I keep seeing this story headline from security admins lecturing me how to not get my estate compromised... please just learn and employ best practices and stop getting on at those with proven track records
I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed
291–300 of 562 posts
Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone why buys a lot of cycling parts online, there are many mom/pop bike shops with web storefronts, that are very reasonably priced and often include "free" shipping. Stop giving bezos your money, you have no excuse.
Yeah.. lots of people keep repeating "but its expensive out of amazon!" and they never tried. Sure, you can find cheaper products on Amazon, but once you start looking around, it's definitely not always the case. But people are lazy, they get multiple amazon packages a week, and love to complain about Bezos but do nothing about it.
I bought a book on Amazon in 2005, it came (weeks) late, i complained, got sent another, ended up receiving 2 books. It was my last purchase from Amazon. Since then, the only time i see Amazon is on the backend of a scammer. Amazon in my opinion, in every sense, a scam itself.
First off, its just morphed from a book store into a upper class ebay. Alibabba became the chinese ebay. I'll pay that drop shipper the money, i got no problem with the conveince they give but realistically whats the point of going through 3 middle men when i can wait an extra week and limit that to 0 or 1.
Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed
#293"while I'm no expert, I've never heard of a call center system that can accept touch tones seamlessly while a call is active, and it would take extremely sophisticated audio processing capabilities to be able to do that, since the frequencies used by touch tone keys heavily overlap the frequencies of human speech."
"Extremely sophisticated?" The tones are just a sum of two sine waves of known frequencies. That's trivial to detect. What am I missing?
Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed
#294It gets even weirder when your bank acts like a scammer. A few weeks ago I was trying to help my wife add her USBank credit card to Apple Pay and Apple Pay said I needed to call this number to finish setting up the card. So I call the number and the guy is very friendly and asks me for a bunch of identity verification details, which I provide to him, but then he asks us to send a code back that will be coming over te…
Something I learned (almost the hard way) was to always make sure I have a Bank/Credit Card's own app installed (and logged in) before trying to add to Apple Pay. Apple Pay can and will redirect you to verification steps in the app if the app is installed. More often than not, if you initiate "Add to Wallet" from the app itself there's no additional verification step.
The setup flow is hit or miss.
With some banks, it was seamless to setup. With another bank, it wasn't clear how to finish setting up Apple Pay. I don't recall if I called them or went through their app to actually set it up. It was definitely confusing, and the Apple Pay onboarding screens didn't provide useful instructions.
Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I've been ordering from Target, Best Buy, and Walmart much more often these days. I just assume the product descriptions and reviews on Amazon are all lies.
Target and Wal-Mart also sell third party shit. It's easier for me to just buy directly from brands I like, or to shop for them on a couple outlet sites I trust (so far) to sell legit (overstocked or lightly damaged) top-quality stuff and not lower-quality second- or third-tier versions (as some outlet stores do), than figure out how to avoid or disable displaying third party sellers on a bunch of different sites. By…
Best buy is filled with 3rd party sellers too but it's at least very easy to filter them out. If I could do the same on Amazon I wouldn't have any problem with 3rd party sellers, but they instead make it almost impossible to know even if you check manually.
Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't follow. Just because an online retailer grows it doesn't mean they have to start allowing third-party sellers. In fact, seeing what is happening to Amazon's reputation, that seems like a bad long term move. Short termisum might win out, but it is not a foregone conclusion.
The mechanism is the managers that take over at companies who focus on the short term bottom line (trimming support today, to juice profits tomorrow, to lose credibility years down the road after the bonuses have long landed in their bank account). And the problem is that Amazon's growth profile (retail-side anyway) is going to be pretty constrained going forwards because they own too much of the available pie right…
"short term bottom line" is a comically absurd way to describe Amazon, which has been growing consistently for 25 years.
Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I've been ordering from Target, Best Buy, and Walmart much more often these days. I just assume the product descriptions and reviews on Amazon are all lies.
Target and Wal-Mart also sell third party shit. It's easier for me to just buy directly from brands I like, or to shop for them on a couple outlet sites I trust (so far) to sell legit (overstocked or lightly damaged) top-quality stuff and not lower-quality second- or third-tier versions (as some outlet stores do), than figure out how to avoid or disable displaying third party sellers on a bunch of different sites. By…
True. But stores like Target also let you see inventory in physical stores, so it's easier to purchase an item you know is coming from a Target store/warehouse than a 3rd party.
Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed
#298Hm, interesting. I've had surprising fraudulent charges on a WF card just a few days ago. They texted and emailed me, but I had to call them myself (not that I would've trusted a call, I even wondered for a minute if SMS was a fraud attempt).
The issue is, it was a card that I keep only because it's the oldest card I have, that I don't really ever pull out of my wallet anymore. I'm not familiar with the underground stuff but I suppose stolen CC numbers are typically sold reasonably fast (months, not years) and used while they're still fresh? If that's the case, while two random anecdotal data points don't prove anything, I start to wonder if it's possible that WF was recently compromised.
Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Amazon today is a street side flea market. You really don't know what you'll get. There are two time when I will use Amazon nowadays: 1) If there is an official store there Anker is a good example of this. It seems like Amazon doesn't commingle inventory if there is an official store. 2) If I want something faster than Alibaba/Aliexpress Quite often I can find the exact Chinesium equivalent on Amazon and I get the…
> It seems like Amazon doesn't commingle inventory if there is an official store. Is there any confirmation of this? I've seen assertions both ways.
No. Amazon doesn't commingle inventory when... the manufacturer doesn't sell through any other channels, so there is no one to commingle with.
Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wrong opening hours on Google is a niggle for me. And having been on the other side of the equation, changing the hours Google says a business is open is not always straightforward.
whoa, dude, language
This is a great opportunity for you to learn more English language.