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Email/Phone Scams

Kritter

Kritter

Well-known member
I have reached a boiling point... The last 6 months has been ridiculous the number of email and phone scams i have been dealing with. And none of them are anywhere remotely intelligent....

This morning might have been the worst yet...
Visa scam.. Both my wife and i have a couple of Visa's... This scam was not even a voice mail but a message left on our voicemail.
They start by saying there has been suspicious activity and 2 charges on your card, one from amazon for 500 and another from Itunes for 1000...

First, not 1 mention on who's card it was, mine or my hers.
Second, they said suspicious activity on your visa card starting with 45, i am not 100% sure, but don't ALL visa cards start with 45? when required to identify your card, you have to give the last 4 digits... so FAIL right there.
Thirdly.... Is there anyone on this planet that HASNT ordered something on amazon? how the **** could this possibly be suspicious activity LOL

I did get that email a few months ago with the 'we have videos of you jacking off to this or that porn site, so give me all your money and i wont send this video to your contact list'....
My wife got one the other day and it said pay them or they will send out the video of her stroking her little penis.... too funny

Sadly, these people find enough victims to make it worth their efforts.
 
I got a call from an angry Indian guy last month on a Saturday morning saying he will go to the police because my daughter kicked his dog unless I pay him. I advised him the big issue is I have no children.
 
Big scam down here is the IRS scam. You get an automated message saying that if you don’t pay X amount of dollars within 24 hours you’ll be arrested by the local police. It should be noted that the IRS will never call you they will send letters.

How people fall for this is beyond me.
 
apparently I'm about to be arrested by the CRA.

also the office server got locked down and held hostage, luckily the backups worked perfectly.

oh and my 76yr old mother is being blackmailed for bitcoin using her debauched porn habits.

and I keep winning free Chinese cruises.
 
JackBurton said:
I got a call from an angry Indian guy last month on a Saturday morning saying he will go to the police because my daughter kicked his dog unless I pay him. I advised him the big issue is I have no children.
Click to expand...

That may have been the Jerky Boys.
 
My cell phone gets called weekly by marketing and scams. I don't pick it up unless I recognize the number. One thing these scammers have been doing is obtaining a phone number with your same area code and exchange (e.g., 416-548-xxxx). Be careful of those.

My company's general email address is also being inundated with scam emails.

Recently, I had an email from a client's personal email address pleading for money because they were on vacation and had lost all their id. Someone had hacked her email and contacts.

The world is full of scammers these days.
 
Habsy said:
Big scam down here is the IRS scam. You get an automated message saying that if you don’t pay X amount of dollars within 24 hours you’ll be arrested by the local police. It should be noted that the IRS will never call you they will send letters.

How people fall for this is beyond me.
Click to expand...
That one's going on in Canada too. Though a lot of the time, it's a live person from some call centre in India calling you up, rather than a recording. Pretty much the same schtick---police are on their way to your house to arrest you, unless you immediately go out to a bitcoin banking machine at get the X amount of dollars worth of bitcoin and call them right back.

One of my co-workers got one of those calls at work, and had the scammer on the line for 20-30 minutes while he pretended to be a confused old man getting them the money. When the scammer realized he'd been had, he screamed, sweared and threatened for about 30 seconds while we were laughing at him before hanging up the phone.

Another variant of this scheme out in BC, owing to their large Chinese expat population, is an automated message in Mandarin saying that the person being called owes X number of dollars to the Chinese government, and their family over there will be arrested if they don't pay up immediately.

The sad thing about these scams is that they're still profitable even though a tiny percentage of people fall for them. If you call 100 people in a day and find just one gullible person, or one vulnerable/senile senior citizen that forks over a few grand to you, that's not a bad return for a day's work. And with automated messages, you can cast an even wider net.
 
Barracuda is your email servers friend.

I get spam calls from local numbers all the time. I continuously block caller when they come in.
 
Yeah, I get voice messages saying they're from the CRA and if I don't respond they'll take legal action. I deal with the CRA regularly and they'd never leave such a message (though I do get voice messages from them occassionally).
 
zeke said:
apparently I'm about to be arrested by the CRA.

also the office server got locked down and held hostage, luckily the backups worked perfectly.

oh and my 76yr old mother is being blackmailed for bitcoin using her debauched porn habits.

and I keep winning free Chinese cruises.
Click to expand...
Heh. I've been getting a ton of those e-mails at work the past few weeks.

Pretty impressive that the hacker has been spying on me through my non-existent webcam.
 
Nothing (spam) gets through on my company’s server. I swear by barracuda.
 
BeLeafer said:
My cell phone gets called weekly by marketing and scams. I don't pick it up unless I recognize the number. One thing these scammers have been doing is obtaining a phone number with your same area code and exchange (e.g., 416-548-xxxx). Be careful of those.

My company's general email address is also being inundated with scam emails.

Recently, I had an email from a client's personal email address pleading for money because they were on vacation and had lost all their id. Someone had hacked her email and contacts.

The world is full of scammers these days.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I definitely follow that rule too.

If it's a real person that actually knows me, I figure they can leave me a voice mail or send me a text if I don't pick up.

I also take every unfamiliar or 1-800 number that either doesn't leave me a message, or leaves me a SPAM voicemail, and add them to a contact on my phone named "Telemarketer Idiot", which is set up so that my phone won't ring, vibrate or give me any notification when a number listed on that contact calls me.
 
CRA calls have slowed down at my house, but was getting at least a couple of messages a week for a while.

An elderly aunt had her laptop frozen by the "CALL MICROSOFT MALWARE", she called the number and paid $500 for the fix.

Worst part, was that she gave them remote access to her laptop and left them to work.

I told her that if she just wanted email, facebook and to play a few games to just buy an ipad with her $500.
 
btw they found the source of that CRA/IRS scam in india.

rcmp ain't doing anything about it though.

i'm sure the americans are.
 
Habsy said:
Barracuda is your email servers friend.

I get spam calls from local numbers all the time. I continuously block caller when they come in.
Click to expand...

I do that too, but it's pretty pointless as it's really easy them for spoof to different numbers of origin
 
Habsy said:
Big scam down here is the IRS scam. You get an automated message saying that if you don’t pay X amount of dollars within 24 hours you’ll be arrested by the local police. It should be noted that the IRS will never call you they will send letters.

How people fall for this is beyond me.
Click to expand...

Some woman in Toronto made news when she fell for the scam and even paid her tax bill in bitcoin as per CRA instructions. Lol.
 
zeke said:
btw they found the source of that CRA/IRS scam in india.

rcmp ain't doing anything about it though.

i'm sure the americans are.
Click to expand...

rcmp got indian authorities to conduct a raid or two.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/national-cra-india-rcmp-scam-1.4883796

Over the past two weeks, Indian police have been bursting into suspected illegal call centres, arresting everyone in sight and seizing troves of equipment used to carry out phone fraud aimed at foreigners. Hundreds of Canadians are among the victims of the so-called "CRA scam," and their combined losses — from just two of the raided offices — are likely to be at least in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

...

The raids were triggered by a visit from Canadian police to Noida, a suburb of India's capital New Delhi, following a CBC Marketplace investigation that revealed how and where many of the scammers were operating. An RCMP officer based in India, in cooperation with the FBI, approached Indian authorities to act.
Click to expand...

only so much rcmp can do in foreign jurisdictions.
 
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