“I know! I’m sorry! It’s this door…”
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I have to go visit the corporate mothership. I went to the corporate travel website, put my dates in, and it told me the only way to fly from Chicago to San Francisco was to take a plane to nashville and then transfer to a flight that made stops in Minneapolis and Las Vegas.
A short wait and there were a more reasonable set of choices available. (One of my teammates had to have a human book for him, because there were no choices for his origin airport. Clearly saabre was having a badday. )
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“You don’t want to be crossing Utah that day. Oh, no reason.”
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The shortest path between Chicago and San Francisco is via Nashville; any HR Travel Analyst will tell you that.
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The other day I got a call from Microsoft Support that my computer had a virus and was making tons of external requests. I told them I was sure I didn’t have one.
“As an end-user you have no idea what you are doing.”
This of course was the wrong thing to say. No professional support script would accuse the customer of being an idiot.
Of course it was a scam but even I was unsure for the first few seconds of the call. I told them they should quit their bullshit and ended the call. But even after that I was a little unsure… until I realized they had called on our landline which we do not use for anything anymore.
Now I feel like I am somehwat adept at dealing with tech and scams and if I am unsure about this other people will likely fall for it… so I told my dad in all detail that he should never talk to anyone on the phone either (we taught him to spot email scams quite well)
Today there is an article in the local newspaper… that someone lost quite a bit of money with this exact scam. So for all it’s worth, since email is probably no longer effective it’s now phonecalls.
Maybe you all already know this and Germany is behind the latest tech even with scams… but maybe not.
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My dad often hits them with, “I don’t know what you’re talking about but my son has a Computer Science degree so can I pass you over to him?” Seems to do the trick even though I haven’t lived with them in a long while.
Back in the day one of his colleagues got hit with the “You need to buy our expensive anti-virus software”. I think he got off lightly considering some of the stuff I see on Jim Browning’s channel.
My mother is still a bit too trusting of spam emails that mention issues with package deliveries.
Saying that, I received an email to my work address informing me that my personal information was being sold to/by Oracle and that I should click the link to find out more. The link didn’t look particularly suspect. I clicked it but it was blocked by our IT system so I forwarded it to our cyber security team.
Doesn’t help that our external payroll advisor was breached last year so I’m expecting that sort of email from the company who’re on the look out for our personal details.
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I had one of those, lo these many years ago.
It was clear what was going on, and I’d recently been working on an ISP tech support line, so I knew all the ways users could fail to do stuff. I spun things out for half an hour or so until I finally allowed that, yes, there was now a black window on the screen with some white text in it.
“And what does it say?”
“Bash 2.03, and a dollar sign.”
[click]
I mean, they’d never asked me whether I was running Windows…
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I think it’s surprisingly easy to be caught out by scammers.
The worst times imo are when you’re half expecting an email or whatever and the scammers company of choice coincides with an expectation. But even then I think unless you are suspicious 100 percent of the time tripping over sometimes feels inevitable to me
(lol maybe I’m just generalising to cover nearly putting in my PayPal password responding to a scam email).
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I’ve gotten a call claiming to be the support dept of my employer (who are generally understood to not have such a thing, though it does exist). They’d called my work phone, which is called only by the robodialer at ork. (and my wife, if I don’t answer my personal phone fast enough)
So, I didn’t know if it was a targeted scam or random. “Oh, what’s your employee id, so I can look you up in <an actual internal tool that totally doesn’t have people in it>.” They gave me a number, I hung up and reported it. (Sometime around then, somone social engineered an employee into clicking a drive by malware link that exfilled a bunch of cryptographic secrets from their phone. it also broke the phone, which the employee reported. That triggered a bunch of auth revokations, which trigggered a bunch of failed 2fa challenges (but valid from the recently revoked cert…). So targeted attacks are a thing, and why I know it was a scam the moment the phone rang… And this, boys and girls, is why you keep your phone and its apps up to date.)
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Japan strikes me as a huge untapped market for scammers. Security is a joke, and this is the country where people wire large sums of money to the “hey, it’s me, I need some money” scam.
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Tell me more. What would said scammer put in an email, and could you provide me the emails of people you know who you think are particularly gullible?
