Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The IT Guy vs. the Con Artist

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 161 posts

Re: The IT Guy vs. the Con Artist

#131

Post by Plasmoid2000ad »

munificent wrote: post #72
rdtsc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Scammers are aware of this, and will often use a tactic of gradual escalation. At first, you have no reason to hang up and call them back, because the call seems harmless.

Good example would be someone claiming to be your ISP apologizing for recent slow internet speeds (when doesn't this happen), and wanting to confirm you're now happy and not experiencing slow speeds. Why would you doubt this and go to the trouble of calling back?

The other problem is businesses being so extremely dumb. I've had and heard of man cases of Banks calling people, asking them verification questions on cold calls and offering no way to call them back. Not just stupid in that it limits your strategy, but it actually trains people to be more vulnerable to scammers.

Re: The IT Guy vs. the Con Artist

#132

Post by Theodores »

duiker101 wrote: post #26
parliament32 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it depends. Services crash, sure, that might be what they meant by "the server crashed". But it's very, very difficult for an actual modern kernel to crash and also not auto-reboot and resume whatever it was doing. Hardware failure is always a possibility though.

maybe the disk filled up?

This has happened to me on a Sunday albeit with a hosted server running that awful cPanel version of linux.

The backup was what killed it, it ran out of disk space and the box keeled over. I could not believe the backup program was that stupid to back up twice as much stuff as it had space for and then to kill off the important processes to keep the backup running until zero bytes were left.

I have also had a close one with mySQL replication, it took the disk to fill up before I configured it to purge the logs. My own stupidity is to blame for that one.

Log files are going to be the killer, run a linux box for long enough without any log file rotation and the disk is ultimately going to fill up. I can't imagine that a decade ago when this server was built that there was a rack of terabyte SSDs in there.

Email is also an area that just grows and grows. The email doesn't even have to be used, just your system message stuff.

Re: The IT Guy vs. the Con Artist

#133

Post by Nextgrid »

dboreham wrote: post #57
mgleason_3 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it so interesting to hear that finding victims was the top impediment to prosecution. The amount of pain and anguish these scammers inflict upon some of our most vulnerable citizens is almost unbearable to think about. I couldn’t help but wonder why the FCC hasn’t required CallerID Verification years ago. Especially in this age where we are all being forced to get RealID cards so that our every move can be mo…

>I couldn’t help but wonder why the FCC hasn’t required CallerID Verification Because corruption?

Because carriers (and thus the FCC since it's in bed with them) profit from delivering these spam calls and authenticated Caller ID would significantly decrease the amount of these calls.

Re: The IT Guy vs. the Con Artist

#134

Post by intarga »

cosmodisk wrote: post #118

We don't have IT scams like this in Lithuania,as nobody ever pays for IT support,they just get someone they know to do it for free. However massive prize scams used to be quite popular and still are to certain degree today. Scammer calls a victim and claims he's calling from a radio show,some company, events organiser, whatever.Then obviously comes the part where he saya that the victim won x,y,z and all they. need t…

> get someone they know to do it for free.

Because people with technology skills should perform free labour for people without...

Re: The IT Guy vs. the Con Artist

#135

Post by Nextgrid »

klenwell wrote: post #79
bdowling wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You would hope, right? It's actually a lot of shades of gray. The most astounding part about it was once the scammers had this verbal consent, they check could print a check themselves against my grandmother's account and cash it. We started with my grandmother's bank, WAMU, thinking surely they would cancel or reverse the withdrawal. Nope, they had their fraud department "investigate" and concluded that the withdraw…

> had entered a few sweepstakes that caused his name to appear in a database advertised by infoUSA, one of the largest compilers of consumer information

> InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”

> Vast databases of names and personal information, sold to thieves by large publicly traded companies, have put almost anyone within reach of fraudulent telemarketers

> Mr. Guthrie’s name first appeared on a list used by scam artists around 2002, after he filled out a few contest entries that asked about his buying habits and other personal information.

This is a good argument against the cancer that is advertising, marketing, etc. Even if you truly have nothing to hide, are happy to receive targeted ads and offers, it's just a matter of time before the information falls into the wrong hands and gets used against you.

Re: The IT Guy vs. the Con Artist

#136

Post by ubermonkey »

gumby wrote: post #17

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.

I love that. I don't really have time for podcasts -- no commute, etc -- and reading is WAY more efficient.

Re: The IT Guy vs. the Con Artist

#137

Post by iends »

itronitron wrote: post #128
localhost wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago, I had a police detective call me about an active investigation. He wanted to come over to visually verify that I had something in my possession. I was suspicious, and he totally understood. He said, "go look up the phone number for and ask to speak with detective so and so, badge number ZZZ".

you can also just call 911, tell them it's not an emergency, and ask them to connect you to the police station

I advise not being lazy and consuming emergency services if you can help it.

Re: The IT Guy vs. the Con Artist

#138

Post by Mirioron »

dwd wrote: post #86
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…

Troy Hunt took on one of these groups years ago and let them loose in a VM to see what they did. 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...

There's a twitch streamer called Kitboga that messes with these types of scammers in VMs. It's pretty entertaining. He uses a voice changer and has a timer in the corner on how long he manages to keep a scammer occupied.

Re: The IT Guy vs. the Con Artist

#139

Post by majortennis »

localhost wrote: post #110
bsamuels wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you actually look it up and call the number?

Yes I did. And a couple of days later, 2 detectives showed up, verified the item was in my possession and went on to the next person on their list. Incidentally they also marked the item by etching a number on it to make sure that they didn’t see it again, i.e., to rule out my cooperating with the person they were looking for.

what was it?

Re: The IT Guy vs. the Con Artist

#140

Post by chrisdhoover »

macintux wrote: post #108
jtbayly wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you hang up and pick back up too quickly, yeah. But the call doesn't just stay connected until the cake hangs up. Either party can end it by hanging up, right?

Landline calls, at least when I was younger, were not disconnected until the caller hung up. I assume there’s a technical reason involving channels instead of packets but I never researched it.

Landline calls were disconnected after a timeout. The receiver could hangup and pick up quickly and still be connected. We used this method to move to another phone in the house. Also if you tapped the hook a few times the line would disconnect
Post reply on HN