Yet Another Scam

[madox07]

I don't know why I have the feeling (probably not true) that the Romanians invented these types of scams. Over the past 12 years I have been receiving calls to buy stocks in Ferrari when they had their IPO, send money to a distant bank account in order to help my cousin from Spain who was in a car crash (I still have an uncle working in Spain, but no cousin), buy a sphinx cat for EUR 1200 from a lady that moved from South Africa to a small town in southern Romania and now was fixing to move to Latin America so the cat couldn't go (how likely is that), shucks a guy called me once in order to tell me that he bought something off of me on olx.ro (the Romanian eBay) and that he requires my card no and ssn no in order for him to send me the money for the product (which I never sold), and the list goes on.

Oh nothing beats the terminal cancer suffering old lady, that I gave a sum of money to - in person, on several occasions, just as my mother was going through the condition (that softened me I guess), which I saw in the local newspapers one year later. The article read something like "Old lady lies to gullible victims that she is terminally ill, while amateur photographer filmed her gambling the money in a local slot machine parlor". Yeah ... I got angry at first, but sort of got used to it.

Hmmm .. thinking back a number of years prior to my return to Europe, I do remember a message on Linked in where a supposed lawyer contacted me to let me know I inherited some Ethiopian magnate with no next of kin, and of course I had to pay a legal fee before I could get my fortune. I even had a letter in the mail once when I lived in Austin, telling me I won some $1 mil in some wacky lottery. All they asked was for a modest $11 processing fee ... but ... I never bought a lottery ticket in my life. So yeah ... there is a crazy world we live in. And no, the Romanians didn't event this ... I wonder if it was the Russians, they are usually the ones to be blamed for bad stuff ... so it might be them :P

 

[cosmicfolklore]

my wife actually waited for the person to come on after a recorded message from VISA about her VISA card, and she asked to be taken off the call list, and the person on the other end just started cussing her out, and my wife was like, "let me talk to your manager," and the person just kept cussing her... so I hung her up.
Mrs Cosmic was all like, "I can't believe how these telemarketers can be so rude."
I was like, "That was no telemarketer. It was a criminal, who was trying to steal your money. They don't have bosses. Did you really think that there is a company called VISA that issued you a card? Ha ha... not since like 1960... ha ha."

 

[anotherbob]

my wife actually waited for the person to come on after a recorded message from VISA about her VISA card, and she asked to be taken off the call list, and the person on the other end just started cussing her out, and my wife was like, "let me talk to your manager," and the person just kept cussing her... so I hung her up.
Mrs Cosmic was all like, "I can't believe how these telemarketers can be so rude."
I was like, "That was no telemarketer. It was a criminal, who was trying to steal your money. They don't have bosses. Did you really think that there is a company called VISA that issued you a card? Ha ha... not since like 1960... ha ha."

funny video about messing with scammers

 

[Courtney]

Thank you for sharing the information. I will be more careful. I heard that email security is directly related to a user's password. And statistics show that - 85% of people don't think twice about passwords. We always use birthdays, names of children or pets, or important dates (wedding day, for example). We need to come up with good passwords. It's better to always be on the lookout and know their tricks. How to distinguish fake sites from non-fake sites. You can find more information here. It is better to be armed with knowledge and be one step ahead of the various scammers. Be careful what you do.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

I've read somewhere that we should all add a comma (,) to our passwords. When batch password information is stolen from these web companies that we use, they use a program to batch process stolen data to strip our passwords, and the comma is used in the process to separate data. For each comma used in a password that they are trying to strip, someone has to hand fix the coded data. So, if more people worked a comma into their passwords, then we could bug up their nefarious scams.