/s
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There was a minor stir at my workplace recently when a startlingly targeted phishing email came through, and our security team sent everyone a heads-up. About an hour later I learned that this ‘attack’ had been sent by one of our other offices as part of them testing security procedures, and they’d failed to tell everyone on the security team in my office what they were doing. On the plus side, the right things happened; but I think they were rather intending for security to not warn everyone, so they could find out whether people fell for it…
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(I’ll pretend there was no /s for a moment)
There were so many cases of old people being scammed out of large amounts of money that a national campaign to publicise the scam resulted in TV ads, banners everywhere, warnings on most ATMs - it’s been many years and I still see posters, and the ATM warnings are still ubiquitous.
The scam was/is someone simply cold-calling and saying “hey, it’s me”, letting the old person fill in the blanks, and asking them to send a large amount of money to an account to help with some unspecified problem.
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My employers occasionally send fake phishing e-mails to staff as training. They’re usually fairly easy to spot for cynical British engineers because they’re targeted on overconfident American salesmen.
A side effect of this is that I incorrectly identified a genuine e-mail about some training from a third-party supplier as a scam. The manager who had selected the supplier was cross about that, but my own management agreed that e-mail from something like achivemore@learningprofessor.com looked like a scam.
And while I was writing this post, I got a call from “Microsoft about your computer”. You’d think that they’d realise by now that claiming that their name is something stereotypically British in a heavy Indian accept is an orange flag, but I guess they’re after the hard of thinking.
“Which computer?”
“The one registered to J G Dallman.”
“What’s the node name?”
“Nodname?”
“The host name, the name of the computer.”
“click”
Microsoft never, ever, ring up ordinary users of their products. A “Call from Microsoft” is a scam, as soon as they claim that.
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Since about a year or so we are also getting semi-regular fake fishing emails from the security department. At my work this started after there was a breach in one of the branches and this may well have been targeted. Reasons.
At my partner’s work, if you click on one of the fake scams you are redirected to an internal course on security that you have to take then. I have no idea what happens at my work… so far I haven’t fallen for any. But they are pretty good reminders and so I am kind of glad they are sending them.
I also sometimes think legit emails are scams… there was one from some kind of security briefing for the internal employees last month that was not a scam but everyone thought it was. That was a bit hilarious.
The sad thing is the majority of the world isn’t bad people but modern technology has given the scammers et al such reach that it may sometimes seem that things are far worse than they are. Still, it pays to be vigilant about these things.
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Phishing doesn’t need to be high-grade. I was reading something recently from someone whose job is to send out the test emails, and (being annoyed with management who wanted him to offer non-existent bonuses to desperate workers just before Christmas) he phrased it as something like “this is the phishing test email. Please report this email to [internal security address]. Please don’t click on the link below or you’ll get put in for extra training.” And about as many people clicked on the dodgy link as usual.
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My company’s senior execs have, apparently, been lax in the past on security awareness and training and there were so many compromised cell phones and personal computers of senior leadership that there’s at least one joke during every call with a SVP or above about “I’m not locked in a conference room and I don’t need any Amazon Gift cards”.
Our current SVP of Security is legit, though; and that’s coming from someone who used to work for the security department of a large, publicly traded company (we weren’t all-that legit… but we knew our limitations) and has evolved our security awareness training away from the fake phishing campaigns.
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I am sure @yashima also knows this, Germany suffers a lot from phone scams with old people. At least you read about them in the newspaper every week (we still get the paper thing at school, good source for regional news but too expensive to get it just for that).
There are several scams:
-More a long scam but still: The new love found on the internet who needs a ton of money for things.
-Hi, we are the police and there are a lot of robberies going on in your area and we want to save your valuable items, so we collect them and put them in a safe at the police station.
-Hi, I’m your niece / daughter / granddaughter etc. and I am sitting in prison. Please bail me out by giving money to the nice police man I am sending over.
-A variant on the top one with a relative being in a car accident and they killed someone.
The last one happened to my aunt too but luckily she was so shocked she just hang up and went to my father who knows a lot of policemen to ask him to inquire about the accident with a dead person her daughter was involved in, because she couldn’t reach her daughter. She was totally believing it but acted not the way the scammers wanted her to.
I am sure I forgot some.
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Absolutely, the most well-known goes by “Enkeltrick” (grandchild trick)…
And yes the one with the people posing as police has been in the news a few times, too.
Well and this new one with Microsoft support seems to be taking off, too.
Old people are known for keeping too much cash at home here. Maybe that is a reason?
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