191–200 of 562 posts
Here is an interesting story in which a scammer almost got me but failed because he knew me "too well": One morning in college I was awakened by a call after staying up all night working on some project. The caller claimed to be from my home country's embassy and was investigating a fraud case I was involved in. He started by confirming my personal information such as DOB and passport number and he had them all corre…
There was one time I thought I was being scammed, but it turns out there was an actual issue with my bank account. Sitting at my desk at work, I get a phone call from my bank on by cell phone. "Mr. Anechoic, there appears to be a security issue with your bank account. We can resolve it for you. For security purposes, can you give your checking account number and the last four of you SSN"? This is clearly a scam, righ…
Long story short, I could have ended up with a subscription on a set of questions for 20 dollars a week, which was given only after a set of legitimate surveys were given on behalf of Apple. I of course notified Apple of this, but I never got the 20 first dollars back, before cancelling the "subscription" I had apparently signed up for.
I really wanted to track the guys down, but they had been very careful in covering their tracks with proxies and mailbox addresses, so in the end I considered it too much work. But I did spam them. Perhaps I could have even used their mail for even more spam, but I suppose they just use throwaway mails anyway.
Not sure how they got through the cracks of Apple, though. IMHO it's pretty damning for the reputation of Apple to work with guys like that.
After reading all that... I noticed that the "scam prevention expert" isn't serving their site with proper https.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon today is a street side flea market. You really don't know what you'll get. I've started ordering more stuff from traditional retailers. Their online operations these days are really good, and at most a few dollars more than Amazon. Clothes from macys.com, home goods from homedepot.com and target.com, and so on. You're not flooded with choices with these stores that are mostly garbage, instead you get only 1-3…
I think ordering on amazon has become a little like getting your car towed. Towing companies appear to be a large shell game where your $200 tow is handled my one or more middlemen who eventually get some poor independent towtruck driver to tow you for $75 Amazon should do something that would allow partnering with decent brands. Customers would be happy, brands could keep their reputation, amazon could get a reasona…
There's one easy rule that could have avoided all of this - never give out any info on incoming calls. If I get a call or text about fraudulent transactions, I'll keep them on hold while I log into the bank website. If I get a call about a late payment, I'll thank them for the info and ask them to stay on while I pay online. If I get an inbound call with a more complex request, I'll ask them for their employee info a…
Anyways, maybe there was nothing wrong with providing those details. Maybe they were already available to him on his screen. But the act of asking for that info and making it commonplace for people to just provide it is how so many scams are successful. I don't know how we get away from bad security practices being the norm.
I expected some crazy new attack vector that was so sophisticated it could fool this Scam Prevention Expert, but this post is laughable. They fell for textbook "scamming 101" that my grandma knows to avoid. Here's one tip for this expert – if you get a 2FA code over text or email that clearly has the line "we will never contact you for this code over phone or text" right under it, DON'T give it to a "support agent" o…
What makes us vulnerable is that we are human: we get tired, caught up in the urgency of the call and our logical thinking stops working.
The actual story of the article is that we need to design systems that are robust even when people are getting scammed. Able to identify and reverse scamming soon after it happens with easy ways to report it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bet your Amazon rep just searched for Reolink and clicked on a Google ad that happened to belong to the scammers.
Well this initiated a rant, not directly related to ads, but Google in general. This is an internet literacy issue I’ve noticed more and more. People will refer to Google listings as an authoritative source even if the data comes from some third party. “Is this Jordan’s Tiles?” “No. This is Patrick. You have the wrong number.” “It says on their website this is the number!” “Their website is wrong, this isn’t Jordan’s…
Not that I don't also feel like Google search results have gone down hill.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really hard recognizing the image Amazon have in the US compared to my personal experience with amazon.de . The service is stellar, shipping both ways is free as long as you buy products covered by prime. Refunds are with no questions asked (as long as you don't start abusing it i guess). As soon as you go into 3rd party sellers the experience gets muddled, though I've had plenty of good experiences with those a…
Amazon US used to be as you describe. But now its mostly just cheap knockoff stuff. I hardly purchase there anymore. Its really sad because they used to have such a wide selection.
By that you mean overpriced dropshipping from aliexpress.