Entertainment:
A member of my family got a call like that. “Hi, grandpa, I’m in a jail in (South America somewhere, I don’t remember where”, and my family member said, “Joe? Are you OK?”, so the scammer went right with that “Yeah, it’s Joe. Can you wire me some money? Don’t tell dad.”
I don’t know how much he lost, but it was in the thousands.
I kind of wish I’d strung the scammer along now.
Well, there is bound to be another opportunity!
My parents were almost duped by a caller claiming to be their grandson. It was an upsetting call, poor connection he’s in trouble don’t tell Dad I’ll pay you back etc. but they knew this gKid quite well, it sounded too strange and called his parents to check it out. There were other events, scammers will never stop hunting for information
I get scammy group texts frequently.
I know I can do that with a SanDisk MP3 player; what I was asking is could I do that with an apple product since the request was for an apple gift card & Voyager stated that they need internet access; IOW does apple currently sell anything that could be used like an old ipod - but only with music loaded from local sources?
& yes, I agree that scammers are probably buying hardware & turning around & selling it to convert their scammed gift cards into usable money.
I feel like that “I’m on vacation in Europe/whatever and I’m in trouble, send money fast” scam has been around since almost the internet became an everyday reality for most people (so at least 20 years). Interesting how some scams don’t change.
There was a scam going round in Jakarta while I lived there that persisted long after you’d think everyone would have heard about it. I don’t know if it was a special Indonesia scam or if it is found elsewhere as well.
People whose children were enrolled in expensive private schools (ie, sure to have money) would get frantic calls from the school saying “Adam fell off the monkey bars and hit his head during phys-ed; the school admin rushed him to the hospital but he can’t be admitted until payment is made, can you quickly arrange for money to be delivered?”
I was well aware of the scam and always gave people a hard time when they called - it was fun because the callers never expected a foreigner to be able to engage them in Indonesian. (They knew the parents were likely to be expats, since the majority of students at the high-end private schools are, but they figured one of the ubiquitous household staff would take the call and just deliver a message to the parent.)
Anyway, I would feign horror and say “which hospital? I want to call them directly! No, no, I don’t need to meet you at an ATM, I have the cash in my safe, just tell me which hospital, I want to call them.” Very frustrating for the people on the other end of the line.
One day I came home and the staff (yeah, we all had tons of household help - I know that offends many people but that’s neither here nor there) were completely ashen. They had indeed taken the call and were convinced my son was near death at a local hospital.
I was touched at how upset they were! And I know they were a little horrified at how I just laughed and said, “no worries, that wasn’t real.” (To make them feel better, I called the school and verified that my son was fine. But I already knew he was.)
Often it doesn’t involve the internet at all. It’s initially a phone call, and in one common form a “courier” will pick up the bail money from the dupe.
How do you turn a gift card into cash? I thought a gift card could be used only to buy merchandise at the designated store.
Sell it? But I’m not sure what that question was a response to.
There are marketplaces that one can sell/buy giftcards for the majority of their value, 80+%
I had an email last year from my granddaughter who was in jail in Spain for breaking some Covid law or other. She needed 500 Euros to get bail.
It was quite a surprise since our only (at the time) granddaughter was just four years o;d.
Man, that kid is gonna be a handful when she hits her teens!
Yes/no? You would basically have to buy an iPhone or iPad (so $429 minimum pretty much) but once you have it, iTunes can load any locally sourced music including ripped CDs and other player compatible files.
steam cards are used more than bitcoin in illegal transactions … and some legal ones … there’s a way to convert them into cash …
Tell me about it. She has a kid sister now and their father is already past 50. He’s pretty fit ATM but in nine or ten years…
Yep - in fact on eBay right now, I am seeing gift cards listed at prices greater than their face value, which seems odd, but if someone has, say, a PayPal account balance they want to spend at, say, Amazon, then I could imagine a legitimate scenario where they pay a small amount over and above the face value of the card just for the convenience of directly converting one credit balance to the other.
Another way scammers apparently launder gift cards for things like Steam or Google Play is by having a fake app/game on those platforms, which they ‘buy’ (essentially from themselves) using the gift card.
I’ve encountered a lot of people who think that scammers asking for gift card payments must be kids messing around. In reality, gift cards are just money, and once the victim has given them to the scammer, it’s pretty untraceable and irreversible, so they are better, from the scammer’s point of view, than other forms of money.
Would it be accurate to say that if you receive an email requesting the purchase of a gift card, the chance it isn’t a scam is on the order of one in a thousand?
If you’re not expecting it, yes. We have been asked to buy gift cards for teacher appreciation several times, so that’s at least one exception. But that was an expected email from a known source.
ETA: Actually, now that I think about it, it was actually to Venmo money for a single person to buy a gift card for the teachers, so not the same thing.
A few months ago, we were hit by a bunch of spear phishing attacks that purported to be the college president asking a faculty member to buy Apple gift cards.
One person fell for it and actually came down to ITS demanding we reimburse him. I kept a straight face and referred him to my boss.