6 Ways People Got Screwed By Websites You Use Every Day
It's no secret that the internet is an amazing place to indulge your inner sociopath. You don't even need a reason most of the time. But what if you did have a reason? Like acquiring riches? Could being a sociopath help with that? Yes, it can very much, as we demonstrated last year. And would you believe that in the time since, things haven't miraculously gotten better? Consider these fresh new examples ...
Porn Users Are Paying for Fake Camgirls
Masturbation, much like the sea, can be tumultuous and difficult to predict. Although the basic technique (It's friction, folks. Use friction) generally stays the same, for many of its most experienced practitioners, the visual aids they'll find most appealing during the act can vary considerably, and can often be quite particular. Which is where camgirls come in.
To save your blushes, we're going to explain this to you as if you don't know.
Here's how camgirls work. Whilst browsing the internet for porn, a customer sees an ad pop-up offering a private and personal show by an attractive person. Let's say a girl. The customer -- a man in this hypothetical situation we're constructing -- agrees, and after shelling out some money, he's connected to a video chat room with the girl. Then, via a system of typed messages and grunts, the customer requests the camgirl do various things, which she happily agrees to.
"NOW HOLD YOUR HAIR UP AS IF IT WERE A MUSTACHE. DO IT SEXY."
But in some cases, this camgirl isn't real at all, and is nothing more than a customized porn video -- an archive of prerecorded ass slaps skillfully woven together by some dude sitting at a computer. Any hitches or blending problems get blamed on lag, and everyone walks away happy ... except possibly the dude making it, who probably thought he'd be doing more with that cinematography diploma.
"So long as you ask no follow-up questions, my job's going fine, Dad."
This isn't a well-hidden industry, either. If you know where to go, you can buy a collection of these video clips for as little as $10. We're not going to tell you where, though, because this isn't really a career we recommend, for a few reasons. One: These video packs are often stolen from real camgirls who went through all these motions, had them recorded without their permission, and aren't making any money from their resale. Second: This is exactly the kind of career which could end with you becoming the sex puppeteer for one of your relatives.
"So long as you don't ask how they got there, could you clean some viruses off my computer, son?"
Google Maps Made The Hollywood Sign Disappear
The Hollywood Sign has long been a must-see attraction for tourists visiting Los Angeles. Perched in the Hollywood Hills, it looms over the city's skyline, serving as a metaphor for how important this one place is to television, film, and popular culture in general.
It also does a pretty good job of looming over the people who live in the hills below it, drawing in hordes of tourists who jam their streets, litter, and trespass. More troublingly, these tourists can get in the way of fire trucks which need to access these highly combustible hills. In short, the proximity of the sign can be a bit of a nuisance -- the kind of thing people who own knee-shakingly expensive homes don't like dealing with.
"This place is incredible. Let's close the fucking door."
So the residents fought back in the most devious way possible. Most tourists were finding their way into the neighborhood by using Google Maps, and then kind of blundering their way through the streets to get as close to the sign as possible. So the local residents got Google to change the GPS co-ordinates of the sign, directing any tourists to a lookout at Griffith Observatory, miles away. Even the "walking" directions on Google Maps ignored the public hiking trails people could use to legally access the sign. You could be standing underneath the thing, and Google would still direct you on a two-hour death march to the distant observatory.
Any closer, and they would still smell the putrid stench of the poor.
On the one hand, this is slightly defensible. There were real public safety concerns which needed to be addressed, and neighborhoods around the world have implemented all sorts of measures to calm and control traffic. On the other hand, fuck these rich guys. This was clearly done mostly for selfish reasons. One of them has even threatened to sue a blogger for directing tourists along these same public roads and trails. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck them.
If you set your coordinates for Mt. Lee Drive and arrive between midnight and a minute past, they might not release the hounds.
More generally, dealing with public safety concerns is kind of the job of the government, isn't it? Like, we're having all these fucking elections for a reason, right? For public roads to be hidden thanks to the actions of private individuals and companies is a little bit spooky.
Rogue Wikipedia Editors Are Holding Pages For Ransom
Although Wikipedia can nominally be edited by anyone, it has a core group of editors and writers who wield an unusual amount of authority over the site. This is slightly cliquish, but a core group like this does serve as an effective guard against anonymous edits from people with usernames such as *WeEdDoNg420*8====D~~~~.
"This botany article needs a section about how Hitler had some good points."
But having a small group of people with such wide-ranging powers can lead to abuse. In an investigation code named "Orangemoody" (all of the good names were apparently taken), Wikipedia unearthed a scam wherein one of its editors would write an article about a company or band or whatever, and then hold it hostage until the target paid a small fee for its safe publication. The targets couldn't fight back by writing or editing their own article, because the scammer could use their eldritch Wiki powers to block them. It was essentially a slightly boring combination of cyber-squatting and blackmail.
It does get worse, though. After paying the initial "fee," these targets were presented a second offer: For the ass-clenchingly large sum of $30 a month, the scammer would then "protect" the article from vandals and deletion and things of that nature. That's right; some underpants-wearing would-be gangster invented a fucking Wikipedia protection racket.
