Bitcoin prices and everything!”

I’ve heard that countless times before. “But the site looked perfect! How was I supposed to know it wasn’t really PayPal?” “But it looked like a real bank site!”

You can buy templates for websites that look like anything you want. With a two-minute search, I found a pre-created template for a Bitcoin trading platform that included real-time feeds of Bitcoin prices, login, activity tracking, fake account generation, the whole nine, for $39.

You can, with a few clicks of a mouse, use online tools to have fake letterhead and business cards made, then with a few more clicks ship it off to production.

The point here is, design is no longer a proxy for legitimacy. You can no longer measure something’s validity by how it looks.

But millions of people, mostly Boomers and Gen Xers, haven’t got the memo.

The sudden revolution in design created an exploit in the minds of a large number of people indeed, a way to slip past their defenses to take advantage of them with scams.

What’s the solution? I don’t know. I do know that a lot of people base their judgment on something’s legitimacy on how “official” it looks, and nowadays that veneer of legitimacy is available to everyone.

When people get taken by scams, it’s not necessarily that they’re stupid. Sometimes, it’s that they’re using markers for scams that no longer exist, because the world changed in the blink of an eye and the cues that once separated scammers from legitimate enterprises no longer exist.

We live in a world surrounded by design. Design is both invisible and essential, so when the design world changes, it can have weird knock-on effects nobody ever imagined.

https://tacit.livejournal.com/677700.html