Free B00A3OGH1O EBOK by Allen Wong

of my classmates knew how to make them, but they thought the ninja stars were the coolest things they’ve ever seen. One day, a classmate who was a year older than us told me that he would pay 50 cents for each of my ninja stars. But he said that I’d have to let him try out my paper ninja stars at home first before he would pay me the next day. So he took my whole box of a dozen or so ninja stars with him home. He ended up never paying for them. When I asked him about the money, he would always find an excuse to explain why he didn’t have it. I trusted him, because I was gullible at that age. My brother had to explain to me later on that I’d just been scammed.
    And when I got on the internet, there were even more scams. I had my first major experience with an online scam back when I was a teenager. It involved a web-based game called Neopets®.
    One of the biggest crazes during my time in high school was online multiplayer games. Neopets became very popular at my school. You basically control a virtual pet, and you must play Flash games to gain money to buy food and clothes for your pet. There was even a store interface that you could set up to sell your in-game items for in-game currency. It was through these customizable stores that people were scamming victims.
     
    Lifehack #15: Use social engineering to get what you want.
    The creators of Neopets were ignorant enough to allow HTML tags for your store. They even allowed you to add custom cascading style-sheets (CSS). So scammers of the game would sell high-valued items at low prices to attract unsuspecting victims to their Neopets store. But they also hid their actual store using CSS, and created a fake store made out of HTML. If you clicked on the fake store item in an attempt to try to buy it, you were taken to an external website that resembled the login page for the Neopets website. After the victim enters his username and password into the fake login page, the scammer can use that info to log into the victim’s account.
    The whole setup is what computer security professionals called ‘Phishing’. It is a play on the word ‘fishing’, because the whole setup resembles a person laying out bait and fishing for what he wants (and in this case, Neopets accounts). What the Neopets scammer would do next was log into the victim’s account, buy cheap items from his own account’s store at ridiculously high prices, and then create a fake shop for the victim’s account to reel in even more victims. This allowed the scammer to transfer a lot of in-game currency from the victim’s account to his own account. The whole setup could be repeated over and over again with increasingly higher success rates as more and more fake shops were being set up.
    The hack was pretty interesting to me because it was more of a social engineering hack than a computer hack. It relied more on the hacker’s ability to deceive the human mind rather than his ability to find vulnerabilities in a programmer’s code. I studied this type of social engineering extensively and mastered it myself. The ability to convince a massive number of people to do what you want without them knowing that they are being manipulated proved to be quite useful later on. It was actually a lot like how chess players tried to convince their opponents to move their pieces in a certain way without them knowing that they were being influenced into doing so.
     
    The 1% Rule
    I never fell for these scams, but I learned that there were many naïve people out there who would. That gave me the confidence to believe that given a large enough sample size, there was bound to be someone who would do what you wanted him to do. I called it the 1% rule.
    The 1% rule is simply my theory that about 1% or more of people in a large enough sample size will do exactly the opposite of what everyone else is doing. Take movie ratings for example. Even if a movie is universally praised by a majority of critics, there will always be a