[Cryptography] Reproducible results, scientific method, fraud enforcement, etc.

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 12:27 PM, ianG <iang at iang.org> wrote:

> On 8/10/2015 14:32 pm, John Denker wrote:
>
>> James Randi, a respected expert in the art of fooling people,
>> famously said "scientists are easier to fool than children".
>> That's because they are not accustomed to being lied to.
>>
>
>
> On that, James Randi makes for some interesting reading including on
> social engineering (the security connection):
>
> http://skepdic.com/projectalpha.html
>
> Another group that is well known to be easy to fool is doctors.  They are
> the number 1 target for boiler room operations, so I hear.
>

I would discount that sort of claim because one of the things about fraud
is that most of the widespread ones tend to move through affinity groups.

A while back we noticed that a heck of a lot of dentists were being caught
up in Ponzi schemes, not just one scheme but several. And so people were
theorizing about dentists being more susceptible.

Then there was the Madoff fraud where he had separate feeder funds for the
Jews, the Christian evangelicals, etc. and the reason was clear. Basically
the reason the frauds spread is because the groups communicate. Doctors go
to conventions, dentists go to conventions, they know each other through
loose connections on a once a year sort of basis. Retirees go to
'investment seminars' as something to do.

Any large scale fraud requires a feeder network to support it and while
some of those get rolled up when the scheme crashes, some do not and they
have address books full of contacts in one particular community.

Finally criminals prefer to rob rich people than poor people and they
prefer not to try robbing people who might spot what they are up to. So
boiler room operations are not going to go after Wall Street investment
bankers and lawyers are a bit risky. Who is the next richest group of
easily identified professionals?
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