Adversary inspired services
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Previous week we started looking at examples of what services public side could offer or how existing ones could be modernised when citizen’s automation budget and other concepts free resources and money.
Sometimes it is good to look at what the adversaries are doing, learn the best practices from them and utilise these new ideas for good. Let’s explore…
Fraud Corps
Different online frauds are gaining speed globally. Typical examples like older Nigerian letters where you can earn hugely just by helping a cousin of a deceased Nigerian prince to unlock inheritance, service technician calling to claim your computer is compromised and you need to install remote control software so they can help you etc. Service they do provide in deed, but not the one you expect.
How to turn this concept around?
Small frauds are beneficial on society level as they makes people aware that not everything can be trusted. The betrayed will share experiences to friends and on social media making communities more risk aware. Personally of course, they can be devastating experiences.
Could same service be provided without the ill effects - why such fraud services should be left for private sector entrepreneurs alone?
Fraud Corps (FCs) is a public service organisation offering a wide portfolio of fraud schemes to the general public that later return the money to victims. This serves the purpose of creating awareness without any loss. It also provides a way for individuals who enjoy unorthodox transactional interactions with people to follow their life’s true calling in legal manner. Being helpful and becoming true cornerstones of society.
Recruitment may experience some difficulty in finding honestly dishonest people. As alternate data scientists may be able to turn to machine learning techniques and teach computers to automate the process - to push our buttons and tickle our fancies in all the digitally wrongfully right ways.
As unorthodox method as it is, this will reduce the amount of lost money to fraud. It’s really a way of society cheating itself so that I would not be cheated by any other.
Fraud Corps product development will undoubtedly source inspiration from the private fraud artists and this is not even very difficult. First Fraud Corps impersonate regular citizens and engage in lengthy dialogues and small scale transactions with genuine fraud operators to learn the best practices and latest tricks from the true professionals. At the same FCs tie them up for non-profit or low ROI engagements.
National Gullibility Index
Many other sectors of society can improve by testing them in production. Why limit the idea to just citizens? Fraud Corp concept can become a true multi-disciplinary service.
Sample services:
I studied myself and found others short of the standard. Make autoethnographic studies (a study where practitioner studies themselves), write your own biases and prejudices down and try to get this passed as genuine article in scientific journals.
Why are you never listening to me? Try to get warrants for home searches or telephone tapping with increasingly weaker arguments.
I’m certified. Buy online various certifications and try to get hired into different positions. Finland some years ago a person was practicing several years as a doctor with diploma bought from illegal markets in Russia.
Money. money, money aka berniemadoffing. In banking try to take out loans with fraudulent claims and fabricated business cases with increasingly bigger and more obvious calculation mistakes in spreadsheets.
Another bites the dust. Standard Nigerian letters from acquittances of the late princes.
Good Vibrations. Homeopathic watch, where movement has been removed but the healing vibrations are still retained inside the case.
Mice say so. Do or find research with mice and report them as applicable to humans. The gold standard of click-journalism of today.
As a result, a national gullibility index (NGI) can be calculated. By combining results around the global a global gullibility index (GGI) will be made available. Governments in future may have numeric targets how much to lower the NGI overall and try to focus on domains where the NGI is large or on the rise.
You may think such testing makes the world a worse place as society is built on trust and such constant bombardment and even rewarding it is a grave violation of that. A contrary argument is that every system and organisation out there is already tested or attacked against and drawing in curtains and plugging ears won’t make it go away. You can think of the relaxation of financial regulations that led to 2008 financial crisis as such an attack.
Affordable Wildlife Products
Today there is rampant epidemic of counterfeit production of practically all items - fashion, watches, spare parts for cars and airplanes - with high margins. Sometimes called affordable alternatives to brand items.
At the same time many endangered species are facing threat from poachers that sell parts of them to international markets. It would seem there is clearly an underserved market in the production of wildlife items - ivory, rhino horns, shark fins, big cat skins etc.
By producing these in vast quantities in factories, the demand present in the market could be met without hurting any endangered species. Due to larger supply the prices would come down, reducing the payback from hunting real animals. Different quality levels would be produced serving different customer segments. Since some people always want the genuine thing, the absolute best counterfeits would be sold only in very limited quantities at astronomical prices thus validating their authenticity.
The wildlife products today are hunted down by local population in absence of other earning possibilities. The affordables need thus to enter the value chain through them, otherwise the hunting will likely continue. This is a true win-win. For local population the affordables are a cheaper, less risky alternative, wildlife gets saved, everyone wins. If one is caught, it was done in the best interest of the country's nature - acting as a true patriot. Everyone can keep their position in the value chain, margins are better, conscience is better (maybe not perfect, but better...), part of the earnings of the production factory can be used to fund stricter ground monitoring making hunting of real animals even more risky.
Additional value-add services can be thought of like wiping the affordables with real animal dung for increases authenticity and customer satisfaction. Genuine dung-treated replicas should command a nice premium.
Governments in areas with endangered species can think of having dedicated ministry for this - Ministry of Affordable Wildlife Products - to oversee good quality, tax gathering and wildlife protection.
On the leading edge today are techniques where for example keratin and real animal DNA are 3D printed to make among others Rhino horns with identical genetic finger prints to real ones. The long term solution will be when microbes like e.coli are trained via gene editing to produce unlimited quantities of ivory, rhinos horns. Then you no longer can speak of affordable alternative as it is the real McCoy – physically the same material.
Affordable Antiquities
Same concept as above can be applied to other high-demand, excludable products as well. For example, in certain countries there is high demand for antiquities and self-organising teams are making private diggings and plundering the rich past. These countries typically have limited financial means to protect their heritage and may also have problems with corruption making existing efforts less efficient.
Production of affordable antiquities by well-funded, best-of-breed artisans and manufacturers can offer these countries a completely new source of revenue. There is less demand to destroy the original past and at the same time the highly stressful occupation of digging in the dark or creating sideline replicas will become a regular nine to five job in nice production environment.
In summary customers get what they want, prices are more reasonable, there is more and richer supply, work for artisans is no longer so stressful and even the added benefit of buying the products from shady middlemen can be preserved as this seems to add to the enjoyment of the clientele. High price for best replicas as guarantee of originality is another feature that possibly is a must for customers.
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