I’ve been struck over the last couple of days by a scam phenomenon that’s at least new to me, and that seems likely to me to get more and more prevalent. (It’s quite possible that this sort of thing is going on constantly already, and my recent intensive blog-reading session has only just made it visible to me). I’m calling it the spur-of-the-moment scam. Recent examples are the Live Journal money-for-vet-bills scam, and a Slashdot book review that turned out to be posted by the book’s author.

There are a few of things I find interesting about these two scams. Let me give a quick recap of them both, so we’re both on the same page.

In the kitty scam, someone posted on LJ that their cat had been burned by local bullies, and that the vet bills would cost $5000. She asked for donations to her PayPal account, and got them. Then one of her friends got suspicious, did a bit of digging, and uncovered the fact that the cat was never sent to the vet at all. According to City_glitter, the whole thing was a social experiment (to prove a point to her father) and the money is being returned. (Friends are waiting for receipts, which is as far as I’ve followed the sordid little story.)

The Slashdot book review actually took me in. It reviewed a book released under Creative Commons, with a two pound download fee, in terms that made it sound not fantastic but worth at least checking out. Reading the comments, more and more people expressed disappointment with the book and questioned the reviewer’s impartiality… until someone realised that both reviewer and author shared an email address.

I’m calling these “spur-of-the-moment” scams, because they both seem to take something that someone has put enormous effort into (City_glitter’s LJ community of friends, and James Morris’s book — make no mistake, badly-written or not, a novel is no small investment in time) and endanger it with a small action that might have seemed clever at the time, but that I bet the respective authors are deeply regretting now. This is a different type of scam to, say, Nigerian spam, where the author sets out from the very get-go to mess up someone’s life. (At least if City_glitter can be believed in her denials…) This is ordinary people, who through the scaling effects of the internet suddenly have the potential to skim hundreds or thousands of dollars, for very little extra effort.

But at a pretty big risk. I imagine City_glitter doesn’t have many friends in the LJ community these days. I guess nobody who reads Slashdot will be buying Morris’s book (the del.icio.us entry has eight people bookmarking, which is effectively nobody after a Slashdot advertisement). And the interesting thing is, it’s the same scaling effects that make these scams suddenly easy to perpetrate that also make it almost certain that the perpetrator is going to get smacked down.

First, take the kitty scam. This only works online, because real in-person friends are going to want to visit the poor wee darling, or notice that he’s still running around at home, or whatever. But also the sheer scale of the online community means that you can pretty quickly amass some serious donations, if you get your friends to sell your story to their friends, who sell it to theirs, and so on and so on. But exactly that scaling effect means you’re more-or-less certain to bump into someone suspicious at some point. And now the easy flow of information that got your sob story out to so many people starts working against you. Because it’s so easy to publish the details of Kitty’s case, suspicious people get more suspicious when you refuse to do so. And they’re just as free to publish their suspicions as you were to get the original story out there.

(A short digression: Foxfur’s LJ, blowing the whistle and then defending her position from City_glitter’s apologists, is a gold-mine for some academic looking into how individuals affirm their group belonging, defend their community against attack, and so on. On the one hand, there’s Foxfur saying time and again “Don’t believe me, look at the facts yourselves, here’s what I researched, show me I’m wrong,” and on the other hand there’s people laying into her with “I can’t believe City_glitter would do this,” and “Why are you trying to destroy what we’ve got here?” Fascinating, and also pretty scary if you’re under the illusion that people can be swayed by rational argument. Extrapolating this sort of behaviour to world politics is left as an exercise for the reader.)

The Slashdot self-promotion backfired less spectacularly but far more quickly, and for more or less the same reasons. Slashdot gets a lot of readers. Most of them don’t comment, but a lot of them probably read most of the comments. All it takes is one of these people (many of them IT professionals, hackers, computer-savvy types) to find the link you forgot to cover between your authorial persona and your reviewer, and the game is up. And because reputation is so important online, you can be damn sure that nobody is going to read your book, no matter how good it is, with that sort of introduction.

