I am a difficult person to buy for, so naturally my family tends to give me gift cards and this kind of scam is one I’m very familiar with.
It’s the holiday season, so of course scammers ramp up their efforts.
I’m taking a week off to do some prep for our Thanksgiving holiday.
Hitting up r/scams to see what scams are coming through is always interesting. This week’s came up and I remembered I hadn’t covered it yet. It’s a heartbreaking one because you want to make sure your kid is okay, you know? And scammers, lowly scumbags that they are, know that.
The elections here in the U.S. have taken my attention away from my normal scanning of various scam-reporting sites. However, one of my coworkers pointed this one out prior to election day and I couldn’t resist.
I vaguely remember car wraps. I think they became popular after I was a starving student so I never did them as a way of getting some extra spending money while I was in college.
I’m not a traveler at heart.
Since there are new variants of scams coming out seemingly every day and the celebrity in question may change, I didn’t want to specifically name the person most often deepfaked for these scams. Elon Musk is the kind of person who the gullible would think might be willing to pull off something that nonsensical. (There are other crypto enthusiasts that get deepfaked, but he’s the big one.)
Me and my family have been owned by cats for decades. I don’t have one right now - getting approval for one is heck where I live - but I adore the fluffballs. And I have to admit, I’ve had times where I’ve wanted a purebred one and have just been astounded by how much breeders - legit ones - charge for even a pet-quality purebred cat.
This week’s scam is an oldie but goodie. Nowadays, you’re apt to see less of it just because of Covid and the rise of online payments.
I remember when you stopped at toll booths and handed cash to a toll booth operator.
Before I get into this week’s page (fake faxes), or the other update I made (fake debt collector examples) I thought I might talk about how I find scams and phishing to talk about.
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.
I got my first examples post up - though not as much as I hoped, and not covering two scams, because I had so many examples of the Pegasus scam to sort through. I’ll try to get the debt collection scam variations done this week.
The Labor Day weekend here in the United States caught me by surprise, thus the really short entry this week.
Ah, debt collectors, who are only slightly better regarded than scammers themselves. The debt collection scams article has been one of the harder ones to research because I’d search “debt collector scams” and half of the articles/videos were on sketchy/scammy debt collector tactics.
Scammers have been around for a long time. There are shady merchants in stories for a reason.
After many, many drafts the original mid-week blog post just… didn’t happen because I realized that it was far more complex than could be covered easily in one blog post. At some point in the future I’ll come back to it. So instead, I’d like to talk about how to step back and think rationally when you’ve come across a potential scam.
When digging in my spam folder for inspiration - to be honest, I was going to cover pig butchering, which is a very hot scam right now - I ran across the refund scam I am covering today. This is perhaps the third most common scam I see land in staff inboxes, behind the Pegasus scam and fake Docusign emails. This is actually a scam aimed at consumers and is commonly covered on many anti-scam websites, but scammers don’t differentiate between business email addresses and non-business email addresses, so we get them as well.
If there is any word that causes discussion in anti-scam and anti-phishing circles, it’s the word “kindly”. We often teach it as an indicator that something can be a scam, that you should pay closer attention to the rest of the request. Sometimes I think we over-emphasize it as a sure-fire indicator, but it’s not.
There are well-known scams and phishes and then there are scams/phishes that are kind of niche and you don’t hear about as often.
I’m an old fart - younger than ARPAnet, older than NSFNET. Didn’t hear about the Internet until I was into adulthood. In some ways, I think I was lucky. Scammers were still around, but communication was slower. Someone had to rent a P.O. Box or have a phone number, or physically be present to scam someone. And while child predators certainly did exist when I was growing up, they didn’t have a global reach like they do today.
If someone asked me what scam I see most often, whether reported by our staff or on various sites, it has to be what I’d dub the Pegasus Extortion Scam, and as it’s always done via email, could be considered a form of phishing.
Every blog has to start with a first post. This is the first one for the site I have fondly dubbed as the Calconncet Scam and Phishing Education Pages.