Google Translate says: “Your mother sucked donkey cock.”
The adage isn’t true, though.
Yes, a lot of scams ARE motivated by greed, another similar one is that the scammer “accidentally” e-mails the mark with info required to access what appears to be a well-funded crypto wallet, when the mark tries to access it they are told they have to pay taxes or fees, it may be a large sum but it’s only a fraction of what is allegedly in the wallet.
They send money, and the wallet disappears.
But a lot of the scams these days are motivated by fear….fear of your child being jailed in another country, fear of your nudes being sent to everyone you know, fear of being arrested for missing a court subpoena or fear of someone coming to your house and killing you because you wasted an escort’s time and fear of being jailed for serious crimes committed by someone using your name.
There are also scams motivated by altruism and love, from donating to fake charities to sending large amounts of money to an online love interest because they have an emergency.
Yes, greed plays a large part in some scams, but you absolutely can scam an honest person.
My mother got a call explaining that her bank had noticed some unusual activity on her account, and had locked her debit card as a precaution until she could verify that, no, the card was still in her possession; they’d of course erred on the side of her security, but would apologetically switch it back on for her if she could confirm that it’s there by reading the card number to them.
You can see where this is going.
Got a email this morning thanking me for confirming my order with a PDF attached. The PDF says I got some McAfee product for $360 something. If I want to cancel the order I can call this handy 866 number in the next 24 hours.
I routinely delete all e-mails claiming to confirm an order I didn’t place. Best not to click on any attachment either.
I hardly ever delete emails. I also hardly ever read my emails. If I’m expecting an email, I’ll generally look for it and open it when it comes in. Right now my gmail account has over 46k unopened emails. It’s a bit of problem, really. I’d like to clear it all away, but apparently gmail only lets you delete one page at a time (max 50 emails), so it’s kinda overwhelming.
Q: If HYPOTHETICALLY it is a continuous ( targeted? ) harassment/email bombardment, shouldn’t one save those emails for later as ‘evidence’?
That’s good thinking. Evidence. I’ll use that excuse next time somebody asks me why I have so many unread emails.
I have exactly your email habits and exactly your challenge but with yahoo mail. I need to find out a way to nuke all my thousands of emails from orbit, all at once.
If that’s the case and if he ‘Makes It Rain’ we should share the attorney/firm.
Hypothetically.
When I’m in cleanup mode, gmail eventually gives me a ‘do you want to delete everything?’ popup. Not sure what triggers it, at a guess it is after several selections of the ‘everything on the screen’ checkbox.
Found instructions that don’t exactly match what I remember, and I’m not due for a cleanup right now so can’t test: How to mass-delete emails in Gmail | Proton
You’ll probably want to scroll down to ‘delete all unread’, depending.
This week, New York magazine has a firsthand account of a successful $50,000 scam. It sounds absolutely bonkers! The scammers phoned and wove a tale of “drug smuggling, money laundering, and CIA officers.” They insisted on an urgent cash drop into a passing car. Their victim? A seasoned financial-advice columnist.
The comments below the article are understandably mixed between those who think the author behaved like a complete idiot and those who think that, under the right circumstances, it could happen to anyone.
Someone has acquired our company banking information and is using it to write fake checks. Up to about $60,000 so far.
This week we got an email sent to our general public address which got routed to our accounting office. Seems a guy named Bob in North Carolina got a check for $4900 from us and wanted to know if it was legitimate. Our accounting folks sent an email back saying it was a scam, don’t cash the check, send all info to us. Too late. Bob already cashed it and sent the nice people a bunch of gift cards. They have promised to send him more checks. 
Man, that sucks. Check fraud is apparently rampant, with thieves stealing your mail, finding checks in said mail and then printing out blank checks with all your account info encoded on them. It was the basis for me starting this thread. My wife has strict instructions to NEVER send a check in the mail unless there is no other possible option.
A third view is that she made the whole thing up. Remember Janet Cooke (who is no longer with the Washington Post):
I lean toward this explanation.
Her career seems to have declined since she held senior editorships at a couple of publications. I’m not sure however that this article is a good way to get favorable attention.
Not to say that it never happens, but it’s exceedingly rare for a veteran journalist working for a prominent media outlet to simply make up a story. Journalists are well aware that if you try to pass off fiction as fact and are found out, no publication will employ you ever again. Plus, why would she fabricate a detailed story that makes her look so foolish?
Looking at it another way - what media outlet would hire such a credulous person for any kind of reporting assignment, or accept a feature piece that depends on factual elements?
Got hit with a few iTunes purchases around just after midnight this morning.
Some arsehole has my card details.
My bank - probably one of the worst - actually robocalled me because of unusual spending, then I got to talk to an actual human who was actually helpful (a rare thing at that bank) who promptly cancelled the card, and reversed the payments.
Somewhat grudgingly… thanks shitty bank.
Got a phishing spam I haven’t seen before. It was a normal looking message that asked me to “activate 2-factor authentication now!” for my improved security. Sounds good, but no indication of exactly what account it was talking about. The complete lack of branding was the most suspicious thing.
I’m sure if I’d bothered to follow the link in a timely fashion it would have taken me to a clone of some login site, where it would have collected my login and password. By the time I got around to it the site had been taken down, so just returned an error.
The “customer service” link at the bottom of the email goes to a crypto wallet site, so that is probably what they were after.