Hi Maserschmidt, thanks for asking about this scammer. The client was complaining that she’d never met this woman before. The con artist was quite bold so the family and employer were told of it. I’ll bet attempted scams like that happen occasionally in places like grocery stores.
I liked the clip from Anasthama too! LOL
Just spotted in my spam folder:
Wells Fargo Fraud Detection <hbaier.cappel @ t-online.de>
Yeah, suure you are.
Pig butchers target Japan. Chart and text from Bloomberg:
Yes, she downloaded a scam-app. She invests about $200,000; app eventually shows a $1 million balance.
The civil servant was initially able to take out small amounts from the trading account, but in December when she tried to withdraw the balance of her account she discovered she couldn’t. The app turned out to be a fake — her money had ended up in someone’s pocket, not in stock markets.
The Chinese mafia is very efficient: they divide their workforce into two groups, herders and butchers. The herders try to attract new marks: those are the people posting on twitter, facebook, WhatsApp, tiktok and tinder. Once they’ve roped someone in, the account is passed to the butchers who run a much slower romance-scam or a variant listed in their handbook.
Herders try to take the conversation off of the twitter direct message and on to telegram or WhatsApp.
I’m thinking of disrupting their herder model a little. Steps:
a) compile a list of anti-scam websites.
b) Reply to the scammer publicly, thanking them for the follow and warning them of pig-butchering scams, along with a link.
c) If they have no public activity (likely) follow them back. When they DM you, say you only interact with accounts that have some public activity. If they are enticed to make a post, circle back to step b).
I’m getting like 3 or 4 follows per day from these scammers which is ok, but I’d like to take them down a peg.
Cite:
With Russian bots, I used to present Turing tests like, “Do you agree that Putin is a tyrant who murders Russians?” along with a link to articles on the Russian apartment bombings which brought Putin to power. For every reply, they got another link to anti-Putin content.
I may have told this story here before, but here goes again.
Does anyone remember the American reporter who got Ebola during the 2014 West African outbreak, while he was covering it? Anyway, I followed his Twitter/X feed for a while, and a couple years later, he was doing some reporting from Nigeria, and while he was there, one of those Nigerian scammers offered him $10,000US a month, cash, to do Skype or FaceTime with him. He said it was because people would be more likely to fall for it if they saw a white person with an American or Canadian accent.
He declined.
I just got a message on Instagram from a supposed young woman who shares a few friends with me. She is from the area but she is out of town for a while. You see she’s in the US Army and currently deployed to Israel to help with the crisis.
I replied that if she’s in the US Army and deployed to Israel that she shouldn’t be telling me that. She, who I just met, asked me to keep the secret between us.
Romance scam?
I got one of the Medicare scam calls. While making enough vague uh-huh noises to get past the opneing bot, I noticed my phone has an “Audio Emojis” option. When the human scammer got on the line, I sent him a couple audio “poop” emojis (basically loud obnoxious fart sounds) until he hung up.
I was just messaged about the $11.36 I owe to the Oregon Sunspass Toll System, with a convenient link to take care of the problem. The Oregon Toll System is not named “Sunspass”.
In fact, it isn’t named anything because it doesn’t exist.
Sounds like you were just invited to The Oregon Rail.
Take care you don’t get dysentery.
I got an unknown call last week. Usually I ignore, but occasionally I answer.
i connected, and said nothing for a few seconds, then “You’re a scammer”.
This met with a very helpful response involving lots of “FUCK”. Which I appreciated, as I had no fucks of my own to give.
In Number Go Up which is about the crypto scam, Zeke Faux goes to Cambodia to find the enormous compound where the pig butchering scamming slaves are kept. They are mostly poor young people lured to the country for a prospective job, kidnapped, tortured and beaten for not keeping their quotas.
I think about that every time I’m tempted to give a scammer a hard time.
When I get a phone call and hear silence, I wait a few seconds, say “Hello,” wait a few more seconds, and if there is nothing I hang up.
I believe the robodialer programs are expecting a greeting right away and if they don’t hear anything they don’t kick in. That’s why I give the first pause. I give the second pause in case there’s a real person who was politely waiting and was unusually quiet to the point of absolute silence.
So far this has helped me avoid talking to a lot of spammers.
My phone got an upgrade that includes something called “Audio Emojis”. I didn’t pay much attention to it, until it occurred to me that the audio “poop” emoji (basically the sound of a loud obnoxious fart) would be a perfect response to phone scammers.
Just got a call from a local area code. It went:
"Call from " (supposed to be a name, but a voice just said Hello) “To accept, press 1. To send a voicemail, press 2”.
WTF??
I googled the number and got nothing useful.
Is there any decent, free place left to do a reverse phone # lookup? I don’t care about the owners criminal convictions & I’m not willing to pay 99¢ to look up 5 phone #s in the next 24 hrs because I only have one that I want to look up, I just had some curiosity to know who called me, but not that much.
I’ve noticed this, too, and I react the same as you do. If I pick up at all, that is.
I wish I could ignore any and all unfamiliar callers but I get too many legitimate ones to avoid all of them.
Yeah, sometimes I’m waiting for a particular call and not sure how it’s going to be displayed, so I do pick up occasionally.