Real life scams , whats the best you've seen ?

mtnwrunner said:
Some dude on rokslide that scammed me for 50 bucks to help pay for a set of swarovski binos........

Randy
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wait, there are folks on Rokslide that are kind enough to help me buy a set of Swarovski's? I just have to ask, and the money will roll in?
 
Someone from Florida got a hold of my credit card number and quickly ran up a couple grand in a matter of minutes. Luckily my bank caught it and shut it down.
 
Not sure if y'all have heard of "check washing" yet but I almost got hit for a lot of $$ out of my business account. Short version: got call from Sherrif in SC. They pulled a car full of "thugs" on I-95 along with very sophisticated printers & imaging equipment along with over $500k in checks they were taking to Charleston to a check cashing place that was part of their ring.
Here's the kicker... I put check in post office slot going to the other business post office box, so no mailboxes.
They have people that work for them at post offices who take the mail bags home every night & go through them looking for checks. Sons of bitches.
I try not to ever mail checks anymore. Either bank ACH or fed ex
 
eamyrick said:
Mother in laws bf. 2.4 mil crypto IPO scam. Sold his house in Aspen and dumped all his money after doing his “research.” Dude is an accountant who taught at two different well known colleges.

Wife has two friends (who both have Masters degrees) who have both lost over 10k with cop warrant scams.
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Another case of education does not equal intelligence lol, especially with what the "schools" have become
 
This topic really trips me out. I'm sure it's because I've been programming since BEFORE the Internet was opened up to the public. And because I've seen all sorts of variations of the "Nigerian Prince" type of email, etc. Seen and heard all the different types of scams they try to pull. Social engineering, you name it.

What I find so weird is how all these people, younger than me, seem to like to paint the picture of people in my age bracket (thereabouts, be 57 in March) as being reDONKulously non tech-savvy!

I'm just sittin' over here trippin off that because, well, nothing could be further from the truth. Most people in my age bracket or even a little higher, BUILT most of the tech!

One thing I rec'd recently... that I thought was just lame and sad... since nowadays some azzwipe in a 3rd world butthole of a country could just make use of AI to help them with their lack of English Grammer and syntax... and yet you'll STILL run into ones where the f'd up English gives it away!!!

This email I'm speaking of? They did a decent job of visually making it "look" legit. But the very first sentence it had on it, the English grammar was F'd up, ever soo slightly. Had to just SMDH.

I see all this stuff right away because I used to extensively correct my first wife's college papers to help her. She was an illegal immigrant from Central America. So you end up seeing how this other person, coming from a language with THESE sort of rules over here, seeing the pattern to how it affects the WAY they would elect to write a sentence in English.

The more you know about other languages.... you can sometimes detect what is likely the primary language this person speaks the majority of the time, by the WAY in which they flub what they're trying to write in English.
 
Torque said:
I received a call, from my bank's actual phone number and the caller ID was my bank's name, requesting my account information because fraud had been detected.

I did not give the woman on the other end any information, but being able to use those two pieces of information for the call would fool a lot of people.
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For a LONG time now, they've been able to spoof Caller ID isht.

Another thing I've seen, is some of these devious little pricks will have their AutoDialer spoof the caller Id to be some telephone number that has your same beginning 3-digits after the area code, to make it seem like this call must be from somebody within your little neighborhood there.

NOTE: For those of you that might still happen to have a landline (if you've got kids, it's another layer of them having another method by which they can call in to you. So that they have no excuses not to).

Literally all damn day? the home phone line will receive bs auto-dialer calls to it.

Sometimes.. it's a bot trying to figure out if the number called has a live answerer. It will log that it had a live answer in ther DB table, which adds value to it when they sell that listing to someone else.

OR.. if you're foolish and try to pick-up and utter a common normal answer... you'll hear a brief delay while that answered call is THEN.. routed over to a call center.. which you'll hear right away from all the background noise.

What's awesome is... early on.. I learned that I needed to change the outgoing announcement msg on my answering machine on that line, so that it's NOT saying any of the usual words humans say upon answering a phone line. BECAUSE.. these Auto-Dailer bots they've got setup are listening to the responses and presumably doing speech-to-txt to turn it into words, then compare the words with some known table of words would be my guess.

Anyway, so I set the outgoing message to now say "Engage Anti-Robocall Technology." Just that. That's it.

