01 Sep 2024 - AJ
The Labor Day weekend here in the United States caught me by surprise, thus the really short entry this week.
Next week, I’m hoping to have my Examples section together, featuring at least one debt collection scam and a variety of versions of the Pegasus scam, instead of my regularly scheduled scam page. I see so many versions of the Pegasus scam that I really just have to get my examples together and split them out into sections. The latest wrinkle I’ve seen is the scammers actually personalizing the scam a bit more by using Google Street Map images of the victim’s house. It’s a version of the “I have your address/old password/phone number”, but takes more effort as each scam email needs a corresponding pull of Google Maps to go along with it.
The framed text is something I’m testing out for the pages above and may change from how it looks now.
On a side note, the loan forgiveness program that these scams are using is actually fairly strict. They’re meant to help out borrowers who fall under one of a couple of categories, including borrowers who owe more than when they started, ones that have been around for many years (20+), borrowers who enrolled in low-financial-value programs (that is, people enrolled in certain for-profit schools that charged a lot but actually did very little education), and borrowers who are otherwise eligible but haven’t applied. (see Studentaid.gov for more information - page valid as of September 1, 2024.)