Anyone else seeing a recent strong uptick in "You've been charged . . ." scam material?

[britechguy]

Just a few moments ago, this landed in my inbox:



Now why any even vaguely logical person would fall for this I cannot explain, but I know that they do. Every red flag that there could be is present on this one!

The main reason I'm posting is that I've received calls not about this specific scam, but clients who've recieved scam material "of the same form," in recent days. For example, one called me saying she'd gotten something like this saying she'd ordered an iPhone from Amazon, with a screen shot of an Amazon page enclosed. Luckily, she recognized it as a scam before having done anything stupid, but came mighty close (we've had the detailed, "What not to do and how to immediately recognize a scam," discussion again).

I'm just wondering if it's an "isolated incident" or if this may be the beginning of another wave of this type of scam? The do seem to occur in waves.

 

[Markverhyden]

No real change for me, sometimes more, sometimes less. Got a couple of those in two different email accounts in the last week or so.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Yeah, this stuff comes and goes. I've seen 3 of that specific on in the last week though, I almost tune this junk out these days.

 

[NETWizz]

Mine is usually McAfee, but it is the same scam. I suspect they remote control your computer convince you by logging into your bank that they have given you a refund that is too big then ask for giftcards or something.

I have called scammers in the past to mess with them, but I am not really in the mood lately. I considered installing Windows 10 ARM addition on a Raspberry Pi then running it through a Cisco router/switch or firewall to mess with them a bit. For example, I used to like to mess with their downloads or slow their remote connection down to maybe 60 Kbps while showing them a speed-test blaming it on their end.

Currently, I don't care because whack-a-mole isn't worth my effort. Anything short of taking down a scam call-center is not going to excite me anymore.

 

[Sky-Knight]

@NETWizz Like this guy:

 

[GTP]

Seeing so many of these lately. The "wave" has started again imo.
Scam email/text messages purportedly from McAfee, Norton, Microsoft, Apple Inc, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, asking for "subscription payments."
It still astounds me that people fall for these scams as a simple phone call is all it takes to get $400+ from victims.

One of the most common scams here is the cold call from Telstra, Optus, Google etc telling the potential victim that their "your computer networks" have been infected thereby causing an impact on "our servers."

They offer to clean the victims PC (and mobile phones are now included) then charge $400+ for basically trashing the clients devices.

 

[britechguy]

One of the most common scams here is the cold call from Telstra, Optus, Google etc telling the potential victim that their "your computer networks" have been infected thereby causing an impact on "our servers."

It frustrates me that, apparently, there is a huge swath of the earth's population that either never, ever pays attention to the news and/or does a full brain purge about every 6 months, at the outside.

Every telephone scam that I've ever known of begins with a cold call from an entity that the person receives it KNOWS that they have never transacted any business with. Hang Up. Period. End of Sentence.

No legitimate company or governmental entity will ever cold call you. You will receive either email contact or actual postal letter contact first, always, if there is a true issue to be discussed. In the case of email, which could still be a scam (potentially) you never click through on any link contained in it. You go to the entity's website by entering the address manually in your web browser and you log in there. If it's legit, you'll have the same message either in a pop-up on logging in, in their private messaging center, or both.

This is not rocket science. These scams are so far from new, and so far from "infrequent" that the same basic advice has been being given for decades.

I get that there are "people of a certain age" who are, for legitimate reasons, more likely to fall for this stuff. But anyone who's under the age of 60 years old has absolutely no excuse unless they've been living under a rock for decades.

 

[Sky-Knight]

And if a government entity calls you, it's definitely not using a text to speech robot to do so.

 

[timeshifter]

There's not a lot of misspellings and bad grammar in the example you posted, but I recall hearing something interesting about that. We all thought "oh, just look how bad their English or spelling or grammar is" or whatever. That's a tell-tale sign it's not legit. But, if you know anything about direct marketing and mailing you know that those people are constantly testing their pitches.

If you're doing direct mail you might send out 10,000 pieces. But 5,000 have one slightly different sentence than another. The responses are measured and refined and tested again on the next mailing. So apparently scammers learned that misspellings, bad English and grammar improved their response rates. I can't explain it, but people in the know claim it works.

