The Great Scam!!

[Jim From Accounting]

Aw man that's disappointing. I saw 'A great scam!' article by 'Jim from Accounting' and the first thing I thought of was the movie Office Space.

OT: Sounds like the guy that was trying to scam you was really stupid. Did he try to make you install a specific program or something? Also, did you get his caller ID and report his dumb ass?

yea i got it and reported it to the scam watcher thing

 

[speight88]

I got an email from Lloyds TSB telling me that my bank account had been temporarily disabled due to suspicious activity. The only way to reactivate my account is to click on a suspicious link and enter all of my bank details.

I don?t even have an account with Lloyds TSB.

Ah those e-mails. so far i've had one from natwest, rbs, hsbc, lloyds tsb, santander, halifax and barclays, only one of those is my actual bank (no i'm not saying, you never know who's lurking) and on that one they spelt my forename and surname wrong!

 

[Superior Mind]

That 'Microsoft' scam is an old one. Happened to me. I insisted I was no good with computers and suggested that they send someone around to help me. I gave my address as the local police station and told them that I worked between the hours of 9am and 5pm and no-one was home but I'd leave the computer on and the key under the mat so their technician could come in and fix the problem. I then told them the code to the burglar alarm and said if they needed payment I'd leave my credit card on the bench with a post-it note with the pin number on it.

At that point they hung up. Such a shame.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I keep getting mails from noreply@blizzard.com saying my battle.net account info has been changed.

I don't think I play a single blizzard game, and I certainly don't have a battle.net user.

I had the same thing once. The email even had a link to a website that looked exactly -- and I do mean exactly -- like the real Blizzard site. Needless to say, I don't have a battle.net account[footnote]Well, I say I don't have one. I think I made one as a little kid for the battle.net edition of Warcraft 2, but that would have been under my parents e-mail address, not mine. I also have a copy of Diablo II, but I haven't taken it online yet, and I didn't have a copy at the time. As for WoW, I've never played it.[/footnote], and it was kind of a WTF moment when I got the e-mail.

I also occasionally get robocalls on my cell phone telling me something to the effect of "congratulations, you've been selected for a free Carnival cruise!" Those are fun. I also wound up on an unrelated mass text-spam list on the same number (real estate or something; I can't remember) but miracle of miracles, texting "stop" actually stopped the texts.

The biggest one, though, is this company called Vector marketing that sends letters to all the recent high school graduates that they can get addresses for, advertising a door to door sales job. They sell knives, and of course the employee has to pay for their own demonstration set of knives. It's almost but not quite a pyramid scheme, and while I've heard of some people occasionally being able to make money through it, I've heard a lot more horror stories of people who wind up deep in debt because of it. If anyone reading this thread gets one of those letters, I suggest you ignore it.

Note: I didn't fall for any of these scams; I've just been targeted by them, and am passing on the information.

 

[BoredRolePlayer]

When I was at orientation at my college there was little slips of paper to get extra money in our dinner plan. So I looked at the url and it was for a geocity, I showed it to the tech guy giving a talk and we both laughed

 

[Dragunai]

I keep getting emails from "Blizzard" telling me that my World Of Warcraft account is compromised or that there has been recent activity on it.

I got that one too once. Funny thing was I didn't have a WoW account at the time of the E-mail.

Intriguing thing with this one, I am currently:

under investigation on 378 counts of buying and or selling gold, characters and power leveling, etc

Getting hacked 48 times a day

have unusual activity at least 3 times every hour and for some unusual reason am yet to get banned for not logging into the .tk .info and .scam websites they setup to gather my log in info.

What's even more unusual is that the email account linked to my battle.net isn't the one I get the emails on as I kept that one a secret for my seriously personal email while I have a public one for signing up to sites like this and the various F2P gaming sites.

I also get some from the IRS telling me I am going to get arrested for tax evasion if I don't provide my bank details and I probably should really consider giving my bank info to the guys promising me a £5000 tax rebate... who knows?

Also, the unusual activity from Blizzard might be legit as I have cut down on my 8 hour gaming sessions lately so they might be worried I died or something.

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

My mother was tricked by some professional thugs. You see, when you live in a fucking Warzone that is Mexico city, scammers get better, and they are good, so to make a long story short they tricked her and took her computer and iPhone, Found them using iCal, fuckers have 5-10 years of prison, not that it matters in this country.

Hnnng! Mexico has some dumb things happening right now! My uncle got his car stolen and got beat up because he's well known around Cuqio and Guadalajara.


OT: I actually get a lot of scams sent through my school. Which is kind of funny. Things that don't look quite right. I'm sort of dumb when it comes to clicking on things, so a while back I did a virus scan and had like... 15 windows viruses on my computer that were you know, just sitting there (I have a Mac tiger. Oooold).

 

[Blemontea]

My email got hacked once, it sent spam to all my contacts saying ObamaCare was going to cause the doom and frog raining apocalypse of 2012 early. Pretty easy to stop, just deleted all my contacts and got a new email.

