Wow, thought she was smarter.

[Edward78]

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/27/business/barbara-corcoran-email-hack-trnd/index.html

[Andreas Lilja]

Not really stupid, should definitely have paid more attention.

 

Stupid is paying the IRS in iTunes gift cards.

[RasmusDC]

it must be nice to say.. "it is only money" to 400.000 dollars, shows a bit about the grand inequality in the states.

[RonnieOP]

18 hours ago, RasmusDC said:

it must be nice to say.. "it is only money" to 400.000 dollars, shows a bit about the grand inequality in the states.

Her story shows that anyone can make it in America. Nothing to do with inequality.

 

She grew up poor in a house with 10 children, worked 2 jobs as a waitress and receptionist, then started her own real estate company and newspaper that she ran and built for 30 years until she sold it for 70 million.

 

Nobody should be using her as an example of inequality because she proves the exact opposite.

 

 

 

 

 

[Techstorm970]

18 hours ago, RasmusDC said:

it must be nice to say.. "it is only money" to 400.000 dollars, shows a bit about the grand inequality in the states.

 

2 minutes ago, RonnieOP said:

Her story shows that anyone can make it in America. Nothing to do with inequality.

 

She grew up poor in a house with 10 children, worked 2 jobs as a waitress and receptionist, then started her own real estate company and newspaper that she ran and built for 30 years until she sold it for 70 million.

 

Nobody should be using her as an example of inequality because she proves the exact opposite.

Damn...

 

@RasmusDC Next time, do some research first!

[Andreas Lilja]

6 hours ago, RonnieOP said:

Her story shows that anyone can make it in America. Nothing to do with inequality.

 

She grew up poor in a house with 10 children, worked 2 jobs as a waitress and receptionist, then started her own real estate company and newspaper that she ran and built for 30 years until she sold it for 70 million.

 

Nobody should be using her as an example of inequality because she proves the exact opposite.

Selection bias. 

 

Great for her, not systemic. 

[RasmusDC]

On 2/29/2020 at 3:02 AM, Techstorm970 said:

 

Damn...

 

@RasmusDC Next time, do some research first!

i actually still stand by my opinion, if she is self made or not, having that way at looking at 400.000 still shows a large amount of inequality.. how many can say that in US... 1% or less? 

 

this is more than a whole middle class family in the US has in income in 4-10 years (span) in 2017 numbers. and even less today.

 

Nice for her, that she is self made... respect to that. 

 

And apparently earning a lot of money and having brains is not tied together. 

 

My statement was on the GAB of wealth or wealth distribution, not on the HISTORY of people. in all statistics there our outliers, all study also shows, that the chance of you making it in the "LAND OF OPPERTUNITY" is MUCH lower than anywhere else.

[Bombastinator]

On 2/28/2020 at 7:58 PM, RonnieOP said:

Her story shows that anyone can make it in America. Nothing to do with inequality.

 

She grew up poor in a house with 10 children, worked 2 jobs as a waitress and receptionist, then started her own real estate company and newspaper that she ran and built for 30 years until she sold it for 70 million.

 

Nobody should be using her as an example of inequality because she proves the exact opposite.

 

 

 

 

 

Not exactly.  There is lucky and good.  Good is required but so is luck, and the amount of luck is getting greater and greater.  The upper levels of American society have always been primarily inherited, but it is getting to be more and more of a thing and a caste system is forming.  Even in midieval Europe it was not absolutely impossible to raise status.  Merely extremely unlikely even with both ability and luck.

 

i recently watched a video about a guy who was shot and paralyzed from the waist down.  He claimed it was the best thing that ever happened to him because it gave him access to a higher level of society which he felt was impossible for him to reach. The “American dream” being flaunted here was only more than a dream for a very short period and that period is receding behind us.

[RonnieOP]

13 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Not exactly.  There is lucky and good.  Good is required but so is luck, and the amount of luck is getting greater and greater.  The upper levels of American society have always been primarily inherited, but it is getting to be more and more of a thing and a caste system is forming.  Even in midieval Europe it was not absolutely impossible to raise status.  Merely extremely unlikely even with both ability and luck.

 

i recently watched a video about a guy who was shot and paralyzed from the waist down.  He claimed it was the best thing that ever happened to him because it gave him access to a higher level of society which he felt was impossible for him to reach. The “American dream” being flaunted here was only more than a dream for a very short period and that period is receding behind us.