 

[NETWizz]

Every telephone scam that I've ever known of begins with a cold call from an entity that the person receives it KNOWS that they have never transacted any business with. Hang Up. Period. End of Sentence.

No legitimate company or governmental entity will ever cold call you. You will receive either email contact or actual postal letter contact first, always, if there is a true issue to be discussed. In the case of email, which could still be a scam (potentially) you never click through on any link contained in it. You go to the entity's website by entering the address manually in your web browser and you log in there. If it's legit, you'll have the same message either in a pop-up on logging in, in their private messaging center, or both.

This is not rocket science. These scams are so far from new, and so far from "infrequent" that the same basic advice has been being given for decades.

I get that there are "people of a certain age" who are, for legitimate reasons, more likely to fall for this stuff. But anyone who's under the age of 60 years old has absolutely no excuse unless they've been living under a rock for decades.

True it starts with a cold call from someone you don't know.

UNTrue, no legitimate company will ever cold call you. I have had this happen at least twice. One was from Chase Bank or J.P. Morgan Chase. They called me to try to get me to invest with them because after being with them for 14+ years I had enough money that obviously I came out in a query they ran for Private Client banking. This one was legitimate from a legitimate company calling from a local branch, but technically in the gray area because calling an existing customer is NOT a violation of the Do-Not-Call List. The second is a legitimate, public-traded (NASDAQ stock symbol "RUN", lol) ; they sell solar panels and while a legitimate company they made the decision to disregard the Do-Not-Call List by hiring other companies including Media-Mix 365 and Modernize to generate leads and illegally blow up peoples phones by calling from overseas. I won't get too in-depth, but many legitimate companies feel if they hire overseas call centers that they can violate the law or at least not get caught because the company itself technically did not make the calls.

True to the rest of what you say.

 

[NviGate Systems]

They prey on the fact that people will freak out that someone might be using their card and they don't think about calling the Bank. Instead "The Bank" (Of Indian Investment) calls you.

 

[britechguy]

UNTrue, no legitimate company will ever cold call you.

I'll grant what you've said. I'll clarify that any legitimate company that you have no prior business dealings with will ever cold call you.

Even the "Do Not Call" registry here in the USA allows for entities with which you currently or formerly had business dealings to call you.

When I use the phrase "cold call," I mean, "dead cold." If you have had prior dealings with a company, however distant, the call may be very, very "chilly" but it's not truly cold.

 

[NETWizz]

I'll grant what you've said. I'll clarify that any legitimate company that you have no prior business dealings with will ever cold call you.

Even the "Do Not Call" registry here in the USA allows for entities with which you currently or formerly had business dealings to call you.

When I use the phrase "cold call," I mean, "dead cold." If you have had prior dealings with a company, however distant, the call may be very, very "chilly" but it's not truly cold.

Well I would say you are 95% correct…

Completely true any company you have ever dealt with can legally call you even if on the Do-Not-Call list.

Unfortunately some companies that are legitimate enough to trade on the NASDAQ seem to disregard the Do Not Call List because they feel they can get away wirh it. They like to hire overseas companies to make the cold calls on their behalf. These overseas companies are called lead-generators and they sell leads after pre-screening via cold calls, voice avatars etc. They often even have indemnification agreements in place.

I know this because I was called numerous times by a solar company’s lead generators Modernize and Media-Mix 365 among others. Eventually when I figured out the parent company and threatened to sue they laughed and even dared me. Then I looked up their registered agent where I was going to send the service before drafting the lawsuit only to see they were actively involved in a class-action lawsuit in the United States District Court where plaintiffs’s complaint was alleging they were they were violating the Do-Not-Call list.

The audacity of them to be a defendant in a lawsuit and continue the outrageous activity shows the length they will go…

I got a copy of the complaint and reached out to the Class-Action arroueys sending them the recording asking for a call…

Long story short they called me at a California number but I live in different one-party-conscent state and they were calling from Airizona also a one-party consent state. I was the conscenring party to the recording I made, which is critical! My recording was admissible and completely saved the case where Plaintiffs were going to lose because they had only days to submit more evidence or the United States District Court was going to grant defendent’s motion to strike.

