121–130 of 143 posts
Why don’t US phone carriers give their users the ability to block foreign calls terminating in the U.S., at the telephony signaling layer? In almost no case do I ever want to receive a phone call from a foreign country with a spoofed number. Nor do I think anyone in my family wants to either.
They get paid every time a scammer makes a phone call.
> link or attachment that when clicked or downloaded, takes you to a spoofed website or installs malicious software on your device. Can someone show me a modern OS that would install software by clicking a link?
I'm kind of amazed how slow 'AI phishing' has been to roll out. The technology for customised text based attacks at scale has been available at least since Llama was open sourced. The tech for custom voice and image based attacks is basically there too with whisper / tortoise and stable diffusion - though clearly more expensive to render. I'm honestly not sure why social networks aren't being leveraged more to target…
It appears that criminals really are stupid, and thank goodness for it!
I'm being glib here but also if you're the type of person who gets texts from the IRS from a number you've never seen and take it at face value that you can pay off your overdue tax bill with gift cards... like, you are already the perfect victim for this sort of scam. They don't need to be good, they just need you to self identify and leap right into the trap.
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The ROI on scams based in Indian call centers is already huge. They recently took my mom for $25k for what was a few hours of “work” over the span of two days. When I reviewed their communications and got the full story from my mom they’re in some ways laughably bad and in other ways very cunning. Turns out it all started with a comically bad initial e-mail, pop-up, and then remote access. Then follow-up calls and te…
Banks are actually getting much better at ferreting out these scams. My Mom got one of those calls where the guy said my son was jail and they needed to pay his cash bail to get him out. They never called me or him, just panicked and went to the bank to get the cash out and the bank refused to give them the money because they knew it was a scam. They started asking my parents questions and pointing out how the scam w…
A friend of mine runs a retail bank branch for a major bank. The other staff refer customers to her if they suspect a scam. She sees a few of these each month.
But those are just the people who personally come into a bank branch.
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Banks are actually getting much better at ferreting out these scams. My Mom got one of those calls where the guy said my son was jail and they needed to pay his cash bail to get him out. They never called me or him, just panicked and went to the bank to get the cash out and the bank refused to give them the money because they knew it was a scam. They started asking my parents questions and pointing out how the scam w…
Her bank tried... She lives across the country from me and I flew to see her to help put her life back together. It was very involved: pretty much had to reconstruct her entire digital life. New phone numbers, e-mail addresses, online accounts, passwords, all banking, credit cards, recurring payments, bill pay - EVERYTHING. My concern was now that they had a fish on the hook where the scam worked once, they'd (of cou…
THIS.
I've been saying this for years. I have no idea why an a world that has been inhospitable to older folks for decades, why there are no programs to help elderly and at risk people to keep an eye out for these.
I'm sorry to hear about your mother as well. That's heartbreaking.
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Forgive my ignorance, but why are we surprised that voice messages aren't being spoofed more often? Doesn't this require a pretty darn decent dataset for training? Unless they've got a ton of videos of themselves shared on a public social media profile, I don't know that this is going to be a thing.
I've had this nagging worry that my voice will be harvested during a random call acting like a sales person or survey. Besides getting money from family members, I really can't think of a scenario where my voice would allow a scammer to get into one of my accounts, but I'm sure it would make social engineering such an attach that much easier.
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Banks are actually getting much better at ferreting out these scams. My Mom got one of those calls where the guy said my son was jail and they needed to pay his cash bail to get him out. They never called me or him, just panicked and went to the bank to get the cash out and the bank refused to give them the money because they knew it was a scam. They started asking my parents questions and pointing out how the scam w…
Then you get the BTC folks arguing that all this regulation and safeguarding is a plot to prevent you from using your money. And once BTC takes over your mom can finally be her own bank.
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Then you get the BTC folks arguing that all this regulation and safeguarding is a plot to prevent you from using your money. And once BTC takes over your mom can finally be her own bank.
So there's regulation. Until I read this I had assumed the bank branch was helpfully breaking the law by refusing to release customer funds. Do you know what's the law that forces (or allows) banks to do this?
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Forgive my ignorance, but why are we surprised that voice messages aren't being spoofed more often? Doesn't this require a pretty darn decent dataset for training? Unless they've got a ton of videos of themselves shared on a public social media profile, I don't know that this is going to be a thing.
I've had this nagging worry that my voice will be harvested during a random call acting like a sales person or survey. Besides getting money from family members, I really can't think of a scenario where my voice would allow a scammer to get into one of my accounts, but I'm sure it would make social engineering such an attach that much easier.
Afterwards I realized it might have been some sort of scam attempt. He seemed to be in such a rush to get it done tomorrow and book a time now now now. And he sent no mail.
I guess the scam would have been to prepay some sort of fee or the whole cleaning. But I've got this feeling he was fishing for something more. Dunno if they have the know-how to actually use my voice to scam e.g. my mother.