I’m reminded of the Alternate Reality Gaming phenomenon I posted about a while ago. Here’s a quote from a lecture by one of the makers of the game (taken from Jane McGonigal’s paper ‘This Is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play):

These were the puzzles that would take a day, these were puzzles that would last a week, and these puzzles they’d probably never figure out until we broke down and gave them the answers. So we built a *three month* schedule around this. And finally we released. The Cloudmakers [an online collective of players working together to solve the game] solved *all* of these puzzles on the *first day*. [Italics in McGonigal's paper.]

The power of scaling up seems to work both ways, scam-wise. So I’m asking you to tell all your friends that my pet gherkin has suffered a near-fatal accident, and that only your donation can save its salty skin. Come on, don’t be shy, the poor warty little dear is in need. Anyone interested in the medical details is welcome to contact me in person.

What this means is, if you’re a SL subscriber you can visit these fish in their natural environment. The artifishies (sorry, couldn’t resist) are hanging out in a shared public virtual space. I don’t know if this is unique, but it’s the first ALife project I’ve heard about that doesn’t reside in its own purpose-built sandbox.

There is a SL group devoted to ALife, but you’ve got to be a subscriber to even view the forums :-( Still, this looks pretty promising. It costs, which counts me out at the moment (not much, but I could also see it devouring time). I’d hope to see more of this sort of thing in the coming years though, when *sigh* I have an income.

(Found via the excellent blog collision detection.)

At least, the tiny first stirrings of this sort of experience have already, well, stirred :-/ I just read about the game known as The Beast, which was created to market the Spielberg film A.I., and was an online version of this sort of idea, but used the massive player base that the internet guarantees to distribute the whole experience, making it intentionally cooperative. It turns out there are more of these things (known as “Alternate Reality Games”, or ARGs), in fact there are sites where people post their suspicions that this or that advertising campaign might be the beginnings of an ARG (for instance the ARG Network).

I’m somewhat amazed that I managed to avoid hearing about any of this until now, it’s quite fascinating. There’s a science fiction short story I read some years ago, suggesting that this sort of activity might become the main learning paradigm for school children; as the pace of technological change speeds up, it’s no longer possible for schools to provide up-to-date prepared lessons, and the emphasis moves to giving children the skills to research breaking news and make informed judgements themselves. A typical classroom assignment becomes something like “Be the first to report a story that subsequently attracts international attention,” or “Get involved in a technological breakthrough.” (Unfortunately I can remember neither title nor author, and the collection it’s in is in a different hemisphere. If it rings any bells, let me know.)

I’m not sure what would be more exciting, ARG-wise: playing, or writing. Here’s Sean Stewart, one of the writers of The Beast:

On the game, there was no time for serious or respectable either. The game was freaking pastiche Armageddon: It started from a Spielberg script inflected with Kubrick notions from a Brian Aldiss short story with echoes of Dune and Clockwork Orange, for God’s sake. Political tracts. Corporate boasting. Sex-kitten catalogues. Mysterious Oriental Gentlemen. Wistful midlife crises. Suicide notes. Gibsonian cyberpunk. I stole or hot-wired or tweaked up Shakespeare and John Donne and Tim O’Brien, Ovid and Iain Banks and Puccini and Bladerunner. I wrote every genre character ever invented, I think–bounty hunters and kept women and a bad guy made of nightmares, religious zealots and angry teenagers and streetwise hackers. Hookers with hearts of gold available on request from Belladerma SRL, in sizes petite to extra large, or (in one of the game’s creepiest phrases) cut to fit. [ ... ] It was the most incredible, exhilarating experience of my professional career. It was street theater and a con game and a pennant drive rolled into one.

Sounds good, don’t it? But here’s the quote that really explains the appeal (Stewart again):

As rewarding [as] novel-writing can be, no job is quite as satisfying, at the end of the day, as Shadowy Mastermind. I recommend it to anyone who gets a chance.