Back when I was scambaiting, I was able to warn real victims of my scammer (we called them “lads”) and I did some warnings to others via ScamWarners.
It was hard.
This story takes the cake.
A friend of mine who has a brain injury and thus is easy prey very nearly lost $10,000 to scammers a couple of months ago. They absolutely convinced her that they’d erroneously payed her $10,000 too much in some sort of post-purchase cash-back deal and she needed to ‘give the money back’ right away or the poor employee who ‘made the mistake’ was going to get the sack.
In this case it ended up a bit like @turtlescanfly’s second customer - the bank teller asked her enough questions that even though she did walk off with the money in her bag (and she was going to physically meet the scammer and hand over the money in person which is pretty unusual I think) she started to doubt herself and phoned a friend. He immediately raced over and stopped her doing dumb stuff.
I doubt this story is completely over, because these people now know she’s potentially an easy mark, and they know how to get in touch with her (it’s possible they actually know where she lives … I couldn’t quite untangle the story enough to tell). Really radical measures like declaring herself incompetent to manage her own money and requiring an extra signature for each transaction are possible, but that’s a pretty confronting sort of thing to do, and I doubt that she’d be willing.
In that link I posted upthread, that’s what they were doing. They pretended to be from Amazon and said they overcharged her and needed to refund her the $200 they sent her. They got her to enter $200 as the amount she requested for the refund and asked her to log in to her bank’s website to make sure it went through. Using some remote access software they edited the html on her screen to make the bank’s webpage look like there was a $20,000 refund from Amazon. The guy then, pretending like he was going to get fired for this and his family would starve to death, had her send it back to him…in cash.
Plus there’s a clip on there of Billy Eichner showing just how much people shut down if they get panicked. He asks someone to do something really simple. Name a woman. But he does it in that yelling voice that he always uses and suddenly people can’t even name a woman. No imagine you have the threat of arrest and jail looming. A lot of people can’t think with that kind of pressure.
Also, regarding how many people actually get scammed. In that clip they mentioned that a call center with 20 or so people will, in one shift, send out about a half million calls, get 500 call backs and collect from 5-10 people.
If we go on the low side and say they get 5 people at $10,000 each. That’s 50k scammed in 8 hours. Subtract off whatever percentage the mules and that’s still a lot of money. Let’s say half of that money gets back to the scammers. $25k for 8 hours work, divided up however it gets divided up and everyone is walking away [from the call center] happy.
You remember that news story, about a year ago, where some hackers got access to a Twitter admin console and sent out a bunch of fake tweets from celebrities that said something to the effect of, “I’m giving back today! Send X worth of Bitcoin to this wallet and I’ll send back double!” The famous people whose Twitter accounts were compromised included Obama, Bezos, Musk, Gates, and many more.
It was obviously, patently a scam. Nobody with any sense would have believed it.
The scammers received six figures in funds before they got shut down.
People like this aren’t targeting the average person who will smell trouble and run away. They’re throwing a wide net, accepting the 999 failures because the 1 vulnerable victim will pay the bills.
I do a bunch of stuff related to scams on YouTube (lately, including interviewing victims of various different kinds of scams). One of the most frequent comments I see is (words to the effect) “I can’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to fall for this shit” (occasionally expressed more like “If anyone is stupid enough to fall for this, they deserve to be a victim”).
I don’t think ‘stupid’ is nearly a good enough answer for why people become victims of scams; Vulnerability can be caused by a very wide range of factors beyond the control of the victim, such as clinical depression, bereavement, dementia, but also, physical or mental exhaustion, temporary anxiety, and other stuff that everyone experiences and deals with. Put simply, even the best people are not always at their best.
One other thing to consider is that, let’s say you (reading this) agree with me that 99.9% of all scams you ever saw were utterly laughable and transparent - and only 0.1% seem remotely plausible…
If we were to compare notes, I suspect we would find that, whilst we agreed on the proportion, we were not actually talking about the same 0.1% - everyone has different things in their head, and not everyone has the same experience of the world outside of them - the 99.9% aren’t all wasting their time pushing scams that are universally implausible to everyone - they’re simply going to hook * someone else who isn’t you.*
Scammers will exploit any vulnerability - that email about the Nigerian widow who lost her wealthy engineer husband to cancer, and is now herself dying of cancer, and wants to bequeath her fortune to you, a stranger on the internet may seem laughably obvious to you where you are right now.
But put yourself in the position of someone who really has just lost their loved one to cancer, and, say, whose business is also failing and has massive debt, and for whatever reason, has also never heard of this kind of scam before. From that uniquely vulnerable viewpoint, the email about the widow’s legacy might appear as a gleaming ray of desperately desired hope.
And that’s how it works - the scams don’t have to be plausible to everyone - they just have to hit home once, by chance, to someone who is in the exact predicament and state of mind to fall victim to this specific story
Scammers send out millions of leads in the hope of hitting home like that.
The other thing to bear in mind is that people generally aren’t in a prepared state to deal with a scam attempt.
The scammer woke up this morning knowing they were going to be doing scams; they probably spent the last several years honing their technique every day.
The scammer expected to be doing this. The victim woke up and just expected a normal day.
And keep in mind, they’re getting a return rate of 5-10 people falling for the scam for every 500,000 calls sent out. It’s not a lot of people. If they called everyone in the entire United States, they’d collect from about 5000 people.
