FBI warns “phantom” hacker scams are emptying financial accounts
So many of these scams start the same way: when the victim is contacted by a random person.  Phones, email, social media, and postal mail tend to allow this by default (being contacted by a rando anywhere in the world).  But maybe the default should be that users&#x27; inboxes and incoming &quot;ports&quot; on such services are  locked down for the average user, such that only a few trusted senders, to whom the user has previously given access (maybe with a per-sender access code) can contact that user.  Marketing and customer service departments, security researchers with honeypots, and adventurous individuals may want to leave such incoming &quot;ports&quot; open, but the average person probably doesn&#x27;t need or want to have their communication network accessed or unwittingly expanded by others.  They probably only want to communicate with their existing, trusted contacts and to be able to add new contacts organically, but don&#x27;t really want or need to allow anyone to &quot;slide into their DMs&quot; without prior authorization from the recipient&#x27;s end.  (Special emergency protocols may be needed to allow verified, vetted incoming communication in the case of true emergencies, in order to give people the reassurance that they&#x27;re not missing out by locking down their incoming &quot;ports&quot;.)<p>Communication technologies have made the world small and flat, but maybe we need to enlarge it and unflatten it unidirectionally, on the sender&#x27;s (and scammer&#x27;s) side.  Some people already do this manually on their phones, by refusing to answer calls from random, unknown numbers.  Maybe such defense measures should be enabled by default for the public at large, with the option of carefully and partially disabling them, if desired.