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Soulex posted:This isn't a scam per say but something I've been noticing is Ill get a call from my area code and I'll pick up to hear a "There's good news for you!" Robot. I tried to call back once to yell and complain only to get a normal sounding dude. Apparently, they used his number to call me, and it happened that my wife started getting these return calls a bunch. So much that she had to change her number. My guess is that the scammers do this to not get caught, but also to run up minutes or data and make you pay out in the long run. The standard MO for autodialed scams that I've seen is to spoof caller ID and use the first six digits or so of your phone number, then fill in the remaining with some random set of digits. This is supposed to make you trust the number, because it appears local. The real calls, of course, are coming from a country with loose telemarketing regulations by way of a VOIP gateway that doesn't ask questions. They don't give a poo poo about you using your own minutes and data, or what might happen to whatever person owns their randomly chosen number.
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Mar 5, 2016 19:02
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MightyJoe36 posted:So lately I get one or two of these per week from different addresses (and they go right into my Spam folder): Reshipping scams in particular are used to launder stolen credit cards into merchandise at Crazy Vlad's Discount Electronics. The scammer buys a bunch of merchandise online with stolen CC numbers and has it sent to the victim's house, then has the victim send it along to some other drop point (likely out of the country). Russian and eastern European organized crime are especially fond of this one, probably because they're so deep in CC fraud to begin with. Assuming the victim doesn't get a visit from the FBI during their "employment", they run up a month or two of shipping expenses, then get paid with a counterfeit cashier's check. That may come with the old "sorry, we made a mistake and sent you too much money, could you please wire us the difference via Western Union?" add-on, too.
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Apr 24, 2016 20:35
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Cyrano4747 posted:fixed that for you. Games of chance are all ripoffs too, but there's a difference between a Vegas casino and a mob numbers game.
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Jun 30, 2017 16:07
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Zamboni Apocalypse posted:You forgot Strip Clubs. Not to mention 
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Jun 30, 2017 16:38
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bulletsponge13 posted:So what is up with the "I buy houses!" Scam? How does it work? https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/realestate/looking-for-eyecatching-profits-from-ugly-houses.html People buy houses for cash at way below market value, then flip them at market value. It's more like payday loans, rent-to-own, and buy-here-pay-here car lots: not exactly a scam, but it tends to take advantage of desperate people who can't access normal financing options or afford to wait for the regular process to go through. The signs are usually hand-lettered crap with google voice numbers because they're not legal (almost all cities have laws against throwing advertisements everywhere), and part of the customer base for "cash for ugly houses" places are people who "don't trust banks" or big corporations.
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Jun 25, 2018 03:18
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Mouse Dresser posted:Similar to the “we buy houses” thing, I’ve always been curious about the signs that say “We buy diabetic testing supplies!” Diabetic testing supplies are expensive if you have bad or no health insurance. People with Type 1 diabetes can go through 100 test strips a month, and they can cost more than a dollar apiece. If you have Medicare or good private health insurance, and diabetes, they're cheap to you - usually just a copay for whatever your doctor says you need. Doctors will usually write a prescription for a bit more than a patient needs in a typical month, so they're less likely to run out. That means there's a large grey market for test strips. Sometimes it's legitimate ("my doctor told me to switch brands and I've got a bunch of boxes I'm never going to use"). Sometimes it's grandma not testing as much as she should so she can sell the strips to afford meat that's not from a cat food can. And sometimes the resellers just sell counterfeit strips to uninsured people. Healthcare in the US, it's pretty hosed up! 
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Jun 27, 2018 04:07
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Doctor_Acula posted:My bank got kind of indignant with me today when I filed the dispute. Like 11.21 was so trivial. The amount isn't the point. Did you talk to the people who handle disputed transactions, or the people who handle fraud and stolen cards? There's a big difference between "I think that I was accidentally overcharged for a sandwich" and "I think somebody at the convenience store is running fraudulent charges and took down my CVV2 number."