And lately, they use robocalls, so not actually people calling, but an automated system that calls and then only if you push the appropriate button on your phone do you get someone on the line, so it is even more economical then when they had to say “Hello, this is Windows support calling.”
//i\\
My mom fell for one.
It was a robocall for “we will be charging you $399 for tech support, press 1 to talk to a customer service agent”. Normally, her tech support is my dad or me; neither of us were available at the time, so she took the call and gave them access to her computer to “remove their software”.
Once Dad got home and heard about this, he shut the computer off. It’s never been booted since. She needed a new PC anyway, so they got one at a local shop. It took a while to restore data and verify that what we restored had not been tampered with. We kept the new computer off the network until we were confident it was OK. The time-consuming part was getting bank info, etc. changed in case the scammers had managed to exfiltrate that before it was stopped.
The scammers used a robocall to essentially do their caller screening for them. Most folks when hearing this would just hang up if they wouldn’t be vulnerable to the scam anyway. If someone responds, the live scammer on the other line knows that they are psychologically primed to participate in the scam, meaning the cost of entry and initial screening is getting lower.
My dad had an interesting experience this spring as well. He got an email from a friend asking him to pick up two $100 Google Play store gift cards that she needed for her grandkids. He went and got them and emailed her to that effect. She then asked him to send the numbers on the card to her in an email.
Fortunately, by this time he smelled a rat and gave her a call. She knew nothing about it. Turns out her email account had been broken into and the scammer was sending similar emails to many of her contacts. My kids ended up with a $100 Google play gift card each.
One of the common features of both incidents was how the scammers tried to create a sense of urgency in the victim, much like high pressure sales tactics. I think it’s a similar skill set.
Before this, I would have been most worried about my mother-in-law, who lives alone a couple miles from us. I think loneliness often is a risk factor for this kind of thing - people who will pick up the phone and talk to anyone on the other end of the line simply because they haven’t talked to anyone in such a long time.
One thing to keep in mind if you or a loved one uses TTY or a captioned phone, the operators are NOT allowed to deviate from the words they hear on the line, that is, they may recognize a scam but cannot tell you or your loved one, they may only transcribe the words. I’ve listened to a lot of these calls, and these scammers are really really good, especially with the “grandchild in trouble” scam.
As to Amazon not being responsible for scams conducted in their name:
If there’s any kind of widespread scam where someone is pretending to be from Amazon, then I think Amazon should at the least post a line or two in a prominent spot on their main access page warning consumers about it. And if actual Amazon sellers are behaving sleazily, the company needs to come down on them hard and fast. But Amazon (and other enterprises like eBay) seems relatively uninterested in such action, as long as the money keeps rolling in.
*I once submitted a negative review of a product obtained via Amazon, which was shipped to me along with an offer to send me a sizable gift card if I posted a five-star review. My review (which was two-star) mentioned the bribe attempt and how the company was sucking Amazon into its faux ratings scheme. Amazon not only didn’t post the review, it suspended (temporarily) my reviewing privileges. Go figure.
I walked in on my father in law who had the scammers on speakerphone trying to give them remote control over his computer. I told him to hang up. He refused to. I picked up his phone and hung up for him. He was pissed off at me until my mother in law got home and read him the riot act, apparently it wasn’t the first time.
He’s lucky he is so tech incompetent that he couldn’t follow the scammers instructions properly.
He’s not stupid. Just old.
One of my thoughts is, even if .1% of the population is a lot of people, it doesn’t seem enough for it to be worth the time for the massive amount of scammers there seems to be.
It’s actually been a few years since I’ve been dispatched to a call of someone being victimized by a scam call. And that was for someone that paid 5 grand for income tax because they were told they won 2 million in the Canadian lottery. A lottery they never entered and why wouldn’t the tax come out of the winnings had you played and won?
Even the best con man can’t cheat an honest man. Are there really that many stupid, greedy, or fucked up in the head people in our country that make all this worth thr scammers time and effort?
I’m sorry, but what was dishonest about the person being scammed in the example right before that statement?
It’s an old saying. A lot of cons play on the marks greed. An honest man would know they didn’t play the Canadian lottery and weren’t entitled to any money.
An honest man with poor memory might not know.
Then I guess he’d be in the fucked up in the head category. It’s just hard to believe that there are so many FUITH, greedy, and/or stupid people in this country that scamming is so prevalent. The fact that enough people are falling for the obvious scams that makes it worth the scammers time and effort is stunning.
.
No, he (and so many others) might very well be in the older person with deteriorating memory category. You don’t have to be “fucked up in the head” to be fooled by a professional con artist…but I can understand how the common use of that inaccurate phrase “You can’t cheat an honest man” might stop some people from asking for help when needed.
I had one day when I got a bunch of calls at work, claiming to be from the local energy utility, and even spoofing the number. Said that they were on the way to disconnect my power, and that I needed to call this other number to pay my bill before they got there.
I ignored him the first time, cursed at him the second time. Took the number from him the third time and thanked him as I planned on turning it over to the police. On my energy utility’s website it did specifically tell me that I should contact the police, anyway.
He kept calling back though, even though I flat out told him I knew it was a scam.
It did go through my mind for a bit to threaten violence. Tell him that I believed him, but I knew where he would have to go in order to turn off my power, and I’d be waiting for him there. I chose not to, because I’d rather not have a recording of my voice threatening violence, but it was tempting.