I saw one YouTube video of a hacker who broke into the scammer’s computer when he was trying to take over the hacker’s machine. He found the script, and started answering the scammer’s questions before he asked them. Took the moron forever to catch on.
Ha ha! Cannabis is legal in Canada! Can’t fool me!
That’s how you can tell it’s a scam. It doesn’t even bother to get basic facts right. Like the time I got a scam robocall saying my student loan from the federal Ministry of Education was in arrears, please pay up now and we’ll call off the police who are on their way.
But I knew the truth! There IS no federal Ministry of Education! So there! Buh-bye, scammer.
:: delete message ::
So… this was a new one on me. The phone rang the other day, I glanced over to check the caller ID, and it said “Illegal Scam”. I thought “well, at least they’re being honest!” Although it’s more likely that AT&T has finally figured out how to flag them.
I do sometimes get “Potential Spam” on my Verizon cellphone, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this on our landline.
I received the (very common" Rapid Delivery Service scam call last week. They were actually targeting me individually as they knew my name and called both my cell phone and my home phone within a few minutes. The spiel is that they want you to call a second number to arrange for a delivery from Rapid Delivery Service, which is an imaginary company. They claim that I have important documents that need to be delivered and signed for. And they are persistent…I hung up and the same woman called back immediately.
I had my cell on speaker for the first call and my wife became quite concerned that I just ignored it. When I explained the scam, she immediately called her adult daughters to warn them. There is no doubt in my mind that my wife would have fallen for it, as would my stepdaughters. She was even speculating on exactly which tax or legal documents I would be receiving.
Here’s a case from 2022, in which a victim paid $48,000 to secure a (fraudulent) African gold inheritance:
Abdul Inusah: I am innocent and still fighting US fraud conviction - Graphic Online
This scheme has been running since at least the 1990s, and people are still falling for it.
It’s been running on the internet since probably 80s and versions of it have been running since forever. It was letters in the mail for decades.
I got one of those letters in the late 70s. It read exactly the same as the email/text scams do now, Nigerian prince and all,