Man, 83, tricked by scammers, gets 21 years to life for killing Uber driver

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/us/ohio-man-kills-uber-driver-sentenced.html

by fortran77 • 5 months ago

44 53 5 months ago

fortran775• 5 months ago

almosthere3• 5 months ago

When is the stopping point to get it so that our phone system stops scammers. We should migrate off phones except for personal calls to each other (without a number - more of a 2-step authorization, you can call me, I can call you, negotiated via links over email...

The phone number is dead, and the only last need for it is scammers and companies that want to record you but you not record them.

jackyinger• 5 months ago

While we’re at it let’s get rid of wire transfers, and transactions by bank id / account number. Something more fool proof and transparent is far overdue.

JumpCrisscross2• 5 months ago

let’s get rid of wire transfers, and transactions by bank id / account number

You can’t sent a Fedwire with only account number [1]. And this woman wasn’t shot because of wires, the man was told to hand over hard cash.

[1] https://onrr.gov/document/fedwire.pdf

abirch2• 5 months ago

Minimally we should make spoofing harder and use some basic TLS type technology for calls.

g8oz• 5 months ago

I thought STIR/SHAKEN was supposed to help. Whatever happened with that?

almosthere3• 5 months ago

I imagine government mismanagement.

RupertSalt• 5 months ago

A phone conversation, like an in-person one, is verbal communication, and therefore plausibly deniable -- even when it can be recorded or transcribed. Corporations continue to treat verbal conversations as unique.

Voice telephone, at least before TTS and LLM, also gives the humans a fighting chance at discerning emotion and lies.

Like it or not, the PSTN is still king in many regards. I find myself using telephone for contact more often than ever.

For example, medical offices, despite demanding all our contact info, will use all at their disposal to remind us of appointments, bills, test results, etc. Voice telephone is probably still the best way to negotiate and schedule an appointment, and if you really need to speak to a specific nurse about those labs, it's not going to be email.

You know all those Chat Buddy LLMs that corps have put on their websites as front-line CSR? They are usually worthless, because once you glitch out and need unique care or something, the chat LLM or the human chat CSR is disempowered and unable to help. I can't count how many times I thought I'd use the website or chat for convenience (or after-hours) and they wasted 30+ minutes of my time before admitting I must use a voice telephone number for contact for that particular issue. Even with Waymo, or my e-Bank with no branches: calling via voice is the only way to connect the two parties who are empowered to work issues and solve problems.

In fact it is even more pervasive, as there is more WFH and the mobile phone is ubiquitous. Your contact in a company may have an extension and a cell number. They may not be at their "desk" but picking up the kids, so they're on their cell, and hands-free, they're using voice. So the PSTN is still the primary channel within the company, as well as with the outside world. Sure, set up a Zoom call, or a Google Meet. It's not for everyone. Requires software infrastructure, advance consent and planning. Won't replace PSTN.

PSTN is like IPv4. While there are plenty of new modes of communication, the PSTN is still universal, rather mandatory, and indispensable, so I do not see PSTN-voice going away, but the telecom standards are still developing, such as STIR/SHAKEN, to combat the fraud and spam.

fortran775• 5 months ago

It's very hard to make people understand how scammers use third parties. Mom 92 year-old mother mailed a check that was stolen in the mail, had the name changed, and was e-deposited.

My brother (a lawyer!) wanted to sue the person whose name is on the check! I had to convince him not to bother; that the person's account that the check was deposited to was probably some other victom who was tricked into giving the bank login information away and his account was being unwittingly used to launder checks. The scammer was most likely overseas, but pays U.S. Post Office employees to steal envelopes that likely contain checks and send images (See https://www.justice.gov/usao-ct/pr/former-postal-employee-se... for example)

The bank reversed the check but we had to get a notarized statement from my mom, and it was a hassle for a 92 year old.

As far as this case goes, guns should only be used in self-defense when there's an immediate danger. Not punitively. This guy's life wasn't immediately being threatened and he deserves to have the book thrown at him.

abirch2• 5 months ago

Checks in their current form need to be sunsetted. Either have a way of printing a check locally that have QR codes that include recipient's name and the sender's financial institution. No static routing and account numbers.

mjevans• 5 months ago

That's the mindset isn't it?

