Identity Theft - Lakes Region
 

Lost $175,000. Gone.

Older gentleman.
Either got a telephone call or an email.
Stating something was wrong with his bank account in a local Lakes Region bank.

Without all of the details. At home on his computer.
He transferred money out of his account and "back" into his account.
To him, all seemed to be legitimate.
An "official" bank security employee was going to "correct" the "errors" in his bank account.

Without all of the minutiae of the transaction details/process. Bottom line.
He ultimately actually got out of his home chair and visited the local bank.

Somehow. Some or all of the money had been transferred to some obscure place in the form of Bitcoins.

The bank did get some of the money back. But not all.

Does anyone else get telephone calls or emails or text messages stating that there is a problem with the bank, credit card, IRS, Amazon, etc ?

What would you do if you received such a telephone call? Would you provide all sorts of private information to an unsolicited telephone call?
What would you do if you received such an email? Would you "click" on the link in the email to "fix" the problem?

Absolutely NOT!!! I tell all my clients especially elderly clients if something looks off it probably is off.

Additionally, If you have any question don’t hesitate to pick up the phone and call me BEFORE hitting and buttons or giving personal info out on the phone.


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Identity Theft - Lakes Region
 

Great post, very sobering, but, sadly, all too often the case. The level of sophistication in the "dark web" allows ill-minded people to present a case that appears to have all the ear-marks of something legitimate, but, in reality, is totally a scam. So many emails come to an address that it is hard to ignore them, but, joey2665 is very correct - don't click on anything unless you are positive it is real, not just looks real, but is real. Some of the "bad guys" find a way to sneak into an account through something which is actually okay, but the bad guys corrupt it. I certainly don't want to ignite a firestorm of activity, but with our present unrest in the political world the circumstances are fertile for scammers to present themselves as trying to help you. NO THEY ARE NOT, they are trying to help themselves. If I could, and I just might try it, I am going back to the two tin cans and a string form of communicating.

Financial institutions and government agencies like Social Security, never (as far as I know) instigate transactions through phone calls, email, or texts. Anyone contacting you in in that way, no matter how urgent, should be rejected. Do not click links or call them back on any phone number they give you. Do NOT give them ANY information. YOU should have contact information for all people you do business with and YOU should initiate contact using methods (ex. publicly available phone numbers for the bank or SS) you are SURE are the correct ones. If possible, you should connect with people you know, even if you have to drop in the physical place of business.

Most legitimate agencies will send you a letter. If such a letter arrives with a phone number, email, or web site, VERIFY it belongs to the agency they claim to be by, again, working through connections you KNOW are the correct ones.

Remember, the bad people are deliberately trying to scare you into doing something stupid. Don't panic. You can ask then to identify themselves and then blow them off. If there is a problem, no legitimate agency is going to threaten you or take precipitous action against you. If someone is persistently threatening, call the police.

I once posted this if you hover over the email address from sender, you will usually find it's not a bank or other legit company.

my new issue is with my land line.( yes, one of those). Caller ID says it's
someone I know and when I answer it, the # is a way out there area code!
Last night it lit up from my healthcare company and when I answered it
the guy started talking about refinancing! I hung up and scrolled back and
sure enough Hallmark Health wasn't there, it was a 513 area code!

I never give info or acct. #'s over the phone. I feel sorry for the gentleman
who was scammed.


TRUST NO ONE!

I've been told I'm in trouble by government agents several times now over the phone. The last guy, with a thick Indian accent told me his name was something like Herato. He said it, then spelled it out for me. I spelled it back wrong, so he spelled it again for me. So I said "Is that pronounced like po-tay-toe or po-tah-to". He hung up on me. There are tons of them out there, and these are really sleazy people. There's a few people on youtube who mess with them, including one who tracks them down. Of course who knows if it's real or not. Bottom line, don't give anyone money over the phone.

On a happier note... Congrats to the Mega Millions winner from Maine!!

Calls from the IRS, Amazon and the American Police Association are the ones I get most frequently. Don't know the details because I hang up before they finish more than a sentence or two. If my bank were really calling and I hung up, they'd call back. Lots of junk emails, but I rarely open them, never mind click on their links. Based on demographics, I'm probably a prime target. It's good that The Professor puts out a remindser to be vigilant.

I received a call about 10 years ago claiming I won the Publishers Clearinghouse.

The caller said that all sorts of taxes and fees had to be paid before the funds could be released.

I told him to deduct all the needed expenses and send me what's leftover.

I then heard a loud "click" as he hung up on me.

The police association calls really aggravate me. When you question how much actually goes to the police they will tell you "after expenses all funds go to the police association". What they don't tell you is the expenses (commission) come to about 99%. The police get very little.

