Attempted Scam

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kyleb

Final Approach
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Drake the Outlaw
Someone tried to scam my 80 something Father today. He didn't feel quite right about what he was asked to do, so touched base with me first and saved himself a good amount of $$$.

The perp called Dad's cell phone pretending to be my cousin(who lives 2,000 miles from here and we don't hear from often), who was in jail and needed $9k in cash to get out of jail. Either the perp had my cousin's name or social engineered the name from my Dad, then told Dad a story about a wreck (therefore the not-quite-right voice), jail, and $9k in bail/bond.

Obviously, none of it was true, but Dad didn't immediately dismiss it. However, he did call me and talk through it, which put an end to it.

The question I had was how someone got Dad's information and made a connection to my cousin in California, since Dad isn't on social media and my cousin hasn't left a e-trail that leads to my Dad. The other possibility is that the person social engineered a cousin's name from Dad. "Hey Mr. XYZ, it's muuuumble, your nephew, how are you doing?" "Mmmumble? Is this Mike??" "Yeah, it's your nephew Mike and..."
 
kyleb said:
Someone tried to scam my 80 something Father today. He didn't feel quite right about what he was asked to do, so touched base with me first and saved himself a good amount of $$$.

The perp called Dad's cell phone pretending to be my cousin(who lives 2,000 miles from here and we don't hear from often), who was in jail and needed $9k in cash to get out of jail. Either the perp had my cousin's name or social engineered the name from my Dad, then told Dad a story about a wreck (therefore the not-quite-right voice), jail, and $9k in bail/bond.

Obviously, none of it was true, but Dad didn't immediately dismiss it. However, he did call me and talk through it, which put an end to it.

The question I had was how someone got Dad's information and made a connection to my cousin in California, since Dad isn't on social media and my cousin hasn't left a e-trail that leads to my Dad. The other possibility is that the person social engineered a cousin's name from Dad. "Hey Mr. XYZ, it's muuuumble, your nephew, how are you doing?" "Mmmumble? Is this Mike??" "Yeah, it's your nephew Mike and..."
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Yeah, I had someone try that with me recently. Said “Hi grandpa, it’s me.” Same scam. Problem is I don’t have kids let alone grandchildren. I told him he deserved it and to rot in jail. Ha!
 
Everyone's data is everywhere and all the scammers have some of it and the rest they search for online or social engineer out of you or someone you know. Since there isn't a retailer on the friggin' planet that is capable of securing their POS systems (I'm looking at you Panera) I just assume every time I swipe or use my chip card I've just freshened the bad guy's database. Over the weekend I had the opportunity to help a government agency to try to reverse social-engineer some Nigerian scammers involved in a BEC campaign but was told to stand down. :mad:
 
Here's another scam, true story: guy gets a $30k loan to buy a car over the web. Wires the money to the guy. No car, no seller. Cash is GONE. His first payment is due the next month. Bank can't forgive the loan, can it? Trust no one, do your diligence, escrow your funds. Imagine the feeling every time this person makes his 'car' payment. Scammers suk.
 
This makes the rounds every so often. People trying to play off the feelings of older folks by trying to get them to think their loved ones need help.

I had the Nigerian prince trying to get his dads millions out of the country by using my bank account once. I pretended to be wanting to help him and keep him going for almost 6 months. I told him I had just taken a new job selling freezers to eskimos in Alaska, and my company would loan me the money to send to him. But the company needed 500 bucks from me first. I had the guy going that if he sent me 500 bucks I could get the 18,000 bucks he needed to get his dads money out of the country.

I learned that from an internet story.
 
Stingray Don said:
Yeah, I had someone try that with me recently. Said “Hi grandpa, it’s me.” Same scam. Problem is I don’t have kids let alone grandchildren. I told him he deserved it and to rot in jail. Ha!
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"I'll send a case of KY, just give me the address!"
 
dayum that sux. guess it could'a been worse tho........
 
Scammers are getting a lot bolder, not to mention the increasing amount of robo-calls that I receive on a daily basis. I tend to believe they target senior citizens over other demographics.
 