"Got a real nice brand here. Would be a real shame if a citation was needed for that."
Crowdfunded Inventions That Are Powered By Wishes
It used to be that if you wanted to invest in a new business, you needed to be a venture capitalist and have the requisite millions of dollars, suspenders, and major cocaine habit that required. But nowadays, the heady life of an international financier can be yours with nothing more than a Kickstarter or Indiegogo account.
The downside of pantsless investment -- there had to be one -- is that it's easy to lose a ton of cash to someone with an active imagination, big science words, and a copy of Photoshop. Consider TellSpec, for instance. This company was marketing a magical device that promised the ability to analyze the nutritional content of a plateful of food simply by waving it around. How? Science, probably! Or at least something that sounds a lot like science. Despite being forced to admit that the prototype used in their promotional video was a pack of lies, the company walked away with a payday of $386,000 -- a sum which looks to have gone mainly to building a fancy website and looking up how to sue their critics.
Got a garage door opener and zero grasp on reality? Then you already own a working TellSpec!
Then there's this scientifically questionable thingamajig which can monitor glucose levels without drawing blood. Or this magic ring which uses jazz hands to control smartphones. Or this umbrella made out of air and unicorn kisses. Less hilariously, there's this group, which has raised thousands of dollars to provide free energy machines to various humanitarian relief efforts. Thousands of dollars which might have been perhaps better spent on literally anything else.
"Could we get regular energy instead? Like, grains or something?"
All these campaigns have essentially found a weak spot in the fraud-detection policies employed by these crowdfunding sites. Because they're actually making something, even if it can't do what's promised, it makes it hard to quickly identify them as fraudulent. You'd need baseline scientific literacy for that. The sites have to rely on their users to complain first, which is a lot to ask of their know-how. Even the media isn't entirely innocent (we never are). Consider our habit of writing glossy promotional material for every interesting laser razor that comes along.
Who wouldn't want to go face-first into one of these?
And this all ignores the seedy truth at the heart of crowdfunding: Even the best-run, most honest, and most viable campaigns are asking people to make an investment whose best-case scenario is getting their money back, while all the professional investors involved are coming out with much, much more.
Airbnb Is Full Of Imposters, Slumlords, And Squatters ...
In the beginning, Airbnb was almost too good to be true. A nice source of revenue for someone who wasn't using their home, and central accommodation at prices far cheaper than they could get at a hotel for the traveler. Who could possibly lose?
Oh. Yeah.
But with growth comes problems, and Airbnb has come down with some fucking seedy ones. Like having a pair of customers wake up to find an angry man standing over them, asking who they were, and why they'd drunk all his booze and also redecorated his dining room with a hookah. In that particular case, it was because that man's roommate was an asshole who posted the place on Airbnb without his permission. The exact same situation occurred with another couple, who went away to Burning Man and left their home in the hands of a house-sitter, who then flipped it for $2,000.
Or there's this one guy who's made what is essentially a gentrified slum, turning a Manhattan apartment into a 22-bed hostel where he forces his "guests" to sign a contract with some bizarre obligations. Like a minimum 30-day stay, a provide-your-own-sheets policy, and a "giving permission for your belongings to be inspected at any time" clause.
It only just stopped short of a requirement to don ritual shrouds.
And those are merely the ways owners have abused the system. Renters are even worse. Here's a case of a couple overstaying in a rental so long that it became squatting. Another well-known case involved these two jagweeds who stayed in an Airbnb for 30 days, making them legally un-evictable under local tenancy laws. It was only after great legal expense that they finally left, though not before dickishly threatening to sue the owner, claiming the house's water had ruined their espresso machine.
And hey, speaking of Airbnb being full of fuckers ...
... And Porn Producers Might Use Your House For Filming
In 2012, Los Angeles County passed Measure B, which requires all porn actors to wear condoms. Intended to halt the San Fernando Valley's slow-but-steady transformation into a bioweapons facility, the legislation wasn't too well-received by the porn industry, who have complained that there isn't much of a market for condom-positive porn. Which is why the industry began shooting in neighboring counties, often in the homes of unwitting Airbnb'ers.
"Honey, do you remember installing that giant hook in the ceiling?"
In one case, a woman rented out her home for several days, only to return to find sex toys, lube, enema kits, and a refrigerator stocked with male steroids. And although you don't really need to be a detective to figure out what happened there, just to cinch it, she also found a business card belonging to Michael Lucas, a well-known porn actor and producer.
That is, well-known if you stick around to watch the credits. Which you probably don't.
It could be worse, though. Because it always can. In Sweden, some Airbnb landlords have discovered prostitution rings being run out of their houses.
The new economy meets the oldest economy.
When Adam isn't praying for an internet apocalypse, he tweets. He also has an email address where you contact him with, well, whatever you want. He's probably going to end up regretting those words.
For more ways people beat the system, check out 5 Organizations That Gamed The System And Screwed The Public and 5 Brilliant Loopholes People Used To Cheat The System.
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