81–90 of 161 posts
One of the things I like about Plant money is that they have transcripts for all their podcasts. I used to listen when I was a driver, but now I don't I can just read the transcript in a few minutes instead of spending 20 minutes or so listening.
Just taking a look at the judgement, Emilio was sentenced to 84 months (7 years) around this time in 2012, followed by two years of supervision [1]. I wonder if he was released. Super interesting read overall. Thank you! [1] https://www.docketbird.com/court-documents/USA-v-Torres/JUDG...
That seems... too lenient. What are the chances he just moves back to Costa Rica and starts up another scam shop, this time refusing to leave?
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> 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.
What would be nice is a service that just forwards unknown calls to someone competent.
Because I'd like to think I'm 'someone competent', and on my own phone I only accept (non-personal) calls that I'm expecting, or can see a reason for.
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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…
Do you know if they’re doing this to people with mobile cells as well or is it only landlines?
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That's my issue with RadioLab. It is just constant interjection.
Those guys are annoying AF. It really makes it a close call whether it's worth listening to.
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 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…
Their initial contact
https://www.troyhunt.com/anatomy-of-virus-call-centre-scam/
When he called them back
https://www.troyhunt.com/scamming-scammers-catching-virus-ca...
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> 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.…
As an important addition to this - use a completely different line for calling the real company. If the suspicious call came from a cell, use another cell phone. If call came from landline, use a cell.
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> This is such an interesting essential part of scams. I guess it's a part of human nature. Absolutely. It happened to my relatives too. The way I found out was I was there visiting and they got a call which I picked it up. It came from what sounded like an Indian person. You see, they wanted to "refund the money" and just needed the bank account details. Aha! I thought, I'll play dumb and pretended to mistype their…
> 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.…
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As an important addition to this - use a completely different line for calling the real company. If the suspicious call came from a cell, use another cell phone. If call came from landline, use a cell.
Why do you say that? What difference would it make?