The IT Guy vs. the Con Artist

Post by Tade0 » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

p1esk wrote: post #67

avgDev wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! I feel the same way but I encountered so many con artists. My favorite con artists was actually a dentist and I fell for part of the "con". I guess you could argue if its a con but I feel like it was. I went in for a simple fillings in two teeth, he starts drilling, then tells me I need inlays $800 a piece x 2. Being young and stupid I said, ok. I was so broke at the time, I needed to borrow money to pay. When I…

So how do you pick a dentist?

Post by im3w1l » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 10:31 PM UTC

ALittleLight wrote: post #35

klenwell wrote: post #10

The victims didn't come forward because they felt so ashamed about falling for the con. This is such an interesting essential part of scams. I guess it's a part of human nature. I remember tracking down a phone scam that caught my grandmother once (based out of Montreal) and I eventually got to a point where I discovered that my grandmother had provided a verbal consent over the phone that had kept it just this side…

In college I worked at a computer repair center for students. When I was new, and before I knew how to talk around this, some people would describe to me what they were doing when they contracted the malware they were there about - at times being perfectly explicit and specific about what videos, exactly to the title, they were watching when they got malware. I think the layman expected there was some character of a…

Post by sysbin » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 11:09 PM UTC

knowow1 wrote: post #74

munificent wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teach them how do respond and how to handle these scammers. Concretely, the way to respond is this: If you ever get a call that claims to be from business X, tell them "OK, I'll call you back." Then get off the phone, look up the number for X yourself , and call them. If it was really X calling you, you'll get back to where you need to be. If it was a scam, X will tell you they don't know what you're talking about.…

It works in the average situation, but unfortunately there are some huge scams happening(passing unnoticed) in undeveloped countries where somehow the scammers can hijack the number for a certain time frame. If you call the same number the next day the real institution is going to answer, but nobody knows a thing. Apparently, in some cases, they can hijack the phone number of an institution, but only for the specific…

Post by redler » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 11:19 PM UTC

klenwell wrote: post #58

chiph wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad got taken by the "Hello this is Microsoft Support calling" scammers. They quickly got him to approve a remote connection to his machine and then they showed him a random registry entry as "proof" that his machine was infected with a virus. Which they just so happened to have the anti-virus for, for $300. Dad was computer savvy, but by this point he was 80 years old and they flat-out took advantage of him. He h…

> Please - teach your parents to just hang up on these clowns. That was the other thing. It was impossible to get my grandparents to do this. I think I eventually got them to let the answering machine answer and not return calls for messages from anyone they didn't recognize.

Post by klenwell » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 11:21 PM UTC

bdowling wrote: post #64

klenwell wrote: post #10

The victims didn't come forward because they felt so ashamed about falling for the con. This is such an interesting essential part of scams. I guess it's a part of human nature. I remember tracking down a phone scam that caught my grandmother once (based out of Montreal) and I eventually got to a point where I discovered that my grandmother had provided a verbal consent over the phone that had kept it just this side…

> my grandmother had provided a verbal consent over the phone that had kept it just this side of being outright fraud. If it was intentionally deceptive or coercive, it was probably outright fraud.