If you want to donate money to a group, seek out the group yourself and get the contact information on your own.

This reminds me of an email I received a few years ago purportedly from Xfinity, regarding my account. This looked quite legitimate. However on very close examination the link to click on showed Xfinitity.com.

I used this for several years in a college IT class I taught.

Got a call the other day from my "grandson" who had a bad accident and needed money to pay his medical bill at hospital. The accent was a dead giveaway. But I played on...said because of the "injury" it was hard to understand my "grandson" but I would be glad to help if my grandson could just confirm his middle name. Caller did not reply but said they really wanted to talk to my wife instead. I told them to go f- - - themselves and hung up.

I also got my credit card hacked just before XMAS....tragic as the bank had to cancel my card and issue a new one. Luckily the new one came in 2 days of the wife would have had a shopping nightmare. Anyway, as an extra precaution, I put a lock on my two savings accounts for 90 days. Nothing can come out of the account without a special authorization by me. Money could still go in if I wanted. I was really worried that if they got the credit card, how much else did they get at bank. May renew this lock at the end of 90 days. My brokerage people will not do any transaction unless they get a verbal approval by me or my wife. And they absolutely know our voices. No electronic transactions allowed on anything. All verbal approvals.

Oh gosh, I get texts, several a week saying my netflix account (which I don't have) etc. has suspicious activity and if I don't reply will be cancelled/frozen/etc. Given that none of these accounts, even the ones I do have, know my cell number, they are obviously scams. And in any event, if I thought there might be an issue, I'd contact the appropriate business using the phone number/email I have on file, not any link that might be in a text or email.

I don't answer any call on my phones (house or cell) except a very few I recognize the name and number. The others go to my answering machine or voicemail. Very rare for any of them to leave a message, and if they do, it is obvious which ones are robocalls or spam. I'll call the legit ones back. And some of the unanswered ones keep calling every day at the same time or even several times a day. Ignored.

The town next to mine has a weekly newspaper with a police log. It seems every week there is one or two reports of someone, usually elderly, falling for one of these schemes. If they realize their error soon enough and report it to the police, the police often report that they were successful in stopping the loss.

I would be OK if the laws were changed to allow the death penalty for the principals of companies with robo dialers who ignore the "Do Not Call" list.

Often, when I get one of those calls and tell the caller to stop calling they claim they will take my number out of their system. The calls usually continue from the same people.

I have explained that offering to put my number on their list of people who they should not call is not enough. The law requires telemarketers to check the list before they make the call and refrain from calling any number on that list. I worked for a company that had a telemarketing department and that company bought lists of telephone numbers that had been scrubbed of any numbers that were on the Do Not Call List.

Most of the calls appear to originate from outside the US. Although these calls are illegal, I doubt the US authorities will extradite anyone from a foreign country over phone calls.

We never answer our house phone, ringer is shut off. If it is a legit call, they can leave a message. We use Ooma which is a VOIP service. Ooma does a good job of blocking most spam and any spam calls that get through usually do not leave a message.

Answering spam calls may add your number to a list of potential suckers.

Gmail does a pretty good job of blocking spam. For our local email we use Thunderbird as an application. The default is to block remote content in messages. That way the sender is not informed that the spam went to a working email address.

Alan

Neighbor who was an exectutive that worked for the telephone company stated that these calls could easily be stopped.
BUT
The lobbyists in Washington - work on BOTH sides of the spectrum.
The phone companies make money the more calls that are made.
My phone machine states the incoming callers telephone number. And some are 603.
These numbers are purchased then sold to the Asian/Pacific telemarketers.
The lobbyists know this but lobby US Congress to leave all alone.

All could be stopped. But those on BOTH sides of the aisle - take the lobby money to help them get elected or re-elected.

Is my phone company neighbor right or wrong on this?

