I would have liked to put this in General Questions, but I doubt there’s a factual answer.
My adult son called me today to tell me an interesting occurrence that happened to him today…
As I heard it: My elderly in-laws (early 80s) received a call today saying that my son (their grandson) was in jail in Dover, Delaware. The caller was supposedly an attorney acting on my son’s behalf; and he needed $5000 for my son to post bail.
Naturally my in-laws didn’t pay, but instead immediately called my son to verify that he wasn’t in jail.
Usually when I hear of a scam, it’s pretty easy to see how it happens or how it works. This one kind of has me puzzled. Is anyone familiar with it?
They knew my son’s name, his relationship to his grandparents and a other personal information that I would have thought was not too easily available. The thing that tipped off my in-laws up was that my son calls his grandfather “papa” and the caller said he called him “grandpa.”
Anyone ever heard of this particular scam? Where are they likely getting their information? I can only imagine emails are the source; but I don’t think they email back and forth. Ironically my son isn’t on Facebook, but his grandparents are.
This definitely isn’t your old “I’m a Nigerian Prince!” type of scam.
Could be that the caller is leading the call-ee. “I’m your grandson’s lawyer.” “Michael?” “Yes, your grandson Michael’s lawyer.”
I’ve heard of this scam before but actually not with the lawyer and not in the US. I’ve heard that people call pretending to be the actual relative, calling from overseas. I’m guessing that the deception is easier when the line is fuzzy and it’s easier to believe a fuzzy line from overseas. And easier to avoid US law.
This happened to my parents, although the scammer pretended to be my niece. And apparently it was a leading conversation, but my mother didn’t believe her granddaughter would be in jail, so she didn’t give the caller any money.
It’s entirely possible they’re getting their information from the paid-content section of one of the many, many “find this person!” type websites. There are scads of them - all of which essentially allow you to type in a name and it’ll aggregate the highest probability demographic and “known associate” information. This information plus some fairly basic deductive work will get you all you need to know to run a reasonably convincing scam.
For a relatively modest initial investment (typically less than $50), scammers can have access to a remarkable amount of information. If it happens the scammers already have access to one such site (through their legitimate work, for example*), no investment is needed!
My job includes access to no fewer than four paid-content people-finder websites, two of them very thorough indeed (including such information as social security number, birth dates, complete financial history and criminal record if any). I work at a law firm - we mostly use the sites to track down either our own clients or witnesses and potential witnesses. My firm specializes in insurance defense work (i.e., we are the people your insurance company calls when they are obliged to defend you in a lawsuit after a car accident or whatever) and an astonishingly high percentage of our clients (the person we are paid to represent is OUR CLIENT, regardless of who does the paying) need to be tracked down and then convinced that no, really, we are your lawyers and you do not have to pay us because your insurance company already is. One would think they’d be anxious to find us and get free (to them) help.
The TV documentary had a man entering canada declaring some valuables…
The customs people became interested in the relative safety and legality of expensive chemicals…
what are they for ? To turn black gold into gold… Alchemy ! … he’d been scammed.
I saw a similar one where I got an email from a friend saying he was stranded in Eastern Europe, having been mugged, and could anyone lend him some money to get home. The email checked out as definitely from him (his account had been hacked)
The scam works because some of the marks will panic and render assistance immediately based on the expressed urgency of the thing.
In this particular case, nobody did fall for it (and I am proud of them for it) - those that responded did so with challenges to verify his identity by answering questions that would be trivial to the real guy, but impossible for a scammer to know)
It is seldom the case that a situation is so very urgent that it requires panic.
I got a call about two weeks ago from a guy who sounded like he was in India. He said he was calling from Microsoft and that my computer had been sending out bad messages or was linked with some sort of illegal activity. He wanted me to get on the computer and follow his instructions. I told him no. He started trying to sound indignant. “Oh but this is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT! You HAVE TO do this!” I said no again. “But you HAVE TO! Do you want to lose your computer?” I hung up and I haven’t heard anything else from “Microsoft”. Hopefully, the guy really was just some scammer and the real Microsoft isn’t planning to nuke my laptop from orbit.
Yes, that’s a common scam. The real Microsoft has nothing to do with how your individual computer operates. It would be like Ford calling you because someone complained that your muffler was too loud.
It was a documentary about customs. A man was re-entering whichever country it was (Canada?), and the officers were pretty suspicious of the guy’s reason for traveling. He had some weird paperwork, and when they checked his records they found that in the past he’d done some time in prison for lying to customs, so they figured he was just trying to illegally import some more stuff. Eventually they dug around, and found out that he’d paid some obscene amount of money for (IIRC) a “solvent” that he’d be able to use or resell for huge profits.
