This was my argument when I first encountered the problem in the Sequences. I didn't post it here because I haven't yet figured out what this post is about (gotta sit down and concentrate on the notation and the message of the author and I haven't done that yet), but my first thoughts when I read Eliezer claiming that it's a hard problem were that as the number of potential victims increases, the chance of the claim being actually true decreases (until it reaches a hard limit which equals the chance of the claimant having a machine that can produce infinite victims without consuming any resources). And the decrease in chance isn't just due to the improbability of a random person having a million torture victims - it also comes from the condition that a random person with a million torture victims also for some reason wants $5 from you.

Where is the flaw here? What makes the mugging important, despite how correct my gut reaction appears to me?