*Punitive* use of force.

-----

Batman usually doesn't do too badly. Not only is it fiction but they're often against fiction level villains who are 'hardened' criminals in literal senses. Even then the violence tends to stop at the point where actual resistance stops. (They get tied up and delivered to the cops with maybe the black eye used in the initial apprehension.)

-----

Contrast this with what we see repeatedly on TV when poorly trained and poorly supervised law enforcement officers beat down or outright murder someone until they're not just not resisting anymore but are outright _unable_ to resist at all. Such excessive use of force in a professional context should also be a crime that is punished with congruent weight for the breach trust in a public official absent extenuating circumstances ('I had an emotional reaction' leading directly to deadly force should not be such a circumstance).

I do recall a highly unfortunate case of someone from WA state who was on some combination of super drugs such that there didn't appear to be a reasonable application of force to result in a successful outcome. More and better tools might help. Maybe net launchers and methods of incapacitating someone at a bit of a distance for mutual safety?

c22• 5 months ago

The scammer was most likely overseas, but pays U.S. Post Office employees to steal envelopes that likely contain checks and send images

Jesus, it's almost like Kaczynski was onto something.

mindslight3• 5 months ago

As far as this case goes, guns should only be used in self-defense when there's an immediate danger. Not punitively. This guy's life wasn't immediately being threatened and he deserves to have the book thrown at him.

I had agreed when I read your comment before I read the article. But after reading the article it feels like this is missing the mark. We're bumping up against the equivalent of gang stalking / stochastic terrorism here - someone being harassed through digital channels and put in a mental state where they're fearing for their life in the physical world.

A similar case of the phenomenon happened in NY a while back [0] with someone being killed for driving up to the wrong house at night, with the shooter presumably having been pumped full of general fearmongering by mass media. But the stark difference in that case it was the shooter's own media diet creating insular paranoia whereas here it was personally-targeted digital communications making the shooter feel threatened by the person ostensibly acting as an agent of those threatening him.

This is a tragic situation for sure, but falling back to applying fundamentalist judgement to emergent behavior is a mistake.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kaylin_Gillis

fortran775• 5 months ago

I'm not withoit any sympathy for the man. But if you choose to have a handgun you have to be 100% responsible for its use. I've owned guns when I've lived in rural areas, but I don't own one in Silicon Valley because I think the risk outweighs the benefit.

cucumber37328424• 5 months ago

It's easy to place all the blame on the shooter but you're basically ignoring the other 999,999 in a million of these situations where bad stuff happens that don't escalate to this point by doing that.

You can't just say that the people actually doing the thing (whatever that thing may be) are in the right because they are doing their jobs otherwise they become a black hole for infinite liability. You need to accept that the dead person was wrong to be there collecting that package at which point is becomes a question of who dispatched them (obviously not themselves in this case) on what grounds and under what circumstances, etc, etc and how did it lead to this failure.

Think about this like an industrial ancient, not some heartstring grabbing rage bait. There will always be crazy old men. Sure, send him to prison or whatever but how can the chain of events that lead to this particular crazy old man killing someone under these circumstances be broken. Uber needs to tighten their shit up, so does the phone system, etc, etc.

fortran775• 5 months ago

Agreed. She shouldn't have been there--not that it was her fault, but Uber shouldn't pick up packages and deliver them to others. Some other service should do that, and it should make contact with both sender and receiver first to make sure everything is on the up-and-up.

hshdhdhj44442• 5 months ago

Umm, it’s incredibly easy to blame the shooter because in those 999,999 cases the shooter was not effectively kidnapping the person they were supposedly afraid of.

This guy didn’t just shoot the delivery person whom they were afraid of.

He didn’t let her drive away even after she was clearly scared, explained she was simply an Uber driver, showed no evidence of weaponry and just wanted to drive away.