He’d traveled to some African country already for meetings with the scammers, so he was pretty hooked. I think they offered to have the police talk to him right there, but I don’t think he understood that he’d been scammed.
They usually claim they are from the Windows company. I was having fun with them a few weeks ago. The first guy I asked if his mother was ashamed of him for being a criminal. He got really pissed at me. It was fun.
The second guy said his name was David in a heavy Indian accent. I said what a coincidence, my name was Rajesh. (It ain’t.) He was confused but started his spiel. When I asked him to tell me what OS I had, he hung up.
Next time they call I’m going to say they have reached the NSA, and that the Indian government has authorized us to target a drone to their location since they are such an embarrassment. After that maybe I should claim to be Bill Gates.
And the scam in the OP has been covered by our papers. Pretty common.
I’ve used that line too - it seems to work quite well. I do sometimes wonder if the call centre guys making the calls even know they are participating in a scam - it could be that they have been given a script and told that their objective is to talk the customer through installing this bit of software.
Or not.
This kind of scam has been prevalent here in Japan the last few years and used to be called the “It’s me” scam because that’s how perpetrators would start their call to their elderly targets. Despite public campaigns to raise awareness among seniors about this scam, people still fall for it and readily deposit money into strangers’ accounts. Shame has a big effect in this Confucius-based society and money is used to “save face” for the family by compensating for the so-called “trouble” that the target’s family member has supposedly caused.
From what I’ve read, this kind of scam ring is very sophisticated and very organized. It works like a pyramid with the people at the very top who employ a handful of people to do their dirty work, who in turn employ more people to do their dirty work. The people who actually collect the cash from victims are homeless or minors, who take on the most risk for the least amount of reward.
The most important cog in this syndicate are the “surveyors”. What they do is pretend to work for a survey company and go to nursing homes or senior citizen residences and ask questions to figure out how much money they have, family members’ names and occupation, any personal information that can be used to gain their belief later on that the scammer on the phone is their actual family member. Many seniors live on their own or are lonely and enthusiastically talk to anyone willing to listen. Cold calling is tedious with low percentages of success, but the surveyors greatly increase their chances.
Last I heard, it’s estimated to be nearly a $500 million industry in Japan. I saw an interview with a former scam artist and he said we was making $3 million a month during the peak of his business, and he was only a middle-tier guy.
Last year, I learned a really cool tongue twister song and sang it for my grandkids (aged 6 and 8 at the time). They loved it and wanted to learn it, so I taught it to them. In a few years, if I ever get a call from someone who claims to be them, all I have to do is ask them to sing the first verse of the song. If they don’t know it or say, "What song?"1, I’m hanging up.
We actually have several songs in our family that only people in our family know. One song I learned as a kid from a friend of mine and it is not written down anywhere, even on the Internet. I taught my daughters and the oldest in turn has taught the grandkids.
The point is, it is a version of a “Family Password”, and I think it is a good idea. Something so weird and not available online that only your family would know.
My daughter-in-law’s parents fell for this one just short of paying the money. The caller said that they were from Windows and they noticed serious viruses on their computer. The caller had them download software which allowed the caller to remote into their computer. He then ‘fixed’ the problems and had them reboot the computer. Up came a prompt for a password. The caller was going to give them the password once they paid him something like $280 by PayPal, credit card, or Western Union. That’s when the in-laws called in their son and he got into a yelling match with the scammer and hung up.
Without the password, they couldn’t get into the computer. About an hour later the scammer called again offering a cheaper price. The gall!
This is where I got involved. First I removed the hard drive; dropped it into an external hard drive enclosure; ran a virus scan on it; and backed it up to an external hard drive. Even though the OS was password protected, I was able to save their photos, documents, and such. If worse came to worse, I could have used their restore disk to rebuild the computer like it was new.
The password wasn’t one of the User Account types. It was much deeper than that. Fortunately I have a WindowPE CD and was able to boot from it. If the scammers are real jackasses, they can encrypt the hard drive or delete any system restore files. Fortunately this guy did neither. I was able to use System Restore to go back about a month and get things somewhat back to normal. I also had to search for the downloaded files and fix some settings so that the scammer couldn’t get in again. Plus I did find a lot of malware such as browser hijackers and a few other minor problems to fix.
Oh! According to what I read, if you do fall for this scam and send the money, don’t expect them to actually give you a password. Chances are they will just hang up the phone.
