Thank god I found out about it within an hour. So my dad gets a call yesterday. Caller id says Dish Network. I was actually there when it happened because I remember noticing the caller id and thinking, sounds like someone forgot to pay the cable bill. Since I was in another room, I didn’t hear the conversation. Cut to later that evening at dinner and my mom asked if dad had told me about what Dish is doing. I, of course, had no idea and said so.
Apparently the person who called said they were from Dish. And that in an effort to improve the signal strength in our area, and reduce instances of weather related outages, they were ‘moving’ the satellite. Now since they were doing this for their customers’ benefit, there was a $150 deposit associated with it. No worries. It’ll get returned as a bill credit in six months. If you refuse, well they’re going to cancel our service and we’re responsible for all early termination fees, including the payout for the remainder of our contract. They had to take the money right now.
As soon as I heard that I was like…that…doesn’t sound right guys. You didn’t give them any information did you? And my dad was like, well yeah. They had our address and name, and the caller id said Dish Network, so I gave them the card number. Well, after a quick call to Dish’s customer service line, I confirmed that this was indeed a scam. The card’s been cancelled and no financial harm was done but seriously?
My dad’s getting older, in his late 60s, and I’m concerned that he fell for this so easily. My mom even didn’t question it at first until I said something. It’s frustrating that these scammers exist and I know the majority who fall for it are elderly. But there’s nothing to be done about it. :mad: Hopefully this will at least make him think twice next time he gets a call asking for money.
My dad ended up buying an extended auto warranty from not one, but two telephone solicitors. Within a few days of each other. It took me a couple of weeks and many hours on the phone and writing letters to get them canceled. I told him to stop answering the phone if he doesn’t recognize the number. I also have his credit cards ding my phone if he makes any purchases.
Haha I got called by a fake publisher’s clearing house scam from a number in Jamaica and he was like haven’t you heard of Jamaica, New York? I said yes but you are calling from the country not the city, dude I’m sorry but although you are painfully trying to hide your Jamaican accent, its pretty much impossible. I hung up but I read about many older Americans falling for this including this poor old man that really thought he won and ended up sending like his retirement and life savings to the scammers and kept waiting for his check, and ended up committing suicide when he eventually realized what he had done.
For some reason I am on a mailing list that thinks I’m retirement age and it is unbelievable the amount of scams people get just based on the ones I get being on that list. Someone who is older and a little less with it can easily fall prey to this stuff.
My (69 yer old) dad accidentally accepted a spam friend request on Facebook, and immediately freaked the heck out. He Googled “removing spam friend on facebook” and got a link to some company based in India. He talked with a service rep for a while, but didn’t feel comfortable paying him and giving him access to his computer (luckily!) to “fix” things.
I told him to just message Facebook about it, but that I didn’t think he needed to worry. Facebook customer service didn’t get back with him immediately, so that’s when he began seeking out other options on Google.
He refused to use his computer again until I could check it out. I looked at his account from my laptop, and there was absolutely nothing wrong.
What was distressing him is that when he would search Facebook for the person whose friend request he accepted, there were results came back under the banner of “Public Posts.” I told him this is how Facebook works. It’s like a Google search, and if you search a person’s name, any public posts with that person’s name will show up in the search results. He seemed skeptical and confused. I don’t think he uses that computer to this day.
I tell older people to NEVER GIVE OUT ANY INFORMATION to anyone CALLING THEM! Period!
It could be anyone calling you.
What they should do is get the name of the person, the name of the company, and their department where they can be reached. Then look up the phone number for that company in the phone book, CALL THAT NUMBER, and ask for the person. Then tell them what they need to know.
Don’t call any phone numbers they give you! Duh!
And of course only companies with which you do business.
And yet, I have had my bank (HSBC) call me on the phone, at the phone number that has been associated with my account for the last 8 years, and then ask me to give them critical personal information “to identify myself” before they were willing to talk to me. Ironically, this turned out to a bona fide call from the HSBC fraud dept, checking into an unusual transaction! If HSBC are too stupid to see a problem with a policy whereby they themselves ask their customers to give out critical information over the phone to an unidentified caller, they really should be eating all the losses from the times that their customers do the same thing with scam callers who are not really from HSBC.
My father-in-law OK’ed aluminum siding installation when he was a resident in a nursing home. He had been contacted the previous week, but was suffering from dementia, so he didn’t realize what he was doing. When the truck pulled up, the director of the place simply called the cops. The installers disappeared before the cops arrived. Preying on people in nursing homes is DOUBLE shitty. :mad:
This was my favorite. The “IRS” left a message about putting me in jail blah blah blah. I call back and they answer in a obvious Indian voice. When they say they were the IRS, I said, “Oh, so you’re the Internal Revenue Service?” click.
I tell them to get lost & if they even say boo to me I curse them out until I hear the line go mute on their end. Then I hang up.
