Scammer calls. Does anyone actually fall for them?

Factual Questions
81

I’m currently playing with fake ‘hackers’ on Instagram - these are the guys that show up as recommendations in bot comments on social media - stuff like “Good video! OMG I got scammed for $10k but [obviousscammer] helped me recover all my bitcoin amounts I wanted!”

As far as I can tell, the MO of these guys is: promise you anything you ask for, try to sound competent, and lean on the victim for upfront fees - they are targeting people who have already been scammed and are in a vulnerable state because of that, and are hoping someone will help them recover their lost money (in practice, nobody can do that).

At the moment, I’m asking one if he can sell me an ‘undo’

82

My parents have both passed on, but they came close to being scammed several times over the years. As their “computer and cell phone support” son, I was able to successfully intercept the threats.

But what surprised me was how hard it was for them to believe that they had not been SPECIFICALLY targeted. My father would get a scam e-mail and ask, “But…why is it coming to ME? Do they know all about me and my finances?” When I assured him that the scammers probably didn’t know anything at all about him and just randomly tried to get victims to respond, he would just make a face as if that couldn’t be possible. He was using 1930s thinking in the modern world.

83

Like so many aphorisms (as has already been pointed out a time or two above), this one has a kernel of truth in it.

But there’s a difference between the guy on vacation in Mexico who thinks he’s getting a $3,500 Rolex for $250 and a cheerful grandmother who thinks her gap year granddaughter is in serious trouble on a vacation in Indonesia.

Or one who thinks they’re in huge trouble with the IRS, the police, etc.

Or one who thinks their “computer has been infected with a virus that can be spread to friends and family without grandpa even knowing it.”

Greedy <> naïve or trusting, in this context.

84

About ten years ago I received a call at about 3 AM, the caller seemed to know my name somehow (I may have told him I don’t remember the first few seconds of the calls because I was 3/4 asleep).
He told me that they had kidnapped my brother and I had to pay them ransom.
The problem with that is that I… don’t have a brother.
So I told them that, and they said it wasn’t my brother, it was my cousin.
At this point I was 99% sure that this was a scam (as oppossed to a “legitimate” kidnapping I guess?), so I asked which cousin it was since I have several.
They said his name was “Enrique” (No “Enriques” among my cousins)
I started to laugh and they hung up

85

I don’t think any victims deserve any blame. My sister in law called my wife in tears because she got a call that there was a warrant out for her arrest unless she paid off. My wife went to calm her down and she didn’t pay, but she could have had we not intervened. These scammers are often good at what they do, they spoof the caller ID or they make realistic looking web pages in their emails so you really need to be on their toes to avoid being taken to the cleaners.

86

I think the point of this is when the scam involves breaking the law e.g. the Nigerian banker who wants to give you a cut of millions out of an account.
You could extend it to greedy people, e.g. where the scam promises to double your money within a month.

87

This article below says that one in six Americans were the victims of a phone scam last year. It says that the average (I know that median would be a better metric) was about $500 so micro-scams must be pretty popular.

88

I thought it might be worth bumping this thread to add some new and interesting information to the question ‘does anyone actually fall for them?’

Jim Browning, scambaiter and scam-punisher of YouTube and BBC fame, probably the most technically competent and scam-aware YouTuber there is, this week lost his YouTube channel due to an attack by scammers (he’s got it back now).

The scammers contacted him via Twitter, managed to persuade him that they were YouTube Creator Services, and somehow talked him into completely deleting his own channel*

So this is a guy who knows a great deal about online scams - definitely an authority on the topic, is smart enough to know how to infiltrate scammers’ systems and infrastructure to refund their victims, take control of their webcams, disable their networks, etc, and mentally competent enough to do this with one hand whilst playing the scammer along on his VM with the other hand, and talk to the scammer in the acting character of a victim, and do all of that at once…

And he’s dealt with hundreds of scammers - he’s very familiar with social engineering techniques and the way scammers attack, and yet despite all this, he managed to get bamboozled into deleting his own YouTube channel.

I’ve briefly chatted with him via email, and it does look like this was really just a case of 'even the best people are not always at their best’.

*Looking at the start of that deletion process in Creator Studio, it looks as though it may not be entirely clear whether the next click you do is the click that will actually perform the deletion- I wasn’t going to touch it so I don’t know for sure - so it may be they took advantage of that vagueness somehow.

89

Reading through all of these victim stories, I see remarkable parallels to the process people go through when falling for conspiracy theory type stuff. I’m not saying the same people are necessarily susceptible to both (see @Mangetout’s story about Jim Browning), but that the process seems to be the same.

