Kevin's Watch

Some recent doings btw of the phone , have brought me to posting this idea; A Scam thread. Yea..letting each other know of a Scam going around seems a good idea. CamJen related a scam that most retail workers face sooner or later. Goods being returned for cash without a receipt. Probably stolen goods of course...

A good one happening on the phone is..about a week or two ago,,i started getting calls for a so and so..Wrong name..doesn't live here,,so let the call go to message service. Well, now the call has progressed to ..if I( the person who doesn't live at this ph #) don't press " 8" now, then I am automatically charged extra fees to be attached to my pass due payment..Of course the scam is laid bare now..So..it seems, calling the number of a pigeon ..but asking for a fictional character,,will get the pigeon to at least stay on line in order to correct the situation..I'm glad that I'm not a slave to the phone.

we got rid of our land line years ago becuse of all the false calls. get a fall and free yourself.

My wife and mother both had their FB accounts hacked into. Or maybe only the chat function? So my wife starts chatting with me. Says, "I'm glad you're here." Aww, isn't that sweet? No, because it was a hacker, who went on to ask "Have you heard what happened??" "I'm stuck in the UK." "Can you wire me some money?" We haven't heard that it happened to anybody else my wife is FB friends with, because she changed her password instantly. (She was home when this happened. heh) But my mother's hacker tried it with several people. She had to open a new account because it got so bad.

Magickmaker had her WOW account hacked. Twice. The second time, the hacker entered their credit card info and paid for a month of service -- which she was not at all sorry about. Then the hacker had the account locked. Magickmaker then had to call customer service and prove that it was her account to start with before she could get back into it.

Years aog, she had a really bad experience with her Gaia account. Months went by between her visits, so she didn't realize she'd been hacked until the time limit for reporting the hack had passed. She ended up losing all the stuff she'd collected over several years of membership on the site, including some items she had paid real money, not Gaia gold, for. She was so incensed at the way Gaia handled her problem that she has not been back there since.

There's a scam going around recently the FBI sent the library. Basically people are calling to "report" that you've missed you're "jury duty". They verify your identity over the phone by asking for your Social Security number.

Don't do that over the phone, ever.

Fist and Faith wrote:My wife and mother both had their FB accounts hacked into. Or maybe only the chat function? So my wife starts chatting with me. Says, "I'm glad you're here." Aww, isn't that sweet? No, because it was a hacker, who went on to ask "Have you heard what happened??" "I'm stuck in the UK." "Can you wire me some money?" We haven't heard that it happened to anybody else my wife is FB friends with, because she changed her password instantly. (She was home when this happened. heh) But my mother's hacker tried it with several people. She had to open a new account because it got so bad.

I heard about this one. In a blog I follow there was a topic as a question of the day a week or so ago where the blogger asked about scams (someone had gotten his wife's info and tried to buy a car in another part of the state) A few people mentioned the stuck in the UK scam.

My best friend in New Jersey got the UK scam on facebook and had his email account compromised and had to change his email address...

danlo wrote:My best friend in New Jersey got the UK scam on facebook and had his email account compromised and had to change his email address...

That happened with my friend with her e-mail account. Somebody hacked into her hotmail account and sent the "stuck in the UK" message to her entire address book. I had just talked to her an hour previously, and the spelling of the message was atrocious (my friend is the sort of person who never misspells anything). It would have been funny, if she didn't have to go through a million hoops to report the problem and get a different account.

Man, if I were stuck in the UK, I wouldn't want to leave

agreed - leave mein the uk until it is sorted out. i will hit all the sites.

I've seen that email a few times on a listserv I'm subscribed to. That's a pretty old scam.

Auleliel wrote:

danlo wrote:My best friend in New Jersey got the UK scam on facebook and had his email account compromised and had to change his email address...

That happened with my friend with her e-mail account. Somebody hacked into her hotmail account and sent the "stuck in the UK" message to her entire address book. I had just talked to her an hour previously, and the spelling of the message was atrocious (my friend is the sort of person who never misspells anything). It would have been funny, if she didn't have to go through a million hoops to report the problem and get a different account.

Someone tried to pull the "stuck in England" one on my friend while we were on Gap year. His family were going "but you're supposed to be in England!"

I just got the "I'm one of the Kennedys, and I want to invest $15 million in your country" scam pm'ed to me on a different forum.

Got calls on my cell from:
866 428 9940. Over 30 in 4 or 5 days.
They're supposedly a collection agency, but they won't know your name, they will probably say you owe a phone bill over 10 years old from someplace you've never lived [Southwest Bell seems to be their favorite, from the research I did.] Do not tell these people anything, not even your name. When they say they'll remove your number from their list, they're lying.

This one was done to one of the staff in my pharmacy last year, only with a fifty pound note not a twenty.

I like to think if I'd been working I would've realised what was going on and stopped it - but who knows? We were £90 down when we cashed up

Stonemaybe wrote:This one was done to one of the staff in my pharmacy last year, only with a fifty pound note not a twenty.

That one was done in Hustle. I wouldn't have thought it would work in reality. It was played for laughs.

CovenantJr wrote:

Stonemaybe wrote:This one was done to one of the staff in my pharmacy last year, only with a fifty pound note not a twenty.

That one was done in Hustle. I wouldn't have thought it would work in reality. It was played for laughs.

That scam is pulled all the time in various forms, and has been pulled for at least the last several decades--when my dad was a teenager, somebody pulled that scam on one of his coworkers at the restaurant he worked at. That's why many places won't make change, or will insist on there being only one transaction at a time.

Auleliel wrote:

CovenantJr wrote:

Stonemaybe wrote:This one was done to one of the staff in my pharmacy last year, only with a fifty pound note not a twenty.

That one was done in Hustle. I wouldn't have thought it would work in reality. It was played for laughs.

That scam is pulled all the time in various forms, and has been pulled for at least the last several decades--when my dad was a teenager, somebody pulled that scam on one of his coworkers at the restaurant he worked at. That's why many places won't make change, or will insist on there being only one transaction at a time.

Mid 80's I had a part time job at hollywood souvenir shop, right next to Chinese Theater, and a guy pulled this scam at every shop in the area [must be 20 of them]...and then came back to try again on the late shifts!

Auleliel wrote:

CovenantJr wrote:

Stonemaybe wrote:This one was done to one of the staff in my pharmacy last year, only with a fifty pound note not a twenty.

That one was done in Hustle. I wouldn't have thought it would work in reality. It was played for laughs.

That scam is pulled all the time in various forms, and has been pulled for at least the last several decades--when my dad was a teenager, somebody pulled that scam on one of his coworkers at the restaurant he worked at. That's why many places won't make change, or will insist on there being only one transaction at a time.

It wasn't done exactly as in the vid (asking for change), the guy paid a small transaction with the fifty, then asked for change for his change, then a refund, etc.

when i worked at the grocery here in town - we had a guy come in with a stolen bank card. he would buy some soda or such and get $20 over in cash. he did this at least 4 times one night.

then head to the carwash and buy some crack.