100% disagree. The "american dream" is very much possible for most people. It takes work, sacrifice, and time but its doable.

 

Ill be 30 this year, and i have two kids that turn 9 and 15 this year. In 2011 i was sent to prison for 23 months. Now in 2020 i have a home i own and last september i bought a business. And theres nothing special about me. Literally nothing.

 

I didnt grow up rich. I spent almost a year living in a car while moving across the country because my drug addict parents were running from the law. I didnt live in a house that wasnt condemned or on wheels until i was 15 years old. (And by condemned i mean 80% of the home was boarded up and we had an extension cord running to a neighbors home to power ours).

 

And compared to alot of the stories ive had people tell me. My journey isnt very impressive.

 

The "american dream" is alive and well for the vast majority of people. They just dont want to do what is needed to achieve it.

 

[TetraSky]

She's not really the one who fucked up though... The accountant/bookkeeper is the one that did. They should've called the assistant to make sure of the transaction first before sending that much money to what they believed to be the right email... 

[dalekphalm]

This is certainly a warning to all - but Corcoran isn't an idiot because of this. First, as others have pointed out, it was actually her bookkeeper that fell for the scam. But even in that case, these things can very easily happen to regular people.

 

We need more education and to spread awareness, yes. But we should not be shaming these people. Especially with how dedicated and/or convincing some of the scams are.

[RonnieOP]

10 hours ago, RasmusDC said:

i actually still stand by my opinion, if she is self made or not, having that way at looking at 400.000 still shows a large amount of inequality.. how many can say that in US... 1% or less? 

 

this is more than a whole middle class family in the US has in income in 4-10 years (span) in 2017 numbers. and even less today.

 

Nice for her, that she is self made... respect to that. 

 

And apparently earning a lot of money and having brains is not tied together. 

 

My statement was on the GAB of wealth or wealth distribution, not on the HISTORY of people. in all statistics there our outliers, all study also shows, that the chance of you making it in the "LAND OF OPPERTUNITY" is MUCH lower than anywhere else.

She wasnt the one that got tricked though. So no point in talking about her. 

 

And no its not much lower. At all.

 

Capitalism (which is what the us has) has pulled more people out of poverty then any other system in history.

 

Not sure where you get this idea that its hard to make it in the US because its not at all. You can make it harder on yourself. But thats not the systems fault.

[RonnieOP]

46 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

This is certainly a warning to all - but Corcoran isn't an idiot because of this. First, as others have pointed out, it was actually her bookkeeper that fell for the scam. But even in that case, these things can very easily happen to regular people.

 

We need more education and to spread awareness, yes. But we should not be shaming these people. Especially with how dedicated and/or convincing some of the scams are.

Tbh i wonder how the scammer knew her email address and knew what email address to spoof.

 

I obv dont know anything about her business but first thing that popped in my head was that someone inside helped pull this off.

 

I could be 100% wrong though.

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, RonnieOP said:

Tbh i wonder how the scammer knew her email address and knew what email address to spoof.

 

I obv dont know anything about her business but first thing that popped in my head was that someone inside helped pull this off.

 

I could be 100% wrong though.

Frankly it's not that hard.

 

First, most corporations have some email addresses that are visible to the public. Typically on the contact page or about page. Second, it could easily have been gathered from any number of third party vendors they deal with - all it takes is a single person with her in their contact list to have their email compromised.

 

Lastly, once you have a single email from an internal employee, it's usually trivial to reverse engineer their naming scheme to figure out anyone's email that you know the name of the person. Barbara is a very public figure, so her name is public record. Once you figure out how their company structures email addresses, it's trivial to figure out the name of a specific person. Same goes for the assistant, who you can probably figure out who the assistant is.

 

It very well could be an inside job, but I highly doubt it. It's not necessary. Especially if the scammer did their homework.

 

Hell, all they would need to do is call the company and ask to speak to Barbara's assistant or to speak with Accounting, and bam, now they know the name of both the assistant and the accountant.

[RonnieOP]

6 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Frankly it's not that hard.

 

First, most corporations have some email addresses that are visible to the public. Typically on the contact page or about page. Second, it could easily have been gathered from any number of third party vendors they deal with - all it takes is a single person with her in their contact list to have their email compromised.

 

Lastly, once you have a single email from an internal employee, it's usually trivial to reverse engineer their naming scheme to figure out anyone's email that you know the name of the person. Barbara is a very public figure, so her name is public record. Once you figure out how their company structures email addresses, it's trivial to figure out the name of a specific person. Same goes for the assistant, who you can probably figure out who the assistant is.

 

It very well could be an inside job, but I highly doubt it. It's not necessary. Especially if the scammer did their homework.

 

Hell, all they would need to do is call the company and ask to speak to Barbara's assistant or to speak with Accounting, and bam, now they know the name of both the assistant and the accountant.

 

 

We use different contact details for dealing with internally and externally.

 

I guess thats not a common thing.

[nick name]

On 2/28/2020 at 1:09 AM, RasmusDC said:

it must be nice to say.. "it is only money" to 400.000 dollars, shows a bit about the grand inequality in the states.

It's also nice that we use commas here with numbers.  Why the fack do parts of the world use a period to denote 400,000.00?  When did that become a thing?  If anything -- omit the punctuation so folks know that the period doesn't determine the separation between the dollar and the cent.  

 

And while I'm sure she considers the sum lost to be a large sum -- in relation to the rest of her world it isn't a large enough fraction to completely lose her shit over.

 

It's like a normal person losing $40.  Yeah, it'll piss most people off at first, but they'll get over it. 

 

It's the fraction of someone's worth that is usually what determines how angry they get and for how long.  

[dalekphalm]

Just now, RonnieOP said:

We use different contact details for dealing with internally and externally.

 

I guess thats not a common thing.

I don't think that's common at all. Perhaps it should be, but I've never heard of a company issuing separate addresses for internal communication. Granted, in something like Exchange/O365, it wouldn't be that difficult, as you can assign an alias to any user (an alias is basically another email address that links to an existing one - it's a "fake" email that points to an existing account), so you could have their primary address for external communication, and an alias for internal communication.

 

Of course, the moment that two employees are CC'd on an external email, it all falls apart, because most people just hit "reply all".

[NumLock21]

She got most of her money back.

[ARikozuM]

[Bombastinator]

6 hours ago, RonnieOP said:

100% disagree. The "american dream" is very much possible for most people. It takes work, sacrifice, and time but its doable.

 

Ill be 30 this year, and i have two kids that turn 9 and 15 this year. In 2011 i was sent to prison for 23 months. Now in 2020 i have a home i own and last september i bought a business. And theres nothing special about me. Literally nothing.

 

I didnt grow up rich. I spent almost a year living in a car while moving across the country because my drug addict parents were running from the law. I didnt live in a house that wasnt condemned or on wheels until i was 15 years old. (And by condemned i mean 80% of the home was boarded up and we had an extension cord running to a neighbors home to power ours).

 

And compared to alot of the stories ive had people tell me. My journey isnt very impressive.

 

The "american dream" is alive and well for the vast majority of people. They just dont want to do what is needed to achieve it.

 

“For most people”. Like say, winning the lottery?
your statement is basically “luck is not required. Only ability and effort”. This is probably false.  Luck plays a large factor.  

 It’s still more achievable than it was in the Middle Ages.  More perhaps than in some third world countries.  Much less so than it used to be,  Less so than the majority of first world nations.  And also less so than it used to be.

 

People with luck like to claim ability.  

[dalekphalm]

2 minutes ago, nick name said:

It's also nice that we commas here with numbers.  Why the fack do parts of the world use a period to denote 400,000.00?  When did that become a thing?  If anything -- omit the punctuation so folks know that the period doesn't determine the separation between the dollar and the cent.  

 

And while I'm sure she considers the sum lost to be a large sum -- in relation to the rest of her world it isn't a large enough fraction to completely lose her shit over.

 

It's like a normal person losing $40.  Yeah, it'll piss most people off at first, but they'll get over it. 

 

It's the fraction of someone's worth that is usually what determines how angry they get and for how long.  

Not to mention that her losing her shit over it will accomplish nothing. It won't make the situation any better, and will just make her feel like shit.

[Touch My Hamm]

Why security in IT is BIG BUSINESS currently. I talk with people daily about how most "hackers" do nothing more than social engineering and trying to trick you into giving them the information/money. This is an everyone problem and has nothing to do with where you live or how much money you make. If there is money involved someone out there will try to take it from you with least amount of effort...Its really sad...

[Bombastinator]

22 minutes ago, comander said:

Luck (being born talented, starting with decent resources, etc.) matters. So does preparation. 

The current fad of blaming everything on luck hurts people. 

There should be a culture of diligence and persistence. MANY people aren't living up to their potential. 