And what's great about it is... you'll occasionally here that scenario where the dailer fwds it to a call center place.. and you get to hear THEM.. launching into their Hello schpeel... and since there's like this.. maybe 2-3 second delay before they actually get to HEAR when the line that picked-up said... you get to listen to them then hear that announcement message come in to THEM.. and THEM realize THEY got played and hang up!
That sh!t.. I fkn LOVE!

But yeah definitely also setup your lines with NoMoRobo. it doesn't stop it all. But it does reduce it somewhat.
 
TheGDog said:
This topic really trips me out. I'm sure it's because I've been programming since BEFORE the Internet was opened up to the public. And because I've seen all sorts of variations of the "Nigerian Prince" type of email, etc. Seen and heard all the different types of scams they try to pull. Social engineering, you name it.

What I find so weird is how all these people, younger than me, seem to like to paint the picture of people in my age bracket (thereabouts, be 57 in March) as being reDONKulously non tech-savvy!

I'm just sittin' over here trippin off that because, well, nothing could be further from the truth. Most people in my age bracket or even a little higher, BUILT most of the tech!

One thing I rec'd recently... that I thought was just lame and sad... since nowadays some azzwipe in a 3rd world butthole of a country could just make use of AI to help them with their lack of English Grammer and syntax... and yet you'll STILL run into ones where the f'd up English gives it away!!!

This email I'm speaking of? They did a decent job of visually making it "look" legit. But the very first sentence it had on it, the English grammar was F'd up, ever soo slightly. Had to just SMDH.

I see all this stuff right away because I used to extensively correct my first wife's college papers to help her. She was an illegal immigrant from Central America. So you end up seeing how this other person, coming from a language with THESE sort of rules over here, seeing the pattern to how it affects the WAY they would elect to write a sentence in English.

The more you know about other languages.... you can sometimes detect what is likely the primary language this person speaks the majority of the time, by the WAY in which they flub what they're trying to write in English.
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The slight errors are there on purpose. If the scam looks too legitimate, then the scammer might waste time on someone who ultimately doesn’t pay. The scammer wants exactly the right kind of idiot who ignores the slight grammar errors and still responds.
 
Q_Sertorius said:
The slight errors are there on purpose. If the scam looks too legitimate, then the scammer might waste time on someone who ultimately doesn’t pay. The scammer wants exactly the right kind of idiot who ignores the slight grammar errors and still responds.
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I feel ya on that. That'd make sense.

Precious little, in terms of detail, gets past these eyes o mine. Just due to the nature of my work as a coder. It's an afflication, you see and notice ALL the detail that make most other folks eyes just glaze-over.
 
2 have almost gotten me.

Google calling asking for verification as someone has my password via google. Asking for security code sent to my email in perfect English, before I give it I ask for supervisor which they provide. Ultimately I didn't give it back thinking they have access to my account why would they need this step. It was all AI I'm assuming but it took me a long time on the phone for it to click, no accent, smooth english.

Other one is I run a few short term rentals through Airbnb. It's Airbnb's number calling me telling me a security breach and they need to lock my account etc. Ask for me to read off the code that is texted to me. Before I do I ask them to send me a code through Airbnb on my app, give me a run around on why they can't and luckily that clicked before I gave them access. I'm guessing they gain access and switch the bank account payouts to another account instead of my business account. Clever

More recent not me but someone stole my handle on here and got a guy for a few hundred dollars, I got it switched back to me ASAP but looking at the PM's he was way too smooth, couldn't tell a bit and no red flags at all with how he was interacting with them.
 
Jimmy said:
Couple years ago my grandfather got fooled by the "I'm your granddaughter and I am in trouble and need cash or the police are taking me to jail, you CANT tell anyone, please help me!"

We caught him leaving the house with several thousand dollars in cash. He was 85.
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Shoulda detoured him to the strip club :)
 
Bugger said:
The lottery.
Your chance of winning the powerball: 1/300million
Government’s chance of winning: 100%

It’s the most insane return on an obvious scam in history.
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My calculus teacher in high school called the lottery, "A tax on people who are bad at math." That is 100% the ONLY thing I remember from that class!

I get plenty of scam and phishing emails at work. I work for the county and our IT department requests we forward all suspicious looking emails to them. I can't imagine the game of whack-a-mole they have to play. I was coming back from vacation and trying to catch up on my work emails. I had one claiming that it had hacked my computer's webcam and recorded me pleasuring myself. If I didn't send them $5k in bitcoin they were going to forward the video to my entire contact list.

I dutifully forwarded the email to the head of the County's IT department but assured her I was completely confident the threat was false. Just wondered where I could pick up some cheap crypto...for a friend.
 
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