People buy into the scam or conspiracy a bit, perhaps because it plays on their fear, greed, naivete, or simply tricked. Then they are confronted with contrary information, and instead of saying “ignorance fought, thanks!” they dig in. Usually going down a path that is harmful to themselves, for example giving money away or refusing vaccinations.

90

I’ve watched a fair number of his videos. Some scammer just got one helluva trophy for his Wall of Shame.

Wow. Puts a pretty fine point on the issue, huh ?

91

Well, looks like that illustrated my point well enough. :slight_smile:

92

The reason Jim was targetable in this way was that it used some arcane technical stuff that Jim would have never used themselves, and someone was able to convince him that he needed to do something and didn’t have a clue what it would do himself. The key to this was finding the person’s weakness - what it was possible for them to attack. That was almost certainly a targeted attack - it sounds like the scammers were just trying to show Jim who’s the boss, so to say. It’s a lot easier to get suckered into something when it’s designed to go after your weakness. Most scams spread a very wide net, looking for anyone at all whose weakness might be the method they’re using that time.

93

My friend’s mom fell for a phone/gift card scam last year. She’s not elderly but she’s 65. Not a dumb woman but they got her good. She was way in the hole before she called her daughter to ask for help.

I got a very good scam call on my cell phone a few months ago. It was a young woman with a generic American accent saying she was from “the school” and had some good news about student loan forgiveness, but I needed to call back right away. Were I an actual student or a recent grad I would have 100% called her back (I graduated 20 years ago with no student loans)

94

I don’t doubt they were also far, far more expert at disguising themselves than the usual clowns you hear on scambaiting videos.

95

Does anyone remember the American reporter who got Ebola during the 2014 outbreak, and was medevacked to the U.S.? Anyway, I follow his Twitter feed, and a couple years later, he was doing some reporting from Nigeria, and one of those 419 scammers offered him $10,000US a month, cash, to do Skype or FaceTime with him, stating that people are even more likely to fall for it if they see a white person with an American or Canadian accent.

He wasn’t even tempted, and declined the offer.

96

I received a call today regarding my $510 Amazon purchase. If I’d made the purchase, just hang up and the order will be shipped. If not, Press 1. I pressed disconnect, so I guess I’m getting a package.

97

Possibly, although in Jim’s account, it does seem they were communicating from a script. Interestingly toward the end of the interaction, the scammer asked Jim for advice on improving the scam script - I think the scammer’s expertise was probably embodied in a script that has evolved from previous iterations on other victims.

98

Agreed - I believe the mistake people make when looking at past examples of scams is to fail to imagine that scams are ubiquitous and varied (I mean, also people just fail to realise they have the benefit of hindsight and privileged viewpoint when they read a victim story).

Everyone is vulnerable to something. Scammers try everything.

99

If you watch the video Jim made about the attack, it’s clear the scammer had no idea who Jim was, just that he had a popular youtube channel worth stealing. The scammer was just after money. Jim demonstrated the scammer was nowhere near as successful as he tried to pass himself off as.

100

Yeah, sadly, there are.

First of all, if the scammers are doing it, they’re making money. If they weren’t, they’d put their time and resources into something else. That seems obvious, right?

And there are dumb, gullible people out there.

I actually know (slightly, through someone who knows her better) someone who fell for a scam, and probably lost something like ten grand.

She was (is) a model, from a nation formerly part of the Soviet Union. She came here (the US) in her early twenties. She doesn’t have much in the way of formal education. Her English is functional, but limited. And (and this is important) she’s from a place where the government is inefficient, erratic and corrupt.

So she gets the call. One of those “your social security number is about to be suspended and you’re going to be arrested for not paying your taxes” calls. She panics. She talks to them. They tell her they must pay her back taxes immediately, and she’s afraid she’ll be deported if she doesn’t comply. I have no doubt that the scammer heard her accent and played on that fear. The scammer says she must pay the phone tax debt immediately. In gift cards. “Green Dot” gift cards, which I’d never heard of, but which are apparently popular with scammers for some reason.

And the poor girl does. And is about to do it again, when a co-worker, seeing her crying in a corner on a set, sits down with her and finds out what’s going on.

And that money can’t be recovered. And she didn’t have a lot. She’s not a supermodel, not on the cover of Vogue, just a girl getting by.

And there are greedy people out there. It’s just plausible that there is legitimate money being made, even 50% returns in a couple of months, by investing in (or more accurately gambling on) virtual currency funds. That could actually happen in the real world. That whole thing is right next door to a scam anyway, so it’s not hard for scammers to latch on to greedy and not particularly intelligent people looking to make a quick buck.

Yeah, they’re out there.