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What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

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Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#161

Post by avalys »

deepspace wrote: post #43
avalys wrote: post #29

Wow, how interesting. I started getting these a few months ago, right after starting a new job in a somewhat high-profile area. I have been getting 1-2 per month but found them quite unusual because none of them ever progressed to an actual scam - just a few messages back and forth about the fabricated "wrong number" situation and then each thread would stop, seemingly earnestly. Since there was no obvious scam, I've…

What would the motivation be for anyone to reply to a text from an unknown person? I have also been getting these for months, in it was 100% obvious from the get-go that it must be a scam. I have never felt the slightest urge to reply.

I meet new people fairly often, and if I just ignored these messages, the chance I'm actually being rude to someone I know in real life is fairly high. Now that I know the pattern I will probably be more circumspect about it.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#162

Post by asdff »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #131

Related. I listed something for sale on Craigslist recently and got a bunch of messages right away that asked obvious questions that were in the listing. One suggested that his wife pick it up, and can I take Zelle? Went silent when I said cash only. But the most interesting scammer said: "for my safety, can I send you a 6-digit number, and you confirm it, so I know the listing is not fake?" I say yes, unsure what th…

A few years ago one of my friends pulled a prank on another friend and made a fake craigslist listing for some truck with his info. I don't think his phone has recovered from the spam to this date. There must be a thousand crawlers combing every single craigslist ad there is looking for information to add to these databases.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#163

Post by minimaxir »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #131

Related. I listed something for sale on Craigslist recently and got a bunch of messages right away that asked obvious questions that were in the listing. One suggested that his wife pick it up, and can I take Zelle? Went silent when I said cash only. But the most interesting scammer said: "for my safety, can I send you a 6-digit number, and you confirm it, so I know the listing is not fake?" I say yes, unsure what th…

2FA scams are common on /r/Scams

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#164

Post by Waterluvian »

A recent scam attempt that made me nervous about potentially being compromised:

Someone sent me a very official looking “your payment for $370 in textbooks has been approved. Here’s your reciept.”

The thing is, it came from an official PayPal email address.

In reality it was a request for money using PayPal’s official system. They just filled the title and body with text to make it resemble a receipt.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#165

Post by asdff »

jeromegv wrote: post #150
nicoburns wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a similar scam via instagram DMs recently. They claimed to need me to confirm a code so that they could log in, but actually just triggered my own password reset. Message sent from an actual friend's account (which they had presumably successfully scammed) too. Certainly made me think about how password reset emails are worded!

Most of those are crypto scams. The IG account starts posting about how they got rich on crypto. This is a very prevalent scam.

I see a lot of these too. They take over regular people's accounts, e.g. people from school I still follow, probably brute forcing passwords, then they post all this content how they are self made off crypto but the person in the videos doing the prostelyzation is in no way shape or form the same person who previously held the account.

Clearly they do this to get a decent follower count initially for their spam bots, but my word is anyone who follows John Doe actually going to believe a scam video that is clearly not John Doe coming from John Doe's account claiming to be him? There has to be more effective angles.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#167

Post by LtWorf »

lupire wrote: post #135
notahacker wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A theory which would be more convincing except that [i] saying they're from Nigeria also filters out all the gullible people with spam filters, and yet despite spam filters now preventing the majority of gullible people from responding, the scripts haven't changed [ii] the more straightforward explanation is that they say they're from Nigeria because their ultimate objective is getting you to send money to Nigeria...…

Modern spam filters are almost entirely based on sender, not content.

And you just need to pay amazon to send your spam for you to circumvent all the filters… what a world to live in.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#168

Post by seoaeu »

krallja wrote: post #137
xmprt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd take 10x the amount of spam in my mailbox if I could get rid of all of the rest of the garbage I'm bombarded with I for one would not. Digital spam is easy to deal with. There are automated filters, easy ways to block them, and the few that slip through are simple to deal with. Mailbox spam is physically painful to deal with and it's a massive waste of paper.

Paper is a renewable resource, and also a carbon sink. Throw it in the garbage and consider it carbon sequestration.

Long term, the paper will decompose while sitting in the landfill and then release the carbon back into the atmosphere. Even temporary sequestration is beneficial, but I don’t know whether it is still a net positive once you factor in the resources spent growing the wood, mailing the paper, and transporting it to a landfill.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#169

Post by tialaramex »

aaronwalker wrote: post #148
noveltyaccount wrote: post #131

Related. I listed something for sale on Craigslist recently and got a bunch of messages right away that asked obvious questions that were in the listing. One suggested that his wife pick it up, and can I take Zelle? Went silent when I said cash only. But the most interesting scammer said: "for my safety, can I send you a 6-digit number, and you confirm it, so I know the listing is not fake?" I say yes, unsure what th…

Hmm. Makes me wonder about the security of two factor authentication schemes. For scams like these it's pretty obvious that someone is trying to access your account, but I do wonder if there are more secure ways to verify your identity when changing account settings.

It will depend on the authentication strategy. For WebAuthn it isn't a problem, short of sending you their physical authenticator (e.g. their Yubikey, or their iPhone) they can't help you sign in as them even if they wanted to, so this makes it very hard to fool ordinary users into helping crooks.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#170

Post by gonehome »

chefandy wrote: post #126

For a while I grew quite fond of wasting phone scammers time. I’d pick up, talk suuuuuuper slowly— like Emo Phillips speed at one syllable every one or two seconds— interrupt with irrelevant questions or anecdotes, and overall just see how long I could keep them on the phone without giving them any information. The best strategy I found was telling them that, yes indeed I did remember owing the IRS or whoever money a…

I thought this was pretty great: https://youtu.be/xsLJZyih3Ac&t=22m23s

My favorite part is when the guy uses the scammers real name and she panics.

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