"Social engineering" is just a fancy way of saying "con job." Engineering has nothing to do with it.
 
kyleb said:
The question I had was how someone got Dad's information and made a connection to my cousin in California, since Dad isn't on social media and my cousin hasn't left a e-trail that leads to my Dad.
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There are a bunch of geneology sites out there that connect a sh|t ton of people together.
 
Similar scam tried on my mother-in-law about five yrs ago. Perp pretended to be her grandaughter's ex-boyfriend, in jail in Mexico. My brother in law intervened before the money changed hands.
 
Late last year I got a string of phone calls from the Denver jail. I never answered, and only knew it was the Denver jail because I did a search on the number. I was getting multiple calls per hour so I blocked the number. My guess is it was someone spoofing the number of the Denver jail. I don't know anyone who would call me from there, not to mention that I hadn't lived in Colorado for almost six months at the time. They never left a message.
 
All your data isn't everywhere, and every black hat doesn't have access to every stolen data source - if you had a broken lock on a window, you'd still lock your front and back doors, right? Most everyone is compromised to some extent, but there is definitley still value in taking protective measures. You can reduce your chances of a high impact compromise.
 
My mother got the scam call from "her favorite grandson" she stumped the chump by asking "which one" and then hung-up. She may be old, but she is not stupid !
 
A woman my grandma knows got involved in a money laundering scam. They said send us $500 and we'll send you $1000 a month. Sure enough the woman sent the $500 and a few months later a box showed up at her condo with instructions to keep the $1000 and forward the rest to an address. The FBI got involved I think.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
 
Was in the bank Monday and an older gentleman walked up to the counter and wanted to know the balance on his checking and saving account. The gal went and looked it up and came back and gave him the balance of the checking account and told him he had no saving account. I couldn't help but wonder of he had been scammed or if he he was just forgetful. He seemed shocked at the balance in his checking account and truly shocked that he no saving account.
 
EppyGA said:
Was in the bank Monday and an older gentleman walked up to the counter and wanted to know the balance on his checking and saving account. The gal went and looked it up and came back and gave him the balance of the checking account and told him he had no saving account. I couldn't help but wonder of he had been scammed or if he he was just forgetful. He seemed shocked at the balance in his checking account and truly shocked that he no saving account.
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Dementia or Alzheimers, perhaps.
 
My wife works with a lot of immigrants and by anecdote at least that community seems to attract more than its share if scammers, usually along the theme of pay immediately or go to jail/get deported. But they seem to be a pretty savvy lot and tell the stories in a funny way.
 
iflyvfr said:
Here's another scam, true story: guy gets a $30k loan to buy a car over the web. Wires the money to the guy. No car, no seller. Cash is GONE. His first payment is due the next month. Bank can't forgive the loan, can it? Trust no one, do your diligence, escrow your funds. Imagine the feeling every time this person makes his 'car' payment. Scammers suk.
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Tell the bank to repossess the car.
 
I detailed my own bout of identity theft on this site. They got at my Ebay and Paypal accounts, and I really didn't do anything. Bay and Paypal accounts are now deleted (no sense leaving a backdoor for criminals) and my bank reversed the charges.
 
Ryanb said:
Scammers are getting a lot bolder, not to mention the increasing amount of robo-calls that I receive on a daily basis. I tend to believe they target senior citizens over other demographics.
Click to expand...

I resemble that remark (senior citizen). However, I have a tool that stops the vast majority of those robo-calls - NOMOROBO. I have a VoIP phone and it works wonders. Phone rings once and that's it. So, we never answer the phone of the first ring. A few get through, but 90% or more get stopped.
 
Speaking of scams, I received a phone call from my own number last night. Automated voice comes on saying its ATT and to enter the last 4 digits of the account holders social security number... NOPE. Later saw the local Fox news station post about it.
 
EppyGA said:
That is a possibility, although he did drive himself there.
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I went to take care of my old man while he was in the throes of Alzheimers. My mother was keeping him at home, though it was driving her suicidal. She wanted to go to a camp with her pals in Michigan, so I took a week off to take care of my father (the only time my boss didn't give me a hard time for taking holiday, he was actually impressed). Borrowed my brother's hot race bike and headed home. Mama Steingar took off the next day leaving me with Papa Steingar.

