I feel like that saying needs a footnote to the effect ‘…with a story containing obvious fraud’ or some such.
Honest people absolutely can be cheated; phishing scams, for example, which persuade people to innocently hand over personal information on threat of some bank account issue or other urgent problem. Romance scams, which just entrap lonely, hopeful people. Refugee story scams, fake product scams, etc.
Sure, there are scams that appeal to greedy people who are prepared to commit acts of fraud or whatever - many of the unclaimed estate advance fee scams are like that, but there are also a lot of honest/innocent people getting scammed because the scammers manipulated their senses of pity, duty, compassion, etc.
I’ve always assumed that telcos collect fees for every call routed through their network. It always seemed to me that if they weren’t making money off all the scam callers, they’d be just as interested in stopping these calls as we are. But instead they give you options to block a few numbers, maybe tell you to buy nomorobo, give you ‘advice’ like not picking up the phone or hanging up when you know it’s a scam caller etc. But even if you don’t pick up, they still have to carry the call for at least a few seconds.
If they were carrying all these calls for free, I’d think they’d do what they could to stop the calls before they enter the network.
Think about how much money Ma Bell and all the other (mainly) land line telcos lost over the last 20 years. A lot of people kept their landline after they got a cell phone. And for a lot of people, the driving force behind dropping the land line was the fact that the vast majority of calls were junk. If people got 1 or 2 a week instead of 4 or 5 a day, I’d bet a lot of them would have held on to their landlines for a few more years.
OTOH, I could be entirely wrong about all this. I poked around a little on google in an attempt to verify that they do make money on every call that goes through their system. I couldn’t anything other than a few articles about how the scammers can (do) make money whether you answer or not. Turns out, when a name pops up on your caller ID, that means your telco paid their telco a small fee to get that information. These scammers will work with telcos that, in return for using them for their 10’s of millions of calls each month, will kick back a portion of the caller ID fees (CNAM Dip fees) to them.
I quickly looked up some of the names mentioned in the articles and they’re full of FTC complaints and lawsuits and, at least the ones I looked at, based in the US.
I wonder if the phone companies (the good/legit ones) could legally drop all calls associated with another telco. So if Verizon noticed that, say, 70% of all calls that come from CallerID4U were unwanted, they could reject all those calls. Yes, you’d lose some real calls that way, but the legit people would scramble to find a new telco, one that didn’t allow telemarketers or engage in these practices.
This isn’t a subject I’ve given any real thought to, so the logistics or legalities likely make it impossible or overly difficult.
Yep, I’ve seen that with my own mother, the last few years she was in her house. She never actually fell for a scam, but you can see how easily she might have. Whenever I was there and heard her fielding a scam call, it was hard to get her to just hang up on them. That generation grew up with phone calls being a Big Deal, and have a hard time “being rude” by just hanging up, so the scammers manage to keep them on the line for longer, and the longer they go, the more likely they are to fall for the scam.
The scammers also make a lot of calls early in the morning and late at night, hoping to catch people half-awake, so they give out key information before they’re really awake enough to spot the scam. I had more than one early morning call from mom asking about such calls, with her wondering if she really did have a problem with her bank account or something. It wouldn’t have taken too much more for her to fall for some of this.
“What is the color of our boat at our summer retreat?”
Even if there is no boat, when the scammers try to bluff by saying “blue”, you will still know that they aren’t the person they are pretending to be. “Sorry, there IS no boat. Goodbye.” :click:
I wouldn’t phrase it that way but, yes. I believe literally anyone can be scammed given the right angle, the right person doing the scamming, and catching the mark at the right (wrong) time. Anybody. Yes, even you. Maybe not with these particular scams you know about, but with these, there’s plenty of people who still have no idea. You know the classic overpayment scam? That’s at least a decade or two old and I’m still finding myself explaining it to colleagues I know. Many people are ignorant of all the scams out there, and some are slicker than others.
Most people aren’t on the ball enough to quiz the caller enough to establish they’re lying. In fact, some will volunteer information that makes the scammer’s job easier, like saying, “Dorothy? Is that you? Your voice sounds odd.” And now the scammer knows the niece’s name.
Many many years ago, I got a PM from a college friend asking if I could wire her some money because they’re on vacation in London and [husband’s name] got mugged. CCs, passports, cash, everything, all stolen.