In many cases, it's less about what you have and more about how you use it and the habits you build. 

Oh I’d say it’s absolutely about that.  That’s the “good” part I was talking about diligence and what you described is a minimum.  I’m saying it’s also usually not enough anymore.

[RonnieOP]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

“For most people”. Like say, winning the lottery?
your statement is basically “luck is not required. Only ability and effort”. This is probably false.  Luck plays a large factor.  

 It’s still more achievable than it was in the Middle Ages.  More perhaps than in some third world countries.  Much less so than it used to be,  Less so than the majority of first world nations.  And also less so than it used to be.

 

People with luck like to claim ability.  

So if someone works hard and makes it...its luck?

 

So if you decide to pull double duty and work doubles, spend extra time off the clock learning new skills, and do all the crap things everyone else doesnt want to, to show dedication to your boss in order to get a chance...you didnt work hard you just got lucky?

 

Luck helps no doubt. Luck helps with everything and everywhere. But its not needed.

 

If you work hard and make wise decisions luck isnt required. Now if you are trying to achieve something very specific (like you want to live in this exact area, doing this exact job, and make this exact amount of money) then yea luck will play a big factor.

 

Any able bodied person is able to make it here. Its not going to be instant. But it will happen. Provided you dont make bad decisions along the way. Again luck isnt required.

 

It doesnt take much to live the "american dream". That dream doesnt mean you are rich with "fuck you" money. 

 

73% of the country will be in the top 20% of earners in their lifetime. Thats 100k a year. Is 73% of 300+ million people just lucky? If you have that high of a chance to be in the top 20% of earners how is that luck? 

 

So me saying "most people" is factually correct. 

 

Idk why you bring up the lottery. Most people dont win the lottery. Most people dont even play the lottery.

[Bombastinator]

32 minutes ago, RonnieOP said:

So if someone works hard and makes it...its luck?

 

So if you decide to pull double duty and work doubles, spend extra time off the clock learning new skills, and do all the crap things everyone else doesnt want to, to show dedication to your boss in order to get a chance...you didnt work hard you just got lucky?

 

Luck helps no doubt. Luck helps with everything and everywhere. But its not needed.

 

If you work hard and make wise decisions luck isnt required. Now if you are trying to achieve something very specific (like you want to live in this exact area, doing this exact job, and make this exact amount of money) then yea luck will play a big factor.

 

Any able bodied person is able to make it here. Its not going to be instant. But it will happen. Provided you dont make bad decisions along the way. Again luck isnt required.

 

It doesnt take much to live the "american dream". That dream doesnt mean you are rich with "fuck you" money. 

 

73% of the country will be in the top 20% of earners in their lifetime. Thats 100k a year. Is 73% of 300+ million people just lucky? If you have that high of a chance to be in the top 20% of earners how is that luck? 

 

So me saying "most people" is factually correct. 

 

Idk why you bring up the lottery. Most people dont win the lottery. Most people dont even play the lottery.

You’re asking for an absolute out of a probability.
 

There are a lot of mitigating factors and they’re hard to separate.  Part of luck is things like decent childhood nutrition and education and health care, which would include safe upbringing and other things that are being assumed here.  I brought up the lottery because it’s a fake theoretical free bump into a higher socioeconomic class.  Most people can do math, so few people play.  They can do math because they had education though.  There’s also a desperation factor.   The lottery is the most popular amongst the parts of society who can least afford to play because they are the most desperate.  The things used to be illegal.

 

As for that “math”. What you have tried to imply is that 73% of people make 100k.  Getting 73% out of 20% is pretty hard to do of course. 73% are part of the 20% some of the time huh?  I doubt that.  The hereditary 1%ers in there?  They would have to be. Cut out the top and bottom few percent off that and the numbers change very fast. Statistics are funny things. If you pick the right ones almost anything can be supported. America is still a more fortunate country than many.  My point is it is getting less so for a large section of the population while getting immensely easy for a few percent.  These few percent generally defend themselves with exceptionalism. They attribute things to hard work that wouldn’t have been possible without privilege.  It’s just a probability though.  A higher probability than in the miflddle ages.  And a lower one than it was.  People ignore education or other opportunities they receive.  More and more people aren’t getting those.  Especially people who are the wrong color or the wrong sex.  If a few people get vastly richer while the majority get poorer the number remains the same.

 

Any isn’t any anymore.  It used to be.

Edited March 2, 2020 by Bombastinator
Sentence on privilege added for clarity