Everyone should know the mantra – if it is too good to be true, then it is not true. Somehow plenty of people, including many smart people just forget this a lot of the time.
The first time I remember seeing films with characters inserted into old scenes was Forrest Gump. Forrest is seen with JFK, Richard Nixon, and others looking like he was there at the time. The same film used one helicopter to look like seven in the scene where he arrives in Vietnam. No one believes it is real when presented in this context.
(Forrest meets JFK)
Superhero films and fantasy are now filmed on green screen and look totally realistic. The computer generation makes them more akin to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? than live action films in a traditional sense.
(X-Men: Apocalypse)
It used to be requests from Nigerian princes or other African politicians, offering huge sums of illegal money if you would only send them your data and a few hundred pounds to unlock customs. People fell for it. Or Microsoft Global Lotteries where you were randomly selected for $1,000,000 from your e-mail address (and surely if Bill Gates was doing that it would be Hotmail addresses not Google or Yahoo).
Nowadays there are special offers from retail companies, or bank accounts/ Paypal accounts to unlock. Even the simple trick of replying to see the real e-mail address it is from or hovering off a link that purports to be real but sends you to some random site that will be used to extract your money is beyond some people.
Random messages from HMRC to refund you money are another winner. If your e-mail isn’t a real name it can be a giveaway. Dear HotDiva32, you have a tax refund to claim should be giveaway.
People even still fall for the phone call scam where the Police claim that they need you to transfer all your money into a secure account to help them trap a fraudster at the bank. So you cannot tell anyone at the bank.
On holiday in 2016 I used a cash machine that I think took my details. Whether it was that or not someone tried to use a clone of the card a month later in the Cayman Islands. The bank was really good, they stopped the withdrawals and texted me. I made sure I called back on the number that I had not on the one in the text and it was all legit. I got my money back.
Schools need to teach financial management; IT scepticism and critical thinking.
The thing that worries me is that technology has got to the stage where fakes can be made of people speaking and doing things that they have not done. Deep Fakes.
Fake news is rampant and weaponised to the extent that human turd Donald Trump points to the real news and calls it fake. His baying, moronic supporters swallow it. If you are British and support Johnson and his gang of nationalists, yet laugh at Trump, here is some news – Johnson lies almost as often as Trump.
Nina Schick has written a wonderful book about this.
I really worry about humanity’s future unless people learn to distinguish reality from what they want the world to be like.
I had heard this song a lot of times, but I never knew what it was until I watched the credits of Forrest Gump. It was used in the Vietnam scenes – a conflict that still seems to define the USA’s foreign policy psyche to this day. Buffalo Springfield were very much of the same period as The Byrds (https://fivemilesout.home.blog/2020/12/16/nowhere-is-there-warmth-to-be-found/ ) combining psychedelia, country, folk and rock.
For What It’s Worth
Five Miles Out 