The world, as I am frequently forced to observe, is divided into two distinct groups of people: those with a fully functioning brain, and those who wander through life wearing crash helmets indoors because they find shoelaces too intellectually taxing.
Normally, these two factions stay safely apart. But every so often, a phone call telling me my Mac is full of viruses or an email arrives telling me my daughter is stranded and needs money or, as in this case, a piece of cardboard arrives in the post from Malaysia to bridge the divide.
It’s a “Scratch & Win” ticket. Yes, really. A physical, dead-tree lottery ticket dispatched from Kuala Lumpur by a shadowy outfit styling themselves as “Dreamscape Adventure Travel”. This is a first for me, but it had ‘suss’ written all over it, and I recognised it as a scam so ancient, so utterly devoid of imagination, that it probably made the Pharaohs roll their eyes.
While every spidey sense I had told me that this was a scam, I didn’t actually know for sure. I had visions of that scene from the TV series “One Foot in the Grave” where Viktor Meldrew and Margaret receive 2 tickets for an all-expenses-paid holiday overseas and assume it is a scam and throw it away, only to find out that it was absolutely genuine and a gift from their friends who didn’t think to explain why they had sent these tickets in the mail.
So, what do you do with such a masterpiece of low-effort villainy? You could burn it. You could feed it to a dog. Or, in a stroke of modern genius, you can toss it at an artificial intelligence and watch the silicon do what it does best: crush utter stupidity with terrifying efficiency.
You see, I didn’t spend hours cross-referencing Malaysian commercial registries or calling international phone numbers to see if Dreamscape Adventure Travel was a legitimate corporate entity or a bloke named Kevin operating out of a shed. I simply used AI to do all the heavy lifting snd confirm I wasn’t going to miss out on, as it turned out, $248,000.
And the machine—our cold, unblinking, digital overlord—didn’t even blink. In less time than it takes to say “advanced fee fraud,” it dissected the shiny orange card. It didn’t look at the barcode, or the serial number or the cheerful little green leaf logo. It looked at the pattern.
“It’s a scam,” the AI essentially declared, with the weary tone of a man explaining algebra to a golden retriever.“Everyone wins. They want your money for handling fees. Throw it in the bin.”
And therein lies the beauty of the method. We live in an era where scammers are weaponising global logistics to flood letterboxes with cheap cardboard, hoping to catch the elderly, the confused, or the terminally optimistic. But we are fighting back using the ultimate lazy weapon: artificial intelligence.
You don’t need to be a detective. You don’t need to leave the sofa. You just take a photograph of the brazen nonsense dropped through your door, let a massive neural network chew on the data for a fraction of a second, and bask in the glorious confirmation that humanity remains deeply, hilariously cynical.
The scammers lost. The machine won. And the only casualty was a small patch of grey foil that never stood a chance.
Step by step, this is what I did.
For convenience, I used my iPhone.
I have a couple of AI bots on my phone and all are very similar in their methodology. In this particular case, I used the + button in Google Gemini to take a photo of the offending scratchy and send it directly to the agent.
Then, in the prompt, I explained, in very simple terms, what had occurred and what I was looking at…namely, that I had received these from Malaysia without any context or warning.
In less than a second, it analysed the photo and told me what I already suspected: that it was a scam. It then proceeded to tell me how it worked and what to expect if I was to scratch the ticket. It also warned me in very stern terms not to in any way scan the QR code, call the number, or send an email. Hilariously, it predicted what I was going to find if I did scratch the ticket, which was in this case a $248,000 instant win.
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