There’s a reason he wasn’t just convicted of killing the Uber driver but also of kidnapping.

metalman• 5 months ago

Anyone with a gun is 100% responsible for the outcomes of useing it. The training for carrying it and useing it must be in absolutes, you always dissable, unload, or holster a weapon unless imediatly required, chamber is checked, the barrell NEVER tracks across a human, there is never a situation where an armed person can not walk away from an unarmed person, repeated, tested, habitual life long habbits in gun handling. Or some asshole who tried to get off on the crime of cold blooded murder of someone who he let in his house, had left his home after he got a gun, he followed her out and shot her, she tried to escape, he shot her 5 more times while she was backing away, and she THEN slammed his head in her car door. True grit, wish she made it.

edit: pic from car right before he fires first shot

https://atlantablackstar.com/2026/02/03/ohio-83-year-old-man...

dayofthedaleks• 5 months ago

Getting grifted is no excuse for shooting a stranger.

fortran775• 5 months ago

Yes, and nobody here is disagreeing with you.

ddtaylor• 5 months ago

The amount of scams happening is insane.

The amount of people being wraponized into doing terrible things for others is insane.

This is kind of a gun story but not really IMO.

This is kind of like a story like the people who SWAT others and sometimes people die and sometimes they are held accountable.

If someone is committed to presenting a false narrative for a long time they can manipulate people into doing things. That's not new, but it's certainly more accessible than ever and nobody is ready for it =(

cucumber37328424• 5 months ago

The amount of people being weaponized into doing terrible things for others is insane.

Really is mind boggling when you look at it as "fractional evil". Some hypothetical clerk may make 99 "could go either way" decisions one way or the other to little ill effect and 1/100 or maybe 1/1000 of the time their decisions costs someone tens of thousands of dollars for no good reason for it could have gone either way.

How much of society's wealth is lost to such endeavors?

One wonders how much "evil" exists only because there exists some amount of legitimate activity it can be mixed among to dilute it enough that nobody cares.

Stevvo2• 5 months ago

This man was not "weaponized into doing terrible things for others". After he kidnapped an Uber driver and determined she was not a threat, he murdered her in cold blood.

zzrrt2• 5 months ago

I don't know about "in cold blood." Allegedly they threatened him and his family with death, and he didn't really have time to premeditate killing her. I guess the prosecutor is getting at your point when he said it was not a "reasonable person"'s choice to kill an unarmed person backing away, but I don't think it quite qualifies as cold-blooded either. Maybe I'm too pedantic, but personally it's a reminder to not let emotions push me into a horrible choice like this, because after the fog passes it is objectively senseless.

JumpCrisscross2• 5 months ago

amount of people being wraponized into doing terrible things

This story is headline news because it’s rare. The man shouldn’t have had a gun. That’s where a confused elderly man went from deserving sympathy to contempt.

jerlam• 5 months ago

The elderly man even figured out he was being scammed! The scammers didn't have the full name of the family member, and they had a key detail of the alleged situation incorrect.

When the elderly man called them out, the scammers responded with threats and this apparently triggered the elderly man into (unfortunate) action.

indubioprorubik2• 5 months ago

And every scam across borders is a flyer for nationalism, isolationist politics and a cold shower to multiculturalism - as it shows the prevalence of "scams" beeing different and socially accepted beeing very different in different cultures. And when scamming the elderly can be socially accepted career in a society, the opinion of the affected on that society will corelate.

prmph3• 5 months ago

What are you talking about?

Have you heard about the Epstein files? Was that a failure of multiculturalism?

Not only that, some people from western cultures are also preying on poor women in 3rd world countries with sex tourism.

Western cultures are supporting the rape of resources and corruption in poor countries around the world.

Capitalism, as practiced in western cultures, is in many ways a sad scam that leads to a lot misery for a lot of people.

These are just a few examples to show: all cultures have bad in them. No culture is good

hshdhdhj44442• 5 months ago

Outside of the obvious, the tragedy of the young woman losing her life, the fact that the scammers likely will not be impacted at all, etc. a couple of other thoughts.

- It’s strange that we still haven’t setup any sort of authenticated form of communication with official parties. Email/phone call scams have been around for a long time. They’re very easy to fall prey to. There’s no reason our phones shouldn’t be able to inform us that a certain number is officially from the IRS, Cops, Verizon, etc.

- This is a form of Swatting. Delivery companies, and also the police, etc need to do better in ensuring the people demanding services are where they’re demanding the service and/or the person who lives there is aware and genuinely needs to be visited. - We need a bit of a broken windows policing for online/digital scams. The reason they are blowing up is there is hardly a risk of being caught. And the cost/benefit analysis probably suggests that th police really shouldn’t be involved in most of the individual cases or expend too many resources. However, this blows up the number of cases so the aggregate cost does indeed grow too high. So there needs to be an effort to prosecute and expend resources even on low level cases so the criminals get the message that they’re not gonna get away with it.

