I am hoping you are hinting that this story is an exact replica of that behavior... pulling off a social formula, on a slightly bigger scale. Even if you are not, having gone through a similar phase back in early years with that exact same motivation, I am!
This is a text book usage of social engineer. Putting in divorced parents, single child getting all the attention from the engineer dad making the kid an above average amongst his/her peers, and then putting in a girl, so to make you focus less on the flaws in the story and drool over the hot-geek image more... evergreen combination.
I would doubt though that Forbes came up with this on their own. Rather, it could very much be someone from anon, just having little more fun.
Thanks for making that explicit. My point was that the context (story) she used makes it so we want to believe her. In the same way I could setup a context that makes you want to believe and ignore irregularities.
I would expect that the journalist as a filter makes this even more likely. The journalist would then ignore irregularities or dull them in the story presenting the most consistent pieces in the story, not the least.
I would say one advantage that I had, is I could test responses, over and over again. But that is always what allowed me to basically have a formula that would result in 95%+ conversion on the phishing attacks. The other 5% often times where do gooders trying to tell me not to be in chat rooms or to warn me about pedos.
This is a text book usage of social engineer. Putting in divorced parents, single child getting all the attention from the engineer dad making the kid an above average amongst his/her peers, and then putting in a girl, so to make you focus less on the flaws in the story and drool over the hot-geek image more... evergreen combination.
I would doubt though that Forbes came up with this on their own. Rather, it could very much be someone from anon, just having little more fun.