15 Sep 2024 - AJ
This week’s scam was so simple that not a lot of people seem to talk about it. I got the voice mail I mention in the post (for Spectrum, which is not my ISP) and poked into it. The versions I found were aimed at people who see a deep discount and get greedy.
There are discounts around for yearly payment, though they’re far less than 40-50%. At best, they’re 25% (12 months for the price of 9), but more likely to be 17% (12 months for the price of 10). The 17% discount is far more common. And these are for things like streaming services and the like that like to lock you into their service for a year, not your ISP (though they sometimes do the same with some intense negotiation).
In other news, I’m a bit delayed in getting the example page for Debt Collection Scams up. I forgot that Wednesday was September 11th, a prime day for bad actors to hit Americans and I got caught up in my day job.
And related to that: even if you are receiving email from someone that you’ve worked with before, if something seems off, don’t click on the link. And if you do, don’t enter your email and password. Yes, some of our staff did that. Fortunately, we have fairly robust systems (MFA and geoblock) that prevented the bad actors from getting in; the person whose email was initially compromised wasn’t so lucky.