You may have heard of the Canada Revenue scam, the grandparent scam, the Nigerian prince scam, the Microsoft scam, the Ebay scam and the other brazen and ugly attempts to get you to give up your sensitive financial information online.
Friends of ours got called in the Microsoft scam. This one is roping in a lot of people. You get a phone call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft, they tell you there’s a serious problem with your computer and ask for remote access to it. Once that is granted, they roam around your hard drives and find financial links and info, and if you have automatic login to your bank’s website, for example, you are screwed.
Most of the email scams appeal to either greed or a sense of responsibility or a fear about the mysteries of technology. I received the Rev-Can scam this week. Apparently it’s been working on some people who don’t look closely enough to see the misspellings and obvious other-language-to-English translation. We also received a virus email from Derek’s brother’s account, claiming he was stuck in Costa Rica and needed money to get home. Funny, we had just talked to him at his home in BC!
A couple of weeks ago I received a couple that opted for a tactic I hadn’t heard of before: health scares. One arrived claiming to be from the Blood and Tissue Department and said “we have the results of your recent blood test and it shows evidence of cancer. Please click this link to find out more.” If that’s not evil, I don’t know what evil means! Another claimed my health records showed that insurance wouldn’t cover some recent tests and I owed a lot of money. It’s a gamble on their part to not specifically mention OHIP or anything else that’s identifiable. They lost with me.
When our friend Tom got the call from the Microsoft scammer he said, “Come on man, you could be using your knowledge for something positive and sleep better at night.” Tom says the guy responded, “Well I don’t sleep too good…but I’ve gotta do this.” (Maybe his grammar is holding him back!)
The Do Not Call List has reduced, but certainly not eliminated, the invasive phone calls and scam artists wouldn’t heed such an order anyway. But back in the day when other friends of ours were bothered by nightly calls they would politely ask the person to hold, place the receiver in the bathroom, lock the door and go on with their night!
More than a decade ago I led a guy on after he called me claiming I had “won” a vacation. I played along and feigned interest until he put his manager on to take my credit card and I told the manager where he could stuff his holiday. But instead of feeling worried or upset at being caught, the guy was furious with me for “wasting our time”. I told him he had to be kidding, that he was trying to steal my money but I was wasting HIS time? We had a rather angry exchange which ended with me threatening him if he ever called my number again! He never did. I don’t recommend that method but it sure was a stress-buster.
Our home phone is set to fax only and we never, ever answer it. We do occasionally need the fax so we keep the phone but anyone who really needs to find us can do so in other ways. Sometimes we will see the same unfamiliar number come up a dozen times a night and whoever is on the other end will receive the high-pitched whine of our fax machine. And we grin.
It blows my mind just how many people are willing to stoop so low to cheat people out of their money. It’s especially disgusting to see so many seniors being targeted because, in the minds of the scammer, they’re easy prey: often trusting, often not very good with technology and often have a fair bit of money saved up. People end up losing their money, their homes, their jobs, their families, even their lives to these scams.
I’m not at all religious, but there is a special place for people who do this sort of thing – wherever it is, it is NOT pleasant.
Would have loved to hear you give it to those vacation scammers though. 🙂
I agree with you Mark. It’s stunning to me that so many people want to make their “living” off of others.