Unfortunately, I was almost sucked into one of these scams about two years ago and it proved costly even though I caught it just in time. It started with an absolutely perfect invoice from BestBuy for an annual protection service for a laptop I had bought there four years before. The phony invoice for $199 per year even had the original purchase date and serial numbers on it. I had never asked for this service plan. When I called the number on the invoice to get the charge reversed I was speaking with a gent with a foreign voice but a very professional manner. He was well aware of every step needed to correct the unauthorized charge and genuinely helpful, but said he needed to transfer me over to the credit department to get the invoice credited. At that point something just felt wrong and I hung up and called Meredith Village Savings and was immediately connected top an outstanding fellow that does nothing but handle these types of theivery. He immediately locked down my account and as it turned out did so just before the scam attempt to get into the account arrived. I can't say enough good about MVSB and the skill of the gent who jumped right in and saved me from losing some serious cash. He did say that these types of service invoices were commonly used but it was the first time he had heard of one from BestBuy. I hand delivered a copy of the Geek Squad invoice to the bank for him so he could follow up, but I'm guessing that the scam originated from offshore and there was nothing that he could do.
The followup efforts required on his suggestion was that I open a new bank account with MVSB, re-new all of my credit cards, and have my computer completely purged and the Windows operating system re-loaded. It cost me a couple of hundred bucks and alot of wasted time, but still I feel very fortunate to have escaped so cheaply. When I was dropping my laptop off to Lakes Region Computer the woman that was writing the service order told me that they had a client in the former week that wasn't so lucky and the scammers cleaned out his savings.
If you have purchased anything from BestBuy in the last few years I would suggest contacting them and having any account records you may have with them deleted, for it would seem that their records have at some point been hacked into.
What a shame that these obviously very intelligent and skilled hackers aren't using their talents for something good.

Here is a very interesting long video interview done by Lex Fridman.

Those who do not know of Lex Fridman. He does some fascinating interviews with all sorts of famous people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC1LFC0KFSw

Best to view on your smart TV free Google. Or tablet.

The interview is with Brett Johnson. The/one of the most wanted cybercriminals. It is a long interview.

Some items mentioned are scams that I have never heard of. Yet happen every day.

The woman who owns the copy UPS shop next to Harvest in Wolfeboro must've prevented at least a dozen elderly people in the past year who were bringing $5-10K in cash to mail out to scam artists.

All of them were embarrassed but grateful to her, and she told me it typically is geared to people over 70 years old who get caught up in it.

Being vigilant may be more difficult for single older people living alone who don't get many phone calls and the caller 'seems' honest.

It's possible. But I think more of it has to do with the lack of their understanding about what is going on behind the scenes.

I compare this to two customers I had when I first started in doors and windows. A gentleman came in on the weekend seeking a kitchen cabinet knob. We short staff kitchen designers on the weekend, unless an appointment has been made. He went to the designer not seeing a customer sitting in the chair and started to present his desire to purchase the knob. He didn't realize the designer was working on someone else's kitchen in the computer system and simply couldn't just ''break away'' without risking problems for the customer whose kitchen was being worked on. He didn't understand the behind the scenes.

I was able to order him the knob, because I wasn't busy. But, I made it clear, I am not a kitchen associate at best I could guess based on the sample he had. And once ordered, it could not be returned. We ordered, and I believe that it worked out.

Back then, I worked doors, windows, roofing, siding, and decking... I had that much time and not a lot of sales, so I was able to learn all those options well enough to be confident that I was laying out the options, pricing, and other particulars with the detail needed for the customer to make an informed decision. I attended hours of training and site visits on each category.

The kitchen designer had done so, but with kitchens and baths... lots of hardware and options with those.

I just got lucky with his order.

But the behind the scenes is the thing that takes so much time to absorb, and I presume that most congressional members cannot absorb enough information on every issue before them due to complexity and workload. At best they hope the staff can ''wing it''.

One of my neighbors.
Nice well educated well traveled senior lady.
Was working in yard. August.
She came up to me with an email printout.

She had won a lottery. $100,000.
She stated that all she had to do was to send $100.00 for "processing".

She asked me what I thought.

I wanted to laugh at her but kept a straight polite face.

The one hundred dollars was to be sent to Nigeria. The country of Nigeria.

She was about to send the $100.00.

I advised her politely not to send any money to Nigeria and that it might possibly be a scam.

This recently from Bank of New Hampshire:

Alan

Advice - Unless you know the number that is calling, NEVER pick it up. There is something more sophisticated hackers are doing called "Voice Hacking."

Short of the long - Many of those calls you get where you say hello and no one is there end up being hackers recording your speech. Now, it's becoming more frequent where they call to solicit you into having a conversation with them getting you say as many words as possible while they record your voice (often use excuses around donations, political support or feedback, etc.). Most people just politely decline and think nothing of it, where they actually are just trying to record your voice. Once they have enough data, their goal is to then use software & algorithms and digitally create a soundboard of your voice which they can then use to impersonate you and call your bank or other companies...

Think of the damage one could cause if they could mimic your exact voice... Sure there are checks and balances that good companies put in place to minimize this from happening, but plenty don't as they can't afford it... There are still several large institutions that are trying to offer 'convenience' to their customers with voice recognition software where you just call and don't need to talk to someone, you can do it all through their automated system.

Intent isn't to scare anyone, just to educate as to some of the latest methods of hacking that's around us. The world is and will continue to change quickly and we need to educate and evolve with it as well before we find ourselves being caught victim. Would hate to see anyone fall victim to it on here.