01 Dec 2024 - AJ
It’s the holiday season, so of course scammers ramp up their efforts.
The same advice I put into my articles apply as we go into the holiday season: are they trying to make you scared, cause a sense of urgency, or does something seem too good to be true? Then you should be thinking twice about paying or giving out information.
I was watching one of those random anti-scam/scam education videos that made me think (and then I lost the link). This may be a topic that I’ll cover in a later article in a more general way, but I’m going to talk about a very specific scam item here.
It was multiple ads for a hotspot (the hotspot appeared different in almost every version) that you could get for the low, low price of 40 GBP (this was a British antiscammer) - it didn’t have a SIM card, promised amazing speeds, and of course you would never have to pay a dime - or a pence - for internet.
Now, I’ve run across “pay for the device, get internet for free” hotspots before. In fact, I set one up for a neighbor with limited income. They do exist - or did exist. Thing is, they all required a sim card, they were slow as heck, and you had very limited bandwidth unless you paid for more. They were good for an emergency or some very very low-bandwidth internet access (such as websurfing or downloading mail with all images turned off).
So do such things exist? Yes, or at least they did. Are you going to get unlimited surfing at unbelievable speeds without a subscription of some kind? No.