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Jun 29, 2018 01:15
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Eric the Mauve posted:They do. Apple got caught red-handed at it and publicly admitted to it a few months ago. No, the Apple "scandal" was a function that, when the OS detected that the phone's battery was so degraded that it couldn't run at full power any more, it would keep the phone CPU running at lower power so the phone wouldn't randomly shut off. I actually had this problem on a (then) 3-year-old iPhone 6; it was a good feature that made my phone stop shutting off when google maps tried to run every high-power component in the phone at once. Old phones get slower with software updates because nobody cares enough about them to make sure they run well, and the project of "package up and test the update for the old phone that doesn't sell any more" gets farmed out to interns and people who aren't trusted with anything else. (I would like to thank everybody who thought they'd uncovered proof of a massive conspiracy for pushing Apple to offer cheap battery replacements, though)
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Sep 24, 2018 03:55
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MightyJoe36 posted:This was my reason for not being an organ donor. "Big ER Docs will just kill you for your organs if you're a donor" is an idiotic myth. Nobody in an emergency even has time to even figure out if you're an organ donor, and if that ever happened to anyone it would be the mother of all malpractice suits, with plenty of people involved enough to blow the whistle. There are a lot of problems with organ donation, because people who just have to find a way to extract profit from any good thing are working their way into it. That doesn't change the fact that organ donation is fundamentally a good thing. If your skin gets ground into a $100,000 for-profit rear end treatment and your pancreas saves somebody's life, guess what? Your body parts still saved somebody's life, and it didn't cost you anything.
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Oct 14, 2019 15:31
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Dumb Lowtax posted:**𝘛𝘏𝘐𝘚 𝘐𝘚 𝘞𝘏𝘈𝘛 investors 𝘈𝘊𝘛𝘜𝘈𝘓𝘓𝘠 𝘉𝘌𝘓𝘐𝘌𝘝𝘌** The one thing hardcore Marxists, Ayn Rand-worshipping libertarians, and centrist corporatists all agree on is that owning the means of production is how you get and stay rich. BiggerBoat posted:My conservative ex father in law agrees with you but he thinks that social security and medicare are the real Ponzi schemes and sees no correlation whatsoever between the stock market and a Vegas casino, nor any problems with tying people's retirement money to the banks who gamble there. He called me naive but never really explained how it's not (almost) exactly like a casino. Seems like gambling to me. Short term, the stock market is more or less like a poker game at a casino: people play near-zero-sum games with the brokerages, exchanges, and other businesses running the system taking a constant haircut, based on perceived edges that might be real or imaginary. In the long term, all that back and forth averages out to zero and you just end up collecting profits or a larger ownership stake of the business. There's still risk - businesses fail, and lose market share, all the time - but it's not "the house will always win" gambling. It's, basically, how the rich get richer. Social security isn't a Ponzi scheme, it's an incredibly important backstop for retirement, and putting social security trust fund money into the stock market is a terrible idea pushed by people who already own billions in stock and want to juice up demand for what they've got. But the stock market isn't the same as a Vegas casino, either. Pikkety's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" is a solid look at how wealth accumulates for investors, without any rose-colored glasses about the effects of that accumulated wealth for society.
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Apr 9, 2020 17:19
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Sydin posted:Because Apple fosters an almost cult-like consumer culture where your choice to embrace Apple products is a lifestyle. It's part of your identity and provides a sense of self-worth. This is why you have tons of people who can barely afford to pay rent still lining up every year to trade up for the new iPhone or Apple Watch. This is also why Apple does not want you to be able to repair old devices, but rather make you take them into the Apple store where an employee can push a newer, shinier phone while you're surrounded by newer, shinier phones you can play around with while you wait. Apple was already found guilty of pushing updates that intentionally degraded the quality and battery life of older models of iPhones in an attempt to force people to upgrade out of frustration. Their business model and sky-high valuation are entirely reliant on a yearly buying cycle and people realizing they could just hang on to the same iPhone for even just two or three years would massively eat into their profits. 7/10. You’ve got passion, and that’s nice improv work making up the technical details, but don’t be afraid to go back to the classics. You’ll get a better response if you drop a throwback “hipster scum” or “Crapple” reference in there, as long as you don’t overdo it
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Feb 10, 2021 02:56
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An “urgent communication from the owner” is probably going to end in a “special assignment” using company money to send gift cards, Western Union type transfers, or cryptocurrency to the scammer. If they’re real nasty they might tell the employee to front the money and it’ll be reimbursed. How they get from the start to the finish is up to the scammer, but it might be something like “oh no, a very important package is lost, you have to take $5,000 out of the cash drawer and send it to me, the owner, so we can replace the contents.”
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Jul 30, 2021 15:13
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