I wasn’t aware at the time that this was a common scam (when I reported it to facebook, they had a specific box to check for ‘friend said they’re overseas on vacation, got mugged and need money to get home’).
A little bit of back and forth and I started having some doubts. I asked her what strange thing she did to her dorm room in college. There’s only a small handful of people that could answer that question, obviously she’d be one of them. I suddenly found myself unfriended (couldn’t post a warning on her wall) and the scammer reported my page (meaning it got locked so I couldn’t post a warning to my wall for mutual friends to see). Luckily, I also reported her page and talked (on the phone) to a mutual friend who said she’d let her know her page got hacked.
In my case, it was actually pretty convincing. The scammer clearly spent at least tiny amount of time getting things like home town, husband’s name, job etc so they could drop in these little tidbits in the conversation to make less people question it. I don’t remember what caused me to have my doubts, but at first I didn’t think anything of it. I’d imagine a lot of people have fallen for that one.
A lot of that stuff is in your About Me section. Where you went to school, where you work, who you’re married to, who your relatives are. It’s all right there. Some of it can probably be figured out just by looking at some of your recent posts or captions/tags on pictures.
Those quizzes, I think, get a lot of people to give up the answers to their password reset questions.
My father has fallen repeatedly for scams over TYY specifically because he didn’t believe the scammers would be allowed to ply their trade by the “government” (who he believed operated the TRS)!
My father is a scam magnet because he is painfully honest and rule-following. He was an auditor most of his life (CA, the equivalent of a CPA in Commonwealth countries). Ironically in his professional sphere he trusted no one. In fact he had something like “Trust makes thieves out of honest men” on a poster in his office. He is really good at chess and bridge.
But in his personal life he was constantly falling victim to (or almost falling victim to) scams that he didn’t spot because he believed things like:
They couldn’t send fraudulent materials through the post, that would be mail fraud.
He can’t be using insider information or engaging in self dealing that would be illegal
I saw the tax returns, so they must be correct. They aren’t going to file fraudulent tax returns and pay all that tax just to get a loan (the tax returns the promoter gave him could have been worked up in any PDF editor, there was no reason to believe they were filed with the IRS)
They can’t use the words Social Security and Medicare to sell things that aren’t sponsored by the government.
He has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars cumulatively to a number of scams over the last 40 years (so this was happening in his 40s not just in his dotage). But he still hasn’t forgiven me or my mother for talking him out of being victimized by a number of scams over the years. He will go to his grave believing that we stood between him and him being a real estate flipping tycoon, a convenience store revolutionary, etc, etc, etc.
And this is a guy who lived half his life in a full on kleptocracy. When he moved to the USA he went from complete distrust of the government to complete faith in the government.
Typically, the scammers just disengage at this sort of question, and move on to the next victim - once they know you suspect they are not who they say they are, they have lost the advantage and don’t bother playing further (in my experience).
Scams of this type – preying on the gullible – are big business, so much so that our local newspaper, the Door County Advocate, had an entire issue last week devoted to lists of and stories about the victims.
Some of the victims had been repeatedly sending money to scammers, sometimes the same scammers who detect a pigeon ripe for plucking. Most victims are elderly.
The proprietor of the local Pak N Ship store told me she intercepted two packages of cash that were on the way to scammers not long ago. (She said she is legally empowered to open packages under some circumstances.) The shipper in one of those cases insisted that the package go thru and it wasn’t a scam (it was), so she was doubly-deluded.
My aunt once got one of those phone calls, telling her my sister was in jail and needed bail. Fortunately, she didn’t give them anything, but she DID call my mom and tell her about it, asking her if my sister was okay. sigh
They’re big on playing the “please don’t tell my parents about it or they would just kill me” angle, with (theoretically) sympathetic aunt/uncle type-relatives.
Perhaps another reason scammers are doing this more is due to more atomized social/family relations in general? I’m sure Robert Putnam would be better equipped than I to figure that one out.
Thanks - yeah, baiting scammers and keeping them on the hook is quite a delicate thing - it used to be you could get them to jump through all sorts of silly hoops, back in the heyday of 419Eater, but now, a lot of them are just gone at the first sign that you are anything other than a soft target.