I thought I'd corralled every car key in that house. I don't know why, but there were a lot of them. I must have missed one, because I turned around at one point and both car and Papa Steingar were gone. Great. I called the cops, then called a family friend to watch the house. I then took off on aforementioned hot race bike.

I figured Papa Steingar was headed to Michigan to retrieve mama Steingar, and I knew generally where the place was so I headed for it at top speed. You can imagine the top speed of a liter sport bike. It was fast. Indeed, it was so fast that the closing speed of approaching cars in the other lane were in excess of 200 mph, the cars were unidentifiable except as flashes of color. Red, yellow, blue, but then saw a flash of blue with a little flash of green.

I must digress, as a compensatory mechanism for the Alzheimers Papa Steingar put a bright green styrofoam ball on his car antenna, so he could find it in parking lots. Hence I figured that little flash of green was the ball. The only thing I can imagine more dangerous than driving a hot motorcycle at top speed is stopping said bike as quickly as possible. But, with lots of burnt rubber (about which my brother was less than happy) I got turned around and after him. I had already decided that if this was some other old fool with a giant blue car and green antenna thingie that he was soon to be an ex-old fool with a giant blue car and green antenna thingie.

No, it was my father, driving his car with this giant stupid grin plastered on his face. He drove all the way home with me in close trail. He was so happy.

It was the last time I was to ever see my father smile.

And in case you're interested, all this happened when my father was 5 years older than I am right now.
 
Ronbonjovi said:
Speaking of scams, I received a phone call from my own number last night. Automated voice comes on saying its ATT and to enter the last 4 digits of the account holders social security number... NOPE. Later saw the local Fox news station post about it.
Click to expand...
That's a new one, but not surprising, as "spoofing" numbers is easy enough that even kids can do it these days.

There are many scams out there. I deal with them with my work (law enforcement) constantly. Worst one I ever had was an elderly woman that received a call "from her bank", supposedly informing her that one of the tellers had been withdrawing funds from her account for their own use. The caller asked my victim to go make a large withdraw, $10,000, so they could catch her at it. My victim did, then happily turned the money over to the "bank investigators" at the end to be "deposited back into her account"....sigh. Then, after this poor woman later realized she had been scammed, she made a police report and I got the case. Before I could even start much of an investigation, she called me asking if the sting worked..."What?" I say...well, the criminals called her again, saying now they were the police, and that she needed to wait for the scammers to call again, and withdraw $10,000 again, so the police who were watching them could arrest them. Which, she diligently did. Double sigh.
I ended up prosecuting them, but she never saw her money, and they (as nearly in all financial crimes) never did much jail time.
 
Ronbonjovi said:
Speaking of scams, I received a phone call from my own number last night. Automated voice comes on saying its ATT and to enter the last 4 digits of the account holders social security number... NOPE. Later saw the local Fox news station post about it.
Click to expand...
"Last Four" are the prize - the first three are geo, and the middle two are a limited sub-set of what you would think are 100 possibilities. There aren't. Treat your last four like you would the full nine. . .
 
My wife answered a call yesterday from "Quest Diagnostics" per caller ID. It wasn't.
She handed the phone to me in time to hear an English as a weak second language explain that he was calling back from Computer Support as we had requested a support call and can I be in front of my computer?
Since I had a few minutes and was feeling ornery and irritated at the recent increase in calls, I played him a while - asked what operating system he needed me to use - Windows XP, 7, 8, 10? RedHat? SUSE? Oracle Enterprise Linux? VMS? I can bring up an old SPARC station if that will help?
Oh - Windows, of course, sir, he said.
Are you sure? What version? Oh, and I'll need your employee number to begin, which got stuttering...
Oh, and can you please tell me your IP so I can verify that you will be able to help me?
What Malware package are you running? Do you have a physical firewall or a software firewall so I can be sure this is safe?
and then I had to go, so I told him "In order to know that you can really help me, you need to open a command window and type format C: ...
click .... :)
 
Sundancer said:
"Last Four" are the prize - the first three are geo, and the middle two are a limited sub-set of what you would think are 100 possibilities. There aren't. Treat your last four like you would the full nine. . .
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Yet every CSR you talk to on the phone has access to the "last four" to use as authentication that you are who you say you are.
 
gkainz said:
My wife answered a call yesterday from "Quest Diagnostics" per caller ID. It wasn't.
She handed the phone to me in time to hear an English as a weak second language explain that he was calling back from Computer Support as we had requested a support call and can I be in front of my computer?
Click to expand...

