I avoided this exact scam. The most important thing is to never trust an incoming phone number. If they can't give you a publicly posted phone number that you can call inbound, they are a scammer.
Google has dozens of properties and it is easy to generate an email from one of them that seems to confirm the attacker's identity. Never trust any of these to identify a legitimate representative.
I too avoided it; I had an interesting interaction with the (American) call center scammer -- he called, said his story; he gave me a callback number when asked; I asked him for a web page I could verify a callback number. He quickly rattled off a legitimate Coinbase webpage URL, I believe their ToS page, which does include a phone number. He then hung up rather quickly.
Sadly for the scammers, that number didn't match. But, I note it was part of his script to sound confident and give a working URL. Pretty strong.
It's already hard to verify if a phone number is legitimate, and I think it will get harder. And on the other hand, easier to get a search engine AI to incorrectly spit out the wrong number.
This user just doesn't understand how to use an LLM properly.
The best solution to hallucination and inaccuracy is to give the LLM mechanisms for looking up the information it lacks. Tools, MCP, RAG, etc are crucial for use cases where you are looking for factual responses.
There was something in Google workspace that allowed the scanners to have an email sent to them, AND an additional and of their choice. But when I asked about calling them back, I was told that wasn't possible, which made me suspicious.
Can anybody understand how it detects cheating (throwing your phone off a tall building)?
Assuming it's just using the accelerometer to detect freefall, is there any way to distinguish ascent and descent? GPS is probably too inaccurate and too high-latency to assist here.
Perhaps it can tell the difference between reaching terminal velocity and crashing into the ground, and it penalizes the former?
Dropping a phone will result in an immediate change from normal 1g gravity to freefall. Throwing it will involve a brief spike of high-g acceleration in between.
There have been a few of those already, for at least a decade. IIRC, there was some weather app that crowdsourced readings from users with certain motorola phones and gave shockingly granular weather.
I also recently went through the Coinbase interview process, and was pleasantly surprised that they offered this compensation for the take-home interview part.
Overall, a 4-6 hour task, to be completed on your own over a 1-week period, seems reasonable to me.
Estimates online suggest that GWB has an IQ of 120-125, making him smarter than the average college grad, perhaps slightly less intelligent than the average person with an advanced degree.
It's also worth noting that IQ is not a particularly good predictor of presidential success, and only a partial measure of intelligence.
Meanwhile you only need three 500€ bills to make up for the average European income.
(And 500€ is 36651 rupees.) Those 500 and 1000 rupees are the largest denomination bills in India, but you need almost 10 times more of them to make up for the respective average income.
In fact, the same is said in Europe about the absolute uselessness of 200 and 500 euro bills. I have only held a 200 euro bill once, and never a 500, but also thanks to the Schengen area it is trivial to (illegally) being insane amounts of money to Switzerland. This is why the EU was pressuring Switzerland to abolish bank secrecy.
If you're spending 30k, paying an extra 20 for a banker's draft is insignificant. And it's not like you buy a car every week. (I also can't imagine feeling safe carrying anything like that much cash around. What if you lost it?)
Banker's drafts can be an even bigger pain in the ass in the EU, with some banks charging percentages for them... And losing one of those tends to be a Bad Thing too.
Anyway, my point was that despite being rare the 200 and 500 euro notes are far from "absolutely useless".
I really struggle to see how it's useful to an ordinary person. You maybe save a little money, sure, but for a non-1%er the risk just seems completely disproportionate. I mean any dealer/business would accept a bank transfer, right? So it only makes sense in the first place for buying a car person-to-person (and for friends/family a bank transfer would work too). Carrying 30k to meet a more-or-less stranger who knows you're going to be carrying 30k? Sheesh.
Are banker's drafts the same thing as money orders? That's how I paid my cars; they are worthless if stolen (though if you lose them, the money's gone) because only the recipient can convert them back. Banks give them out for the same cost as withdrawing cash, which is a few euros.
Currency conversions are largely irrelevant to most people's daily life. What matters more is how much you get paid, the cost of house, food, and transportation.
Always think in terms of local currency or you will do much worse than getting down-voted. As my wife says about Chinese currency: "You have to respect the RMB!"
Google has dozens of properties and it is easy to generate an email from one of them that seems to confirm the attacker's identity. Never trust any of these to identify a legitimate representative.