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Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

jeffreyladish.com

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Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#141

Post by AstralStorm »

FDSGSG wrote: post #107
Scoundreller wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it “fails” and then they ask for WU or something non-repudiable. As you get more committed, the more of a length you’ll go to get the place?

WU or just a bank transfer to a drop account. They definitely aren't after card info with a scheme requiring this much interaction.

It's enough to drain few thousands per sucker with scam this automated.

It will be pushed immediately to a temporary account and forwarded in non-repayable way to the scammer, leaving bank or credit card company to take the fall and a big headache to the user.

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#142

Post by stickfigure »

333c wrote: post #78
stickfigure wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a great idea! Why doesn't the url bar highlight the domain? Given how security-critical it is compared to the rest of the URL, why is it not bold and obvious? It seems so easy for browser vendors to implement...

I think you may be saying this sarcastically, but in response to the comment you replied to, at least my browser (Firefox) does do this. On this page, "ycombinator.com" is highlighted in white.

No sarcasm.

Chrome does not display any significant difference... or if it does, it's too subtle for my 20-40 vision.

Firefox is noticeable, now that you mention it. I never noticed before. A for effort, C- for execution?

Given the security implications, how about bold and blue? Maybe even a bigger font size? It should stand out, no?

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#143

Post by FDSGSG »

AstralStorm wrote: post #141
FDSGSG wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WU or just a bank transfer to a drop account. They definitely aren't after card info with a scheme requiring this much interaction.

It's enough to drain few thousands per sucker with scam this automated. It will be pushed immediately to a temporary account and forwarded in non-repayable way to the scammer, leaving bank or credit card company to take the fall and a big headache to the user.

That doesn't happen. The whole idea is utterly ridiculous, if someone could cash out credit cards like that they'd just buy the cards for dollars a piece and not waste their time on a complicated scam like this.

> scam this automated

haha no

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#145

Post by bluGill »

jaclaz wrote: post #139
bluGill wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't live in SF. It isn't unheard of to commute two hours for a retail job in SF just to get where you can afford the rent.

Well, there must be also a given number of "middle class" people, that are not top notch programmers, nor "entry level" or "retail". If we take these as valid data: https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/occupationalem... And set an arbitrary threshold at 45 US$/hour, the amount of people exceeding that are 31.1%, if we set it at 50 US$/hour they are 19.4%. If we draw another line, those that get less than 25…

I'm not an expert in California, but if I understand prop 13 correctly it is possible some of those are people who have lived in SF for many years at the same address - their house is paid off and taxes are minimal so they can afford to live on much less. If your house only costs $400/month to live in ($100 insurance, $100 taxes, $200 other utilities) minimum wage still leaves plenty left over, and presumably if you bought a house 30 years ago you were worth more than minimum wage...

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#146

Post by pnutjam »

Psyladine wrote: post #131
pnutjam wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually look up the tax records of the house. They are usually available on the county website and will show the owners name and when the house was last sold.

If you need to conduct a whitewater-level investigation of an airbnb spot it might be a sign the system needs to step up its game.

Not airbnb, long term rentals.

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#147

Post by masonic »

JoBrad wrote: post #26
nkurz wrote: post #22

The Craigslist ad is still up (or up again): https://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/apa/d/berkeley-two-story-3b... The house appears to exist as pictured at the claimed address on Google maps. Oddly, although Jeffrey's emails about the place were from a couple weeks ago, this current ad says "Posted a day ago". It also says "Call Laurence", although as before there is no phone number. Personally, I'm still not completely s…

Many times they are a copy of a legitimate ad.

Craigslist scammers often copy legitimate ads from other venues as well. My eBay listings are constantly scraped and turned into Craigslist listings.

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#148

Post by masonic »

cissou wrote: post #11

What I'm left wondering is: what is the payoff for these scams? These aren't easy to scale, as you need to be manually writing plausible looking, personalized emails, waiting for someone to take the bait, "nurture" them over days or weeks, etc. Also you need specific, valuable skills: between the social engineering, the actual engineering, the perfect grammar, the creativity, someone who can pull this off can definit…

  what is the payoff for these scams?
Marginal cost for each new pursuit is essentially zero, limited to the ad cost (often zero, like CL).

There were tons of fake CL ads for the Super Bowl and NFC Championship games, asking as little as $850 for Super Bowl tickets (minimum real market price ended up $5000+). Yet people fall for it all the time.

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#149

Post by DrScump »

heedlessly3 wrote: post #129
roel_v wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large parts of this can be automated (scraping profiles, setting up ads based on that scraped info, templates for responses etc), CRM system to track interactions, for which you have 'white collar' staff. The rest you farm out to call center style operations, the 'blue collar' work, who can also do things like 'customer support' for ransomware victims etc. There are entire villages in e.g. Eastern Europe that are not…

that's a lot of overhead and effort for a scam. It would be easier to just to have a normal job such as being a software developer.

Lots of overhead to set up but minimal marginal cost to deploy for multiple use cases and audiences.

It wouldn't surprise me if scammers package their strategy/toolsuite and resell the mechanism to other scammers. Ticket brokers bot networks do this.

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#150

Post by JoshuaDavid »

stickfigure wrote: post #142
333c wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be saying this sarcastically, but in response to the comment you replied to, at least my browser (Firefox) does do this. On this page, "ycombinator.com" is highlighted in white.

No sarcasm. Chrome does not display any significant difference... or if it does, it's too subtle for my 20-40 vision. Firefox is noticeable, now that you mention it. I never noticed before. A for effort, C- for execution? Given the security implications, how about bold and blue? Maybe even a bigger font size? It should stand out, no?

Perhaps even a color chosen based on a hash of the domain name, so a visually similar domain name (e.g. goog1e.com) shows in a different color than the user is used to.
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