Sometimes when I want to get amused, I'll do the same - my favorite is using the command line Linux machine which doesn't have a mouse. I just let them try to talk me through doing whatever it is they're doing, then start asking them if they really know what they're doing.

Hmmm...need to combine this with some kind of phone tracing. Something to put fear in them that they've been caught....
 
bflynn said:
Sometimes when I want to get amused, I'll do the same - my favorite is using the command line Linux machine which doesn't have a mouse. I just let them try to talk me through doing whatever it is they're doing, then start asking them if they really know what they're doing.

Hmmm...need to combine this with some kind of phone tracing. Something to put fear in them that they've been caught....
Click to expand...
I worked at a place once that had a really good, really zealous CompSec guy who would come running into the IT Manager's office at least once a day with "Got another break-in attempt. Can I kill him?" and the manager always had to talk him down with "No, you can't! Just send them the standard warning and disclaimer and watch him."
I should have spent more time with him to find out what "killing him" entailed, as I have a feeling it would have been quite entertaining.
 
II still use my "you've called a number o n the Federal do-not-call-list". I had a guy the other day for whom I had to escalate to the "your failure to disclose your supervisor and address could constitute obstruction of justice, which at the federal level is punishable by a $250,000 fine and a year in federal prison". It had been at least a year since I had to use that line.
 
You know when you're installing an app and it asks for permission to access your contacts?

Someone had your dad as a contact. Same goes with apps wanting to access your pictures. Why does an app for (insert almost anything) "need" that access?

Facebook did not have a breach of security as the narrative continues to imply . They sold the data for huge profit.

For anything free (Facebook, Gmail, etc) you are the product.

100% of the time

kyleb said:
Someone tried to scam my 80 something Father today. He didn't feel quite right about what he was asked to do, so touched base with me first and saved himself a good amount of $$$.

The perp called Dad's cell phone pretending to be my cousin(who lives 2,000 miles from here and we don't hear from often), who was in jail and needed $9k in cash to get out of jail. Either the perp had my cousin's name or social engineered the name from my Dad, then told Dad a story about a wreck (therefore the not-quite-right voice), jail, and $9k in bail/bond.

Obviously, none of it was true, but Dad didn't immediately dismiss it. However, he did call me and talk through it, which put an end to it.

The question I had was how someone got Dad's information and made a connection to my cousin in California, since Dad isn't on social media and my cousin hasn't left a e-trail that leads to my Dad. The other possibility is that the person social engineered a cousin's name from Dad. "Hey Mr. XYZ, it's muuuumble, your nephew, how are you doing?" "Mmmumble? Is this Mike??" "Yeah, it's your nephew Mike and..."
Click to expand...
 
iflyvfr said:
Here's another scam, true story: guy gets a $30k loan to buy a car over the web. Wires the money to the guy. No car, no seller. Cash is GONE. His first payment is due the next month. Bank can't forgive the loan, can it? Trust no one, do your diligence, escrow your funds. Imagine the feeling every time this person makes his 'car' payment. Scammers suk.
Click to expand...

I've bought a lot of cars over the internet, and what I've typically done is gone to get the car in person and then provided cash or a check, depending. Of course that has its physical risks with it, but still gives me quite a few "outs".

I was thinking about it and I did end up buying one car similarly to the scam that you mentioned here, though. My E55 I bought from a dealer in Florida (advertised on eBay) and wired the money to him. I suppose I figured the risk was relatively small seeing as I had paperwork on the car and had done my research to see that the dealer was, in fact, a dealer. It all worked out just fine, but I do remember thinking at the time that if he was trying to scam me, I would be out of luck. I had a good feeling about it and it worked out fine. Plus he had a lot of positive feedback on eBay.

The number of attempted scams I receive has gone up significantly. I do wonder what percentage ever get caught.
 
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