Can we really avoid strangers completely? It takes a day to know someone and then form a relationship with that person. Severally, people we don't know in person but must have seen our work online have reached out to us to either promote a brand or work on some project together. It is our duty to verify if those offers are genuine.
It is ridiculous advice. Most people are on social media and work social media like Linkedin. Most people are exposed to all kinds of strangers all the time. In this day and age, such strategy is only for a fringe minority of people.
If we all decide to avoid dealing with strangers completely, we will be limiting ourselves. All we can advice ourselves is to be extremely careful when dealing with strangers no matter how innocent they may appear. Not all strangers come to us with good intentions, it is left for us to be smart in all our dealings with them
The only mistake I see that Alex did here was not verifying those scammers to ascertain if they are really business people.
How exactly do you believe verification can avoid a scam that involves a zero day exploit? They can create all kinds of fake documents and profiles. They can even hire people to pose in video calls if you believe deepfakes can be easily detected by other humans. Verification does not really avoid this situation.
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This your instance applies to people who seek to verify the information from only one source, that one source they are not certain of. If I find myself in a platform that offers me something beneficial, I will ignore what people in that platform think about the platform and go verify from different unrelated sources to ascertain the authenticity of the information I seek to have. Anyone who uses this my approach is 100 times better than the person who does not make any effort to verify.