99% of me thinks it is. But I can’t figure out the angle, unless the link is dirty.
Anyway, I got this text today…
I haven’t clicked on the link yet. But I did text the phone number. And it turns out that it’s a landline that can’t receive texts. I also texted back the the number that sent this (asking what the catch is) but no response.
What’s likely to happen if I actually call or click that link? Obviously, if I have to pay them money to get “my” money, then it’s a no brainer scam. (Did I just answer my own question) But my identity is garbage, nobody would want to steal it. I have nothing to steal.
Apparently there’s some means for spoofing the Youtube link that lets them automatically re-direct you to another website. I don’t understand the details, but you can read about it here:
There are landlines that are enabled to send texts but not to receive them? Seems kind of pointless.
I think your 99% sureness of a scam can be upgraded to 100%. If there are 200,000 people who got the text, it’s not unlikely that a hundred or so will send the guy money to “guarantee” their winnings.
Yep. If you had tried to pursue getting your $100,000 USD, you would have eventually been asked, after a bit of back-and-forth to ramp up your expectations, to wire a small processing fee of perhaps $1,000 or so to facilitate the transfer of the monies.
Incidentally, I’ve seen those ‘Nigerian Prince’ scam letters from back when they used to be faxed to a company I worked at, on through email and now text, and I used to wonder at the transparently phony, badly-worded nature of the messages. Who would ever fall for this shit, I wondered?
Then a few years ago I read an article that said they are so ridiculously bad and phony for a very good reason-- it’s a form of self-filter so that only the dumbest or most gullible people will bite. If the messages were more convincing from the start, they’d get more replies from people who would buy it at first but eventually realize the scam, wasting the scammer time and effort.
I’ve read this as well, and it may have that effect, but I’ve never seen that anybody has confirmed it is intentional. Most of these scams are run overseas by people who speak English as a second language. It shouldn’t be surprising that their writing is stilted.
Yeah, but it’s more than just the stilted language. There’s a whole formula to it-- the fantastic story, the misspellings, the stilted language and quirkily worded phrases. The scam has been going on so long that clearly it’s working, and if the formula could be improved upon, the generations of scammers involved have had plenty of time to do so.
I wonder how much was deliberate or just going with what accidentally worked.
From watching/listening to scambaiting videos, scammers tend to stick with the same script for years. It’s only been very recently the SSA script has changed from the south border of Texas to the south border of New Jersey/Maryland/Georgia. The rest of the script is unchanged.
An explanation I read was that the reverse is true. It’s a form of self-filter that makes educated people feel superior and think that the scammer is stupid enough to be real.
I’ve read before that it is a sort of evolution in action. Scammers use the ones that work best, share with other scammers, occasionally combine or rewrite. Great command of the language not required.
Yes, there are sites that allow sending and receiving text messages using numbers set up for that purpose. I forget exactly why or what site I wanted to join, but I had to use a Chinese number to send and receive a text message and this type of site was the solution.
The site I used was free. But some sites charge for the service.