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I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed

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Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed

#401

Post by hedora »

nopeYouAreWrong wrote: post #22

I'm so skeptical of these "experts" especially if they write a blog post where they hate their bank. I've been with Wells for over a decade. They have never called me. Never. I have had "fraud" alerts hundreds of times. They always happen at certain POS, and it's always a text alert. Some of the stories I read make me viscerally react with "what in the world are you doing with something as simple as a bank account?"…

I've had other banks call for fraud alerts.

Once, I got a call about attempted activity on a debit card. The person gave the wrong last four digits of the card number, then the call dropped due to poor cell reception.

This was on Christmas Eve or something. I called the number on the back of the card, but they were an outsourced call center for card replacements. Fraud alerts had been outsourced to a different company, so they had no idea if the call was legit.

I went into the physical branch the next week, and spoke to a manager. They said it could be legitimate or not. I think we ordered replacement cards at that point, and watched the next few statements more closely than normal.

Honestly, the behavior of the scammer sounds more legitimate than the actual non-scam behavior of the last half dozen banks I've dealt with.

Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed

#402

Post by ineedasername »

evilduck wrote: post #321
exolymph wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the same thing, but relatedly, every legit email I receive from my health insurance is functionally indistinguishable from phishing. They always bounce me through a million weird domains too. It's very discomfiting and makes me worry that I won't be able to pinpoint a legit phishing attempt because it won't stand out.

In the same vein, every corporate "security training" email I've received that's been outsourced to a third party vendor looks indistinguishable from spam and phishing, the exact things it goes on to train you not to open. I scare-quote that because they're universally worthless training programs used to tick boxes on compliance forms and not actual training, so I happily flag them as spam. I've also recieved company…

Yes, this! I had an email from a 3rd party telling me about required training, click the link and use my employee credentials to log in.

Other training has been posted as a to-do in our individual HR account portal, and this was an external site, so it set off warning flags. Not only that, the name of the 3rd party was a legit company, but the site the email linked to was not that company's domain. Big red flag! Curious as I am, I run whois on both domains. Completely different registration info!

So, confident I've identified a phishing attempt and concerned it might have been shotgunned to many people, I notify the appropriate people. Was it a scam? Nope! In fact the person I notified was quite frustrated because a month earlier there had been an email that, sometime in the future, there would be $X training coming up. Yeah, a month later I had no recollection of a generic HR notification that (when I looked in my archive) made no mention that it would not be using the standard secure MFA HR portal used to link out to all other training.

This was all about 4 months after a similar required security training, which was accessed via the usual HR portal, and which listed about half a dozen phishing red flags that the new training violated. But not to worry, my workplace takes security seriously. I guess their seriousness is just very unevenly distributed. It's a good thing we're not really a high value target for hackers.

Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed

#403

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

klik99 wrote: post #21

There's one easy rule that could have avoided all of this - never give out any info on incoming calls. If I get a call or text about fraudulent transactions, I'll keep them on hold while I log into the bank website. If I get a call about a late payment, I'll thank them for the info and ask them to stay on while I pay online. If I get an inbound call with a more complex request, I'll ask them for their employee info a…

I go one step further and tell them I don't talk to unauthenticated callers, ask them for a reference number and an published return phone number that I can authentic using the usual methods (website, advertising material), explain to them that unaurhticated / cold calls are unethical, and then end the call.

Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed

#404

Post by fphhotchips »

r0fl wrote: post #400
klik99 wrote: post #21

There's one easy rule that could have avoided all of this - never give out any info on incoming calls. If I get a call or text about fraudulent transactions, I'll keep them on hold while I log into the bank website. If I get a call about a late payment, I'll thank them for the info and ask them to stay on while I pay online. If I get an inbound call with a more complex request, I'll ask them for their employee info a…

Excellent, simple advice! I don’t believe anyone who calls me with a problem, ever! Overdue bill? Okay cool thanks, I’ll call back and ask to speak to someone, hang up. Compromised card? Okay cool thanks, I’ll call the number on the back of my visa, hang up. (This one happened to me) Relative in another country is dying of cancer and needs money for some obscure procedure and doesn’t want to tell anyone else about it…

> Hi, the government is giving $5000 credits for people to add insulation, blah blah blah.

This is... occasionally a real thing. Drives me nuts that they choose to implement it this way though.

Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed

#405

Post by axus »

bubblethink wrote: post #145
carabiner wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon today is a street side flea market. You really don't know what you'll get. I've started ordering more stuff from traditional retailers. Their online operations these days are really good, and at most a few dollars more than Amazon. Clothes from macys.com, home goods from homedepot.com and target.com, and so on. You're not flooded with choices with these stores that are mostly garbage, instead you get only 1-3…

This seems to be the classic underdog problem. The traditional retailers that you like today will become third party marketplaces tomorrow if they grow. So the issue is that we only get good service from underdogs and it is destined to fail once the underdog is not an underdog anymore.

Ordered some things from walmart.com, half of it was third-party sellers. They were sort of transparent about it, though, and the quality was at least what I'd expect from inside a Walmart.

Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed

#406

Post by msluyter »

klik99 wrote: post #21

There's one easy rule that could have avoided all of this - never give out any info on incoming calls. If I get a call or text about fraudulent transactions, I'll keep them on hold while I log into the bank website. If I get a call about a late payment, I'll thank them for the info and ask them to stay on while I pay online. If I get an inbound call with a more complex request, I'll ask them for their employee info a…

Am I alone in just never answering my phone? Like, ever, for _any_ unknown number. Seems like that alone solves a certain class of problems.

Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed

#407

Post by alvah »

weq wrote: post #285
Spooky23 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tow drivers make a lot of money. They do a lot of subcontracting and mutual aid type arrangements.

Towys in my country are usually connected to some kind of mafia. Never met an altruistic one like like matts offroad recovery in my travels.

Same here (Western Australia) and it's closer to $2500 than the $200 mentioned above.

Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed

#408

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

duderific wrote: post #337
aceazzameen wrote: post #178

Earlier 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.

As someone who has contributed legitimate reviews on Amazon, I think "all lies" is a bit of an exaggeration.

Negative reviews are silenced. I ordered a machine with missing parts such that it couldn't be assembled. I gave a 1-star review and it never appeared on the seller's page.

Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed

#409

Post by rndgermandude »

Nextgrid wrote: post #315
Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really hard recognizing the image Amazon have in the US compared to my personal experience with amazon.de . The service is stellar, shipping both ways is free as long as you buy products covered by prime. Refunds are with no questions asked (as long as you don't start abusing it i guess). As soon as you go into 3rd party sellers the experience gets muddled, though I've had plenty of good experiences with those a…

I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon is more strict in Europe because their behavior from the US would get them in legal trouble here.

Maybe that, to some degree. But amazon.de has a lot of problems, too.

There are a lot of fishy listings, but it's also often quite easy to detect those fishy offers, because the German text is usually full of grammar and spelling errors, and often obviously a result from Google translate, and often not even fully translated, with larger parts still in (shoddy) English. Outright counterfeit products seem to be somewhat rare still, at least from what I observed, but there is quite a number of low quality knockoffs.

Or e.g. multiple journalists reported on review-rigging operations - usually organized through whatsapp, and using regular folks for a few bucks as "mules", to get some coveted "verified buyer" reviews. Or bait-and-switch listings, where they had an original listing which gathered some good/ok reviews, and then they repurpose that listing for another product, while keeping their stars.

Or e.g. there was a report about one guy who got like 10 - 20 packets a day with junk he never ordered, every day, over months. Apparently some shady sellers got hold of his info, and were using him as a "garbage bin" for excess stock[0]. While he wasn't charged for any of the products or shipping, he still ended up in a situation where his door bell rang a few times a day, and he ended up throwing away most of the stuff, having to properly dispose of it. And when contacted, amazon just told him to throw away the stuff he doesn't want. It's unlikely he was the only involuntary garbage bin victim.

[0] It wasn't clear why they did that. Maybe to inflate sales numbers to get higher ranked in the amazon search? Or because just shipping it through amazon to some random people might be cheaper than just keeping that stuff in the amazon warehouse or disposing of it properly?

Re: I'm a scam prevention expert and I got scammed

#410

Post by wyldfire »

rcurry wrote: post #258

It 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…

It would be nice if banks need this kind of a process could agree on how it should work.

Like maybe the automated "we will never ask you for this info" email should only contain decimal digits and the "we are on the phone and will send you a confirmation code to read back" could only contain alpha characters. Or something obvious and consistent.

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