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My old Hotmail account easily lets the most scam spam through, and I dutifully report each one as phishing. I figure that account is old enough to drink, so who knows how many lists it ended up on. The latest wave has almost all been "Re: [email address before @hotmail.com] Payment-Declined-Order#595-6864-FUC" in structure, with the From field spoofed to be a legitimate company but the actual return address just some random email. My similarly ancient Yahoo account almost never lets anything through, so I'm not sure what Microsoft doing differently. My newer outlook.com accounts also do better spam filtering than my Hotmail account gets, for whatever reason.
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Sep 11, 2023 00:57
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:Also since the speakers aren't stolen, just crap with a medium price, they're doing something that's either legal or almost-legal so there's not a lot of risk to the scammers. Stealing expensive speakers is serious, probably felony, theft, selling stolen goods is also a crime, and both of those are things police and prosecutors like to pursue for prison time. Selling cheap speakers but pretending they're high-end is probably legal or at worst something like conducting commerce without a business license, you might get a fine but will probably will just get told to leave the area if caught. I think it's pretty textbook fraud to claim you're selling something high-end that is actually crap, but the stolen goods story probably reduces the number of people who will report being scammed.
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Sep 14, 2023 06:41
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Flipperwaldt posted:I don't quite get it, it says three different ways that you've already paid it and spells out not to pay again. Are they looking for people to identify themselves as marks by disputing it? Creating a trail of credibility to bill them more later? Yeah, they want people to freak out and think they have been billed for something they didn't order, and then harvest personal/financial info when they follow up. That's why so much of current spam is fake invoices and order confirmations and poo poo.
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Sep 19, 2023 18:56
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I answer sometimes just out of morbid curiosity. I did years of phone work of various kinds, so I'm pretty used to telephonic trolling.
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Sep 30, 2023 07:54
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Tagra posted:We had someone knock on our door at 8:30PM one night. Normally we would ignore it, but there were wildfires nearby and we thought no one would knock this late unless it was something pretty important? Some years back I was living and working in a different city, and gave blood during a Red Cross blood drive at my work. After that, for literal years, the fuckers spam called me doing a hard-sell trying to get me to donate blood again. Like classic "What day and time should I sign you up for?" pushy bullshit. The fact I had moved to a different city where the blood bank was NOT Red Cross didn't seem to deter them. The only thing that finally shut them up was when I told them I had just had emergency gallbladder surgery and was not going to loving donate blood until I had recovered. So, yeah, I don't have a great opinion of the Red Cross, either.
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Oct 1, 2023 21:12
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Volmarias posted:O negative poster detected. O positive, but yeah, that probably had something to do with it.
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Oct 1, 2023 21:43
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Neito posted:These operations are so low-margin low-effort that the overhead of putting down "555-555-5555 is a mark" is probably too much effort. Easier to just spam the entire list all the time. Yeah, I think that's reasonable. Spam calls and emails are pretty much just the old fax spam adapted to different technologies. I still get the occasional fax spam at work, including classic 419 scam stuff.
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Oct 4, 2023 19:12
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Blue Footed Booby posted:It could also be there's no link and it's really trying to bait a reply ("I think you have the wrong address") as the hook for the next stage. I've gotten Nigerian prince style spam that didn't ask me to do anything, just "I am rich but now I'm dying of cancer and I realize what is really important please be good to your family God bless," end of email. My all-time favorite 419 scam email (or maybe it was fax) I got ended with a requirement that before me and the scammer split up millions and millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains we had to donate 10% to charity or the scammer would call the deal off. I thought that was a nice touch.
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Oct 4, 2023 19:58
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Shifty Pony posted:If I recall correctly the USPS will notify bulk senders when a mail piece gets forwarded due to a change of address, if the senders request it. The senders then update their databases with the new address without the person ever having to notify them. Not quite. If you file a change of address form it goes into the National Change of Address database, which companies can pay to access. That's why bill collectors track you from place to place, and why junk mail can easily ramp up. I first learned of the existence of this when I worked in the mortgage industry and had a huge fuckoff hassle because of it - the mortgage was in both the husband and wife's name, his name was first on the mortgage, they split up and she kept the house, he moved out and filed a change of address form, she needed to get a mortgage modification because of the 2008 crash, we generated the documents and mailed them out, but because of the NCOA database it got mailed to him instead of her, and he was an absolute bastard and refused to forward the documents on to her. That incident made me look into it and learn how the system worked, and it is also why I haven't filed a change of address form since then. One nice side effect is I get way less junk mail and online people searches stop having my address updated since that time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Change_of_Address
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Oct 22, 2023 10:53
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Tunicate posted:Just drone strike the call centers until they stop, Obama established tou don't even need a warrant. Maybe I should be reading the Terms of Use more carefully when I'm installing new software...
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Nov 15, 2023 21:03
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Recently at work we've had a wave of spam that comes in as a warning from your "email administrator" that your account is 100% full, with a button to click to clear space. It's from the wrong domain, and looks pretty fake since it is completely different-looking from our normal emails, and on top of that our system flags it as being from an external source, but IT still had to send out a warning to people to not click anything in that message. That's one reason why I don't like to have any of my personal devices on the work network.
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Nov 16, 2023 09:26
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Midjack posted:The wildest thing I ever got was a silver certificate in change at a subway sandwich shop one time. No idea how it ended up in their register. Are they actually valuable now? I remember I used to see them more frequently when I was kid (so, like, 1970s to 1980s) but haven't seen on in forever now. Waste of Breath posted:https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/have-a-2-bill-laying-around-it-could-be-worth-thousands/ Thanks for posting the article, and I have to say it also includes one of the dumbest sentences I have read in a long time: "The U.S. Currency Education Program says that as of 2017, there were 1.2 billion $2 bills in circulation, with a face value of $2.4 billion." Why, yes, 1 x 2 = 2. Brilliant observation there.
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Dec 5, 2023 02:43
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Not quite a scam, but years ago I pissed some guy off and he signed me up for the PETA newsletter with the name "Cock." So it would be whatever nutjob was in charge of PETA at the time making an earnest plea for a donation from Cock. I assume he was trying to annoy me, but I just found it hilarious.
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Dec 18, 2023 09:08
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MightyJoe36 posted:I see from my Instagram feed that the old Medical Billing Work From Home scam is making the rounds again. Could you briefly describe that one? Is it obvious, or could it sucker someone actually looking for work to fall into it fairly easy?
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Jan 29, 2024 19:50
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bort posted:https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/home-medical-billing-businesses Okay, cool - thank you. I want to be able to warn people who might be vulnerable to that one.
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Jan 30, 2024 05:05
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I feel compelled to point out that article is from 2009.
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Feb 9, 2024 05:38
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I'm not likely to fall victim to a scam, but the tradeoff there is I am really paranoid about everything. One of my credit cards sent me a text about a fraudulent charge, and then a couple more, and I ended up calling the number on the back of my card only to be told they were actual warnings, and my card needed to be replaced. Fast forward a bit and I get a similar voicemail from my bank, and I'm similarly skeptical. Calling the bank verified it was real, and also that they would lock my account if I didn't follow up forthwith. This kind of hypervigilance gets to be exhausting.
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Feb 19, 2024 06:01
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Volmarias posted:These are forever. Frustratingly, a friend of mine who was getting married to a non US citizen had to jump through a ton of hoops to try to prove that it wasn't a scam marriage. It took them years of talking to whichever immigration agent before they finally caved and accepted that perhaps these two people could in fact genuinely love each other? My niece had to jump through hoops to marry her wife, who is from England. I don't think it took years, though.
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Feb 27, 2024 20:13
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Volmarias posted:Guess the skin color of my friend and their husband Ah, yeah, we're all Anglo as hell.
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Feb 28, 2024 06:02
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EL BROMANCE posted:
FTFY
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Mar 5, 2024 06:20
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 09:39 |
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There's usually an uptick in scammery right around tax season, partly because people that just got their refunds are attractive marks. Same thing happened with the COVID stimulus checks - there'd be an uptick whenever one of those was going out, for the same reason.
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Mar 25, 2024 00:26
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