Neywiny2• 5 months ago

In re your first point, it's tricky because the advice is to call them back on the publicly available number. Problem is, I know somebody who fell for a SEO hijack and called a fake number. Not everybody knows how to spot a scam. The guy here did though, and he used my techniques (ask questions they'd know the answer to). He knew he was getting scammed. I think it was just an emotional override with weighing the risks. This one is very different than a call saying the IRS wants Google Play gift cards or whatever. Especially with the scammers having the woman actually show up. That's next level in all the wrong ways

xethos• 5 months ago

You didn't say, and I wouldn't want to assume the situation, but calling the number on the back of a bank or credit card would work better here (in case it was a bank). This is also an argument in favour of paper bills, or logging in to a customer portal as a best-of-the-worst option

coldtea2• 5 months ago

We need a high trust society.

Everything else is band aids on a broken one.

nathanaldensr• 5 months ago

Agreed. We (meaning the United States) used to have this for the most part. It doesn't scale to mediate all human interactions with authentication/authorization.

jhanschoo2• 5 months ago

Cah you clarify the mechanisms by which a high trust society reduces the incidence of scams/becoming victims to scams?

alephnerd• 5 months ago

It’s strange that we still haven’t setup any sort of authenticated form of communication with official parties

Because this would add compliance and regulatory overhead which the Telco industry has lobbied against, and activist organizations like the EFF will screetch muh liberties while taking donations from those very companies, and HNers will dutifully complain about the descent into authoritarianism.

Additionally, a large portion of smaller essentially fly-by-night VoIP vendors and MSPs have an incentive to not ask questions about who is purchasing their services despite attempts at regulation by the FCC [0].

[0] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-24-1235A1.pdf

MagicMoonlight• 5 months ago

Phone scams shouldn’t even be a thing. Every phone number has to be registered to a company. Simply hold those companies to account for all crimes committed using them.

If you sell numbers to Indian scammers, then you take the hit for all the scams, because why are you selling phone numbers to scammers?

magicalhippo• 5 months ago

It’s strange that we still haven’t setup any sort of authenticated form of communication with official parties.

My alarm company had me come up with challenge and response words. Yet when they call they want me to say my word first. Like how do I know they are who they say they are? Caller ID can easily be spoofed.

So so much for that idea...

mindslight3• 5 months ago

The security model here is different than usual. The goal of the challenge is to authenticate you to them - in case they are calling a landline, or a left-at-home mobile phone that the burglar is now answering. So this actually makes sense.

If they call, you say you word, then they can't authenticate themselves to you, it seems like you must then change your word.

For active man-in-the-middle, I don't think this protocol is designed to protect against that.

randyrand• 5 months ago

"Objectively, a reasonable person would not kidnap and ultimately murder a defenseless person because they were scared,” Mr. Scott told the jury.

That doesnt sound objective to me at all.

mrala• 5 months ago

It sounds objective to claim a reasonable person would not kill a person because they felt scared. Based on the video footage[0], a reasonable person would be able to tell that woman presented no threat. Even if you argue shooting her in the leg because he was scared, it is nearly impossible to claim he was still scared and he has stalked her around her car and then shot her five more times. That is objectively, an unreasonable response to being scared when it’s apparent the woman was not endangering his life.

[0] https://youtu.be/RSlOY39ynaY

prmph3• 5 months ago

Sad story.

It is partly also due to all the guns and the shooting-obsessed culture, folks. The way people are quick to use guns is not normal. I was shocked by the recent ICE shootings.

And the fact the woman was of an ethnicity most associate with crime didn't help either, I daresay. The man probably had his biases confirmed and resorted to deadly violence without much tought.

saaaaaam• 5 months ago

And the fact the woman was of an ethnicity most associate with crime

I feel like I’m missing something here. What ethnicity? And why do “most” associate it with crime?

prmph3• 5 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_stereotype_of_African...

Man, 83, tricked by scammers, gets 21 years to life for killing Uber driver

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