There is one that I get commonly that says something like “is this you in the video?” with a fake youtube link. I go to a lot of live music and I am in lots of crowd videos on youtube. The first time I saw that link, it was from a music friend whose account was hacked. I nearly fell for it.
Are you sure it came from your family member’s account?
The reason I ask is that my mother-in-law periodically gets her Facebook account “impersonated” - that is, someone else sets up a Facebook page with her name, profile picture, and some other information cribbed from her public profile, and proceeds to send out friend requests to her Facebook friends. Often those friends will send messages her way telling her she’s been “hacked”, but it’s really a case of impersonation.
I have the sneaking suspicion that impersonation is done so that those in the friend group will more likely trust links sent to them, but that’s just my assumption - I haven’t seen directly what these fake accounts are used for.
It’s possible your elderly family member was less suspicious than you, and entered their authentication into the dialog, in which case their account has probably been taken over by a scammer and is being used for nefarious purposes as well as sending out more messages to friends to take over more accounts.
If you haven’t let that person know these messages are coming from them, you might want to let them know (not through Facebook, naturally) so they can take protective action.
Good luck.
Yes, this sounds very similar.
I think you are probably right; her account has been hacked and a clone made. I’ll have to let her know as you suggest.
I wonder how many Facebook accounts are “real” and how many have been hijacked and/or are no longer active. I rarely use FB any more.
I should add that every time it’s happened to her, she’s been able to alert Facebook to the issue and they’ve taken care of it with reasonable promptness. You can let your relative know that there’s a page to deal with it.
Got a beauty this morning.
Post office: Your parcel {random text string which looks nothing like a USPS tracking number} was returned to our depot after a failed dispatch attempt due to invalid address. Fill in your specific address here: {URL that would only seem genuine to a brain-damaged planarian}.
Immediately brought this to mind:
“Failed dispatch attempt”. Said by the USPS never.
“Depot”, the same.
For the first time ever, I got one in Spanish.
That sounds just like some of the instructions in the IRS forms.
Well, the first two words made my pocket phisherman go “spoing!” (since technically speaking, there isn’t a “Post office” in the US anymore). If it had said “Postal Service” or “USPS” I might have gotten another six or eight words in before knowing it was a fraud.
I didn’t realize that was part of the email, I thought that was an attribution by you.
I finally got dragged into using WhatsApp, and now I’m getting regular messages from unknown numbers asking how I’m doing. Not sure how they would use my response, but I don’t care to find out.
You can block them, AND report them as spam.
That was part of it of course, but more importantly, BM was “One of Us”, both in the sense of being Jewish and in the same social circle.
We all tend to trust people who are similar to us. Colour, race, religion, class are all part of that.
My opinion is that the reason Madoff fooled so many smart people goes back to the market-making business of his legitimate company.
To quote an anonymous investor -
Everyone knew Bernie was cheating. We just didn’t know he was cheating us.
I think everyone -OK, maybe not the lower level investors, but the high level fund managers that were running his feeder funds — thought he was front running the large orders he brokered for the large clients of his main business. It’s a form of insider trading, his company was handling orders that were large enough to move the price of a stock, and he could have been placing orders for selected clients ahead of those orders, profiting off the immediate changes in the value of the security.
It’s a white collar crime with a very diffuse impact, stealing a very small amount of money from each of a very large number of victims, and these are crimes that get hand waved away and sometimes winked at. They don’t inspire outrage.
But it’s not what Bernie was really doing, of course. But it’s one of the reasons that no one looked very hard at how his fund achieved its exemplary returns.
Bernie did use affinity to his advantage as well, I’m sure some of his peers thought it was the coolest thing ever that he was willing to cheat a little to benefit their favorite charity, and they thought they were the only one. They all did.
Was the scale of his operation widely known? I vaguely recall some analyst in Boston said what he was doing was impossible, and didn’t someone make the point that he couldn’t possibly move the volume of stock he claimed, since there was no trail of it? So some outsiders surely knew this guy could not possibly be making as much as he claimed by doing trades? How much detail on his fund was public knowledge?
IIRC, there was no publicly available information on his fund, it was word or mouth only, unregistered with the SEC, and no one outside of the operation had any idea of the scale. In one of the Madoff biopics, there is an enactment of an allegedly true incident where an SEC investigator asks him for a registration number and he gives him a made up one, expecting to be caught. But the investigator never even checked.
He was, after all, the owner of one of the biggest market-making brokerages in the nation……the idea that he was a straight-up con man was inconceivable.
The illusion of the fund being a small boutique operation was essential to maintaining the fraud. The split-strike strategy he purported to use wouldn’t have worked on a large scale. The insider trading scheme that some of his customers thought was happening on their behalf wouldn’t have worked on a large scale. If he had been running a large legitimate fund, it would’ve left a footprint - records of securities being bought and sold, market moving orders, that didn’t exist.
Correct but it didn’t fool Harry Markopolos who was a finance wizard asked by his firm to try to figure out what Madoff was doing so that they could attempt to duplicate it. He realized that his claims were literally impossible and tried unsuccessfully to sound the alarm.
The latest scam I got here in the UK was based on blocking scam calls. (rolleyes)
I use the Telephone Preference Service (tpsonline.org.uk), which is a free service (and pretty useful.)
The scammer wanted to sell me an ‘updated’ version.
Of course there isn’t one - so I blocked his number. 
I got caught by a scammer, the lady at the Western Union Office saved me from the scam. Funny thing was is that I was well aware of the scam I fell for. The caller said " Hi Grampa, hows it going?" I answered back " Fine TJ, how are you?" He said he had a bit of a problem that he was traveling through Fla and got a drunk driving ticket and needed some money to get out of it and not to tell his mom and dad. Just so happens my grandson travels a lot in that region doing his artwork. I fell for it no questions asked.
My mother-in-law, who keeps trying to fall for scams, got a grandparent-scam call a year or so back. She tried to be clever and asked her “grandson” “what’s my favorite animal?” and grandson took a guess and said “cat” - which happens to be correct.
And the location (Pennsylvania) was plausible as I grew up there and we visit / drive through with some regularity.
Luckily, MIL was at least somewhat aware of the scam, and hung up. Then she phoned me, and said “Where is your son?”. I mis-heard, thought she said “where is MY son” (i.e. her son / my husband) and I absent-mindedly answered “He’s downstairs, working”.
Which was NOT true of my son / her grandson - but my son was away at college (and not in Pennsylvania).
I have to wonder if the grandparent scammers do some research - as @HoneyBadgerDC found (and as I found), the location where the “grandson” got into trouble was plausible in both cases - or if it truly is random calls. If the latter, I’m surprised I’ve never gotten a grandparent call!