By the time the dust settled, it cost them $5,500,000 more than it would have NOT to call me that day and I got paid many times the small-claims limit though nowhere near seven figure amount.

I have still to this day never got another call to sell me solar.

 

[GTP]

It frustrates me that, apparently, there is a huge swath of the earth's population that either never, ever pays attention to the news and/or does a full brain purge about every 6 months, at the outside.

Every telephone scam that I've ever known of begins with a cold call from an entity that the person receives it KNOWS that they have never transacted any business with. Hang Up. Period. End of Sentence.

No legitimate company or governmental entity will ever cold call you. You will receive either email contact or actual postal letter contact first, always, if there is a true issue to be discussed. In the case of email, which could still be a scam (potentially) you never click through on any link contained in it. You go to the entity's website by entering the address manually in your web browser and you log in there. If it's legit, you'll have the same message either in a pop-up on logging in, in their private messaging center, or both.

This is not rocket science. These scams are so far from new, and so far from "infrequent" that the same basic advice has been being given for decades.

I get that there are "people of a certain age" who are, for legitimate reasons, more likely to fall for this stuff. But anyone who's under the age of 60 years old has absolutely no excuse unless they've been living under a rock for decades.

The worst part of all this is that even after being caught out multiple times by these scams people still fall for them.
I've pretty much given up trying to educate clients.
It's pointless.

 

[britechguy]

I've pretty much given up trying to educate clients.
It's pointless.

I haven't. Several have averted disaster because they've listened and "that little light bulb" of recognition went off at the beginning of the scammer's primrose path.

Some are, indeed, hopeless. Others, not so.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Some clients are certainly lost causes, the rest are a variable collection of skills that need continuous reminders.

Nowhere else in our lives do we face such issues, so it's pretty easy to slip up. People usually think to do better when they're physically in a bad place, but it's a tall order to get everyone to think they're digitally in the ghetto 100% of the time.

 

[Markverhyden]

Of course it's easy for us to pick up the red flags given how much we know and understand whats going on this ecosystem. Even then though almost all these emails had red flags that are so simple it beggars the imagination of why someone would/could not realize that.

Take the one below which I received a few days ago. Notice the sales price and the tax at 8.6%. That's very close to 10% so round up to 10%. Just have to kick the decimal point one digit to left get a rough idea of what tax should be. It's pretty obvious that $19.49 isn't even close to $90. Not to mention googling the phone number produces nothing.

 

[britechguy]

Take the one below which I received a few days ago.

Everything you say is absolutely true, and I'm not taking issue with any of it.

But, if you so happen to be someone who doesn't even have a PayPal account, that alone should be the instant determiner that this is a scam. If you do have a PayPal account, and want to verify, then log in to your PayPal account to see if the charge exists.

Presuming that something completely "out of the blue" is legitimate is the first way to get sucked into a scam, which is precisely what I tell all my clients.

And if anything claims that your credit card has been charged, you can be darned well certain that if the charge were "out of the ordinary" the card company would be reaching out to you about it and you can and should log in to your credit card account yourself, manually entering their web address information, to verify whether something has occurred that requires you to report fraud.

The short way I put this to clients is, "You know the old adage, 'If it looks too good to be true, it probably isn't?' Well, the same applys if you substitute either 'bad' or 'odd' for good." Trust your gut and don't panic. Just check things out yourself not touching a thing in these messages as part of doing that.

If we could just get people to stop panicking and taking just a few short minutes to stop and consider, most of these scams would fail even if they're really, really legitimate looking. And, lets face it, if you've been the victim of actual credit card fraud, there's nothing you can do about that but calmly report it and let the company take it from there.

 

[xrobwx71]

I one of these last week on my personal e-mail and my work e-mail. I haven't used Norton products since Ghost in the late 90's.

 

[britechguy]

Latest in my inbox, signed, "Kind Regards, Team norton." (Yes, the N is lowercase, and there is an actual period present - that part didn't snag on screen):





I've never used a Norton product, even a trial version, in my life!