The cursing out is important, because if its some YouTube or Radio Scumbag, they can’t play curses over their medium and it shoves a razor-studded spike up their… bit.
I’ve had that happen too. I simply say I don’t give out any information to someone calling me. And I will call them back. Then I call the number on the back of the credit card, NOT any number they have given me when calling.
I have had similar calls from my bank/card, which shows how clueless they are. If they ask me to identify myself, I just say, “Why? You called me, so you must have all the info you need. You tell me.”
While I should be grateful that my clueless bank tries to call to verify a suspicious transaction, so far none of the ones they question are bogus, and all that results is I am bothered and annoyed. Nothing bad would have happened if I had ignored the calls. They are more likely triggered by a mistaken digit entry by me than a scammer.[sup]*[/sup]
And some of my banks insist on sending out unsolicited emails that 95% look exactly like the scammers – they address me as “customer,” and don’t come from a valid-appearing URL. When I report these, the bank says that’s because they farm out their communication and advertising to third parties and that’s the way it works.
Nevertheless, when these third parties emulate the scammers, it doesn’t engender much confidence in the bank’s security sense. What else are they overlooking?
Long ago, the expiration date on a card was asked for, but never verified, as long as it fell within a valid range. So, just for kicks, I would supply a different date every time that was asked. This never caused a problem for at least 10 years, then they began – without warning – flagging incorrect entries, and I started getting credit rejections and calls like “someone tried to use your card, but they gave the wrong expiration date,” so I stopped doing that.
Got a letter in the mail yesterday from France, which was kind of unusual since I don’t currently know anyone in France. The letter actually purported to be from a law office in Spain, but posted in France, and made the following interesting points:
someone in Spain with my exact last name had died, leaving a “treasure box” with a Spanish bank that, on close inspection, turned out to have $11 million in cash in it.
they have been unable to find any rightful heirs to the money. (Of course they couldn’t. Whether it’s a treasure box in Spain or a trunk full of gold in Nigeria, there is never an heir to be found. No one is interested. This allows the story to unfold, as it indeed this one did …)
yep, this particular Spanish lawyer will now content himself with less-than-rightful heirs, and would like to know if I’m interested in receiving half of it (he will take the other half). Even though “we’re not quite sure” if I’m entitled to it, he “guarantees” that I will get it.
if I’m interested, I should not hesitate to contact him through a Gmail account in which he misspells his own name. I understand that this is the standard way of contacting major international lawyers.
in case I was wondering, he posted the letter from France because he’s there taking a seminar, and apparently typed it up on the spot and decided what the hell, I’ll mail it from here. But he will be home soon. It’s an interesting way of running a law office.
I should have a nice day.
I should write back and say that I understand the problem – I’ve been corresponding with a couple of Nigerian princes he should talk to, who have equally frustrating problems trying to get rid of a trunk full of gold and $15 million on deposit, respectively. No one seems to want it. He and the princes could probably work all kinds of lucrative deals with each other.
Yeah we get those calls from people in India about the computer not working all the time. Luckily he knows those are a scam. But what’s bad about the Dish one, is when I talked to Dish it turns out they ARE migrating to HD satellites and have to actually send a technician out to your site to get that done but at no charge. So the story may even have a ring of truth to it if someone’s heard something in passing about Dish changing over their satellites. Plus, telling the people they’ll get a bill credit in 6 months (outside the dispute period for many banks/cards) just was skeevy.
Yep, that is really and truly clueless, and a clear example of a bank encouraging really really stupid practices because in this case it’s in their own interest. And if their customer is led to believe that a self-identified caller asking for confidential information is routine and ends up getting scammed, well, that’s the customer’s problem, isn’t it? :mad:
I have also tried in vain to get somebody at my bank to explain the CC charge approval/denial algorithms.
I get email alerts for any substantial charge to my card, and I woke up one morning to see multiple fraudulent charges totaling about $3000 out of Spain. I live in the U.S., I haven’t been to Spain in 20 years; or to anywhere in continental Europe in 10 years, nor have I ordered anything online from Europe in that time.
I was concerned about whether I had inadvertently revealed my CC details to somebody untrustworthy, whether I was at risk of identity theft, so I asked my bank for a copy of the transaction records from the online merchant, which the bank eventually sent along with an affidavit form. It turned out that the fraudsters did not know anything about me or about the card, other than the 16-digit card number. Not my name or address (not even the country), not the card expiration date, not the 3-digit verification code. Yet large charges to an online merchant in Spain were approved, and could not be revoked even though I alerted my bank within 3 hours.
I refused to sign the affidavit, pointing out that there was no identifying information, and that the real question was why the bank approved these charges solely based on a 16-digit number that happened to be my CC number. I spoke to several progressively more senior people, and never got a coherent explanation.
The banks are losing billions to fraud, but seem to have hopelessly incoherent charge approval algorithms. It makes no sense at all to me why it’s not worth it for them to have state-of-the-art A.I., and, well, just employ a few smart people.
:smack: