Identify theft and scammers

[rwsaunders]

I always wondered what happened to my dear, old Uncle Henry after he moved to Toronto and then out of the blue, this Canadian gentleman wrote to me and offered to help me claim 1/2 of my $9.76M inheritance. Goes to show that there are still kind souls out there in the world.

[j44ke]

Can I have the third half?

[rydesteel]

Man it's been a while since I've heard from the Nigerian Prince, turns out he moved to Canada. I keep getting message to pay my tolls from EZ Toll or something like it, listening to NPR and they were talking about that exact scam. It's only gonna get worse I'm afraid.

[BBB]

Can I have the third half?

Only if you proof Eric's letters before they are sent.

[Dave Thompson]

Only USD 9.764 million? Piker.

[Mabouya]

Over the weekend I got a whole bunch of missed calls from a number that caller ID showed as the phone number for my bank. They never left a message.

Needless to say, the scammers had spoofed the number and fooled the caller ID. When I called my bank on Monday they said everything was fine...

So, the only question now is how the scammers knew that that phone number (my work number, not my cell phone) is the one associated with my bank account? Have they hacked the bank's database?


Snap57.jpg

[Mabouya]

Only USD 9.764 million? Piker.

In that case I won't bother to leave you that $1.5 mil I had earmarked for the Dave Thompson Charity Foundation of Spokane, WA.

[vertical_doug]

Funny how the signature doesn't correspond to the name. It's almost like the perp wrote their real name from muscle memory as they were getting tired of the hundreds of signatures.

Was it a wet signature? or just scanned in

[Peter Polack]

Over the weekend I got a whole bunch of missed calls from a number ...

This happened to me on my work phone this weekend. They called six times on the same day, never leaving a message.

I noticed in the bank letter above that Mr. Jones doesn't use a bank e-mail address but a gmail account. Hmmm...

Another potential scam happened to me last week: I received a phone call at home from a company claiming they were affiliated with my health insurance carrier. It wasn't clear to me what they wanted
to do but as part of the conversation they wanted to verify my identity-the caller told me my birth date and asked me to confirm my birth year. I refused. After several tries they hung up.

Tip: Unless YOU initiated the call, never offer such information.

[j44ke]

I just don't answer the phone. Unless it is a contact who is family or I know isn't dead or they owe me money.

[j44ke]

Over the weekend I got a whole bunch of missed calls from a number that caller ID showed as the phone number for my bank. They never left a message.

Needless to say, the scammers had spoofed the number and fooled the caller ID. When I called my bank on Monday they said everything was fine...

So, the only question now is how the scammers knew that that phone number (my work number, not my cell phone) is the one associated with my bank account? Have they hacked the bank's database?


Snap57.jpg

They use volume to make it look purposeful. If they call everyone and use the same number I.D., then a subset will actually have accounts at that bank. To them, it is totally random. To you, it looks like they know who you are.

[rec head]

I wish I had a rich uncle.

[bigbill]

I just bought a house so now I'm getting calls and letters from mortgage companies. My favorite is "I'm calling from your mortgage lender," and when I ask the caller who my mortgage lender is, they get evasive and won't answer. That's when I hang up. It sucks because during the process, I was getting frequent calls from my lender that were legit. I was in the PNW when I retired from the Navy and kept my 360 area code. I get the scam calls with the 360, but I ignore and block those calls, and a week later I get more calls from new 360 numbers. Now I'm in Wyoming which has one area code and around 560k people, so I answer 307 calls for now.

When my dad was alive, he would call every few weeks because he got a "call from the IRS." No matter how many times I told him that the IRS sends letters and doesn't call, he still got panicky each time. He even got the scam calls saying my son was arrested and needed bail money. At the time, my son was a midshipman at the Naval Academy. I had numerous calls and sit down conversations with him about handling these calls including the infamous "can you hear me" to get him to say yes. My 84 year old mom is a real estate broker and has fun with the scammers if she's bored.

[BBB]

I forget the precise details, but my Dad managed to get scammed out of $15,000. This resulted in few terse communications between myself and the bank, but resulted in the money being repaid. Between myself and the bank we were able to reverse engineer the scam and provide the Police with the details...but given my Dad was located in one state and the scammers located in another, it was all too hard for the Police to be bothered doing something about it. My Dad lost internet access after that.

It's quite frustrating. Many phone calls (like Big Bill notes) and emails. And they prey on the less savvy elderly. Unusual to get a letter. Eric is obviously a luddite.

[zachateseverything]

They use volume to make it look purposeful. If they call everyone and use the same number I.D., then a subset will actually have accounts at that bank. To them, it is totally random. To you, it looks like they know who you are.

There's a non-zero chance it's less random than that. If you have a smart phone on your person or participate in the internet, your activities are being tracked by Google, marketing companies, etc. Those companies then in turn, distill that data down to key factoids and sell it to interested third parties (who might also repackage and sell it again). Sometimes it's minimally invasive stuff like making sure that you get targeted adds in your email and media feeds to sell you on products. Other times they just give that info to a Nigerian prince.

[vertical_doug]

There's a non-zero chance it's less random than that. If you have a smart phone on your person or participate in the internet, your activities are being tracked by Google, marketing companies, etc. Those companies then in turn, distill that data down to key factoids and sell it to interested third parties (who might also repackage and sell it again). Sometimes it's minimally invasive stuff like making sure that you get targeted adds in your email and media feeds to sell you on products. Other times they just give that info to a Nigerian prince.

As someone I know who is an expert in this stuff, we laugh and ask how can anyone be so stupid? The answer is the scammers just haven't figured out which buttons to push of us yet to make us stupid. It really can happen to anyone.

While the infamous Nigerian letter scam is a hoot, the scam farms in southeast asia are not. These are vertically integrated business with global scale. They traffic in people since they need native speaks in many languages as they may be running scams in the US, South Africa, China, India, Japan, Turkey, England all at the same time. The Japanese and Chinese are absolutely terrified of scammers like the ones located in KK Park or Rufi.



https://globalchinapulse.net/global-china-pulse-1-2024/

You can read about the mules in the Moving Bricks article on the link.