Yes I thought it might help someone else to select that option before getting hacked. It happens so often.
People like that make me very angry. There is special place in “you know where” for people who are like that. It’s selfish and sick. I would cut off contact with people like that too, it’s revolting. Forging vaccine documents and providing fake healthcare worker documents is illegal, do these people not realize that they may get caught and could potentially be in a lot of trouble if they do get caught? People just don’t think! Also, why can’t this young man just wait his turn like everyone else?
Recently I have been receiving daily texts from “UPS” telling me either I wasn’t home to receive a delivery (I have been home all day) or that “Due to no safe place to leave it the package was returned to the warehouse!” and it always includes a link to click on.
The texts are from those annoying numbers that begin with 410100 but always end with a different number, so they can’t be blocked and are a digit shy of a phone #.
I can forward it to my carrier’s SPAM reporting #, but it is highly annoying!
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What about paying $65,000 + per year to send your kid to college? 
For real, there’s this one: phone call from someone who has figured out which utility providers you have and then saying that you are delinquent on your payment (been known to happen) and that they have a guy in the area with orders to turn off your power/gas unless you go to the store and purchase a cash gift card like Green Dot with the made-up back payments. You have to go to the store right now! No time to make a payment over the phone! Otherwise he can’t stop the guy from coming and shutting you off.
We didn’t bite, but I played along with him for a while before he called me some choice names after figuring out that I’d baited him into thinking he’d baited me and burned a 1/2 hour of his scam time.
Called the Sheriff because whatever and they told me that particular scam had a high success rate. You buy the Green Dot cash card, you give the jerks the card number, they transfer the cash to another account or whatever they do and it’s as if you handed a criminal cash. It’s over and there is nothing anybody can do.
Bottom line: the utilities don’t call you and strong arm you into making payments with threats of imminent shut-off. That doesn’t come out of nowhere. You have to be really delinquent and have ignored several warnings before they shut you off, and of course they’ll always take a normal pay method.
I just never understood why anyone would think that a utility company would ask to be paid with a gift card. It’s illogical.
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The thing he was going for was something along the lines of a traditional payment takes longer to clear - and we know there is some truth to that - but that a cash equivalent payment would be the only way to stop the shut-off man. That somehow the utility is so over it that unless they get an immediate cash payment they have to go forward with shutting you off.
I have to say, the idiot who was trying me was pretty good. But I agree: the premise is absurd.
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I’m glad you played along with him and wasted his time!
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We’ve been getting the track package scam emails too.
H’s hotel account was hacked this week too and someone tried to use his hotel points. Thankfully he got an alert.
Someone attempted a scam on my mother yesterday, pretending to be my brother who got messed up in a DUI car accident and was in jail, and then immediately after that she got a call from someone pretending to be a public defender for my brother. I’m sure they would’ve asked for money to be wired or something, but she was suspicious and called me and asked me to call them back and see what was going on. I tried to call my brother and ended up leaving a voice message for him (so I started to get worried); and called the number my mom wrote down for the “public defender” and left a message for them to call me back. Meanwhile Google wasn’t showing me any helpful information on the phone number or the name of “public defender.” Thankfully, I did get a hold of my brother - who was doing fine - so all’s well, but what sick people do this kind of stuff to the elderly. The one silver lining is that it was a good impetus to talk to my brother about getting some emergency contact information for him, as he’s living a digital nomad life for the time being and being in a car accident is a totally plausible scenario (not the DUI part though). I called the “public defender” and left a message saying I reported them to the State Attorney General’s office.
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Sorry they tried scamming your mom. They are the scum of the earth!
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And the public defender wouldn’t charge anything. Bail yes, but not a legal fee.
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Just got an email wanting me to approve a purchase I made on Doc Martins web site using my paypal account. I haven’t used my paypal account in so long any credit card attached to it has expired. I have never purchased anything from Doc Martin. Every link, when hovered over with the cursor, links to something not remotely related to Doc Martin.
Yeah…right. Into the spam folder you go!
Ok, good to know. I’ve never had any dealings with the legal system personally, and my mom would certainly not have any clue either. Thanks, and now I need to look up what bail entails because I am totally ignorant of that process. Hope that I’ll never need to know it in real life.
I just got a robocall from the “Federal Reserve System” saying that they have detected irregularities in my financial transactions! I should press 1 to find out more. Are people really so gullible to fall for this stuff?
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Probably. Or why would they keep doing it? I wonder what the response rate is?
I received a text today from a spoofed number, sent to a group of spoofed numbers in my area plus two in LA, about how this charitable woman who won a powerball lottery was going to give me and 199 others some of her winnings. I looked up the name and discovered there was a woman who won a large lottery payout several years ago and immediately had her name used by various scammers in similar ways. Social media accounts were set up in her name to provide “proof” of the scammer’s identity and good will. 
The scam has resurfaced multiple times, so I guess they get some replies.
All nine numbers have been blocked and I hope that’s the end of it.
I had someone call me and ask why I had just called him. I hadn’t called anyone and told him so - apologizing and saying it was probably spam. He said ok, thanks, and hung up telling me not to worry about it. Someone likely spammed my number to call people. 
I googled the number of the guy calling me and he’s a relatively local lawyer - no bad vibes appeared online at all. It’s frustrating to think someone used my number, esp for local calls. What if I end up wanting to call that person sometime and they’ve blocked my number?
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We see that all the time. Caller ID shows a random name and phone number with a local area code and exchange. If you look at call history, this supposedly local call actually came from halfway across the country. I believe they use an algorithm that chooses a local name and number to fool us to thinking it’s a local number.
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Yup, they were spoofing a local bank (that we happen to have an acct with), but trying to sell us some garbage or other. 
Another trick I’ve seen is that the phony number that shows up on Caller ID resembles a number you’re familiar with. I’ve answered a couple of times thinking it was my mother or one of the kids–upon closer examination, the number displayed is one digit off, or has all the correct digits but 2 numbers are transposed.
Our credo is “if it’s someone we know and it’s important, they’ll leave a message”.
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