 

[Dragunai]

That 'Microsoft' scam is an old one. Happened to me. I insisted I was no good with computers and suggested that they send someone around to help me. I gave my address as the local police station and told them that I worked between the hours of 9am and 5pm and no-one was home but I'd leave the computer on and the key under the mat so their technician could come in and fix the problem. I then told them the code to the burglar alarm and said if they needed payment I'd leave my credit card on the bench with a post-it note with the pin number on it.

At that point they hung up. Such a shame.

Dude, that is legend xD

I haven't had this call yet but I hope I get it soon ^_^, been inspired by the stuff I am reading in this thread and plan to milk it as long as I can =P

 

[the spud]

I got the rare treat of someone pulling the equivalent of the Nigerian Prince scam on me in real life. I was walking downtown one day and was approached by an African guy who told me that he lived in Burkina Faso, and that he had made $8000 working in the US, but apparently could not take it back with him because it would be seized by the government, so he of course asked me if I would take the money and donate it to a charity somewhere in the city. The strange part? He actually produced a gigantic wad of cash from his pocket and showed it to me. That kind of threw me for a loop, before I decided there was no way this could actually be real, politely refused, and boarded a convenient passing streetcar before he could continue pestering me. Definitely one of the oddest experiences I've had.

Dear god man, that was your chance to pounce!

I would have taken it in approximately 3 heartbeats.

OT: I love trolling the microsoft tech support guys. "There may be a problem with your windows operating system."

"When was your last sexual encounter?"

 

[JaceArveduin]

Wasn't me, but last year a girl in my class "won" a scholarship, but they had run out of funds. So for a measly $20, she could buy a shirt proclaiming she had won said scholarship. Got to give them credits for originality myself.

 

[easternflame]

My mother was tricked by some professional thugs. You see, when you live in a fucking Warzone that is Mexico city, scammers get better, and they are good, so to make a long story short they tricked her and took her computer and iPhone, Found them using iCal, fuckers have 5-10 years of prison, not that it matters in this country.

How was a calendar app used to find them?

You are right. I just don't remember the name. I do know they can track your iPhone via a computer. Is it iCloud? I don't remember.

 

[ppsh41]

I keep getting emails from "Blizzard" telling me that my World Of Warcraft account is compromised or that there has been recent activity on it.

I got that one too once. Funny thing was I didn't have a WoW account at the time of the E-mail.

I got one of these from about 3 days in the future, no joke, the sent date was 3 days ahead of the actual date

 

[fletch_talon]

So about 5-10 minutes ago i got a phone call from "Microsoft Tech Support" witch i found really interesting ( thinking why would the need to phone me). Now here is where it got interesting the person kept on telling me that there is something wrong with my computer but wouldn't tell me witch one so i thought that i would amuse my self to see where this is going. It got really interesting when the man would not tell me what the problem is and kept on telling me to open stuff. long story short i phoned Microsoft just to be safe and reported the scam.

So guys(and mythical creature they call "woman") what scams have you been presented with or have you been in one yourself ?

Did they tell you that you had "malicious software" and that it was "so powerful that...".

Cuz I got that call.

I was already dubious but when they tried telling me it was "so powerful" I instantly hung up.

 

[funguy2121]

So about 5-10 minutes ago i got a phone call from "Microsoft Tech Support" witch i found really interesting ( thinking why would the need to phone me). Now here is where it got interesting the person kept on telling me that there is something wrong with my computer but wouldn't tell me witch one so i thought that i would amuse my self to see where this is going. It got really interesting when the man would not tell me what the problem is and kept on telling me to open stuff. long story short i phoned Microsoft just to be safe and reported the scam.

So guys(and mythical creature they call "woman") what scams have you been presented with or have you been in one yourself ?

I demand tacos. Give me tacos and I'll tell you.

Great, now I'll have to get tacos before work tomorrow. Thanks a lot, taco guy (already a T shirt, already copywritten. Don't even think about it).

 

[TheKruzdawg]

I'm not sure exactly what it was, but last week I was receiving about 5 phone calls a day from the same number. The first time I answered I didn't listen long enough to see what they wanted because they sounded like a tellemarketer, but it was creepy because they knew my name. After that initial call I decided to not answer ever again. They've finally stopped though. I've heard of things like that where they get you to pick up the phone and charge you a crap-ton of $ for long distance.

 

[Jim From Accounting]

So about 5-10 minutes ago i got a phone call from "Microsoft Tech Support" witch i found really interesting ( thinking why would the need to phone me). Now here is where it got interesting the person kept on telling me that there is something wrong with my computer but wouldn't tell me witch one so i thought that i would amuse my self to see where this is going. It got really interesting when the man would not tell me what the problem is and kept on telling me to open stuff. long story short i phoned Microsoft just to be safe and reported the scam.

So guys(and mythical creature they call "woman") what scams have you been presented with or have you been in one yourself ?

Did they tell you that you had "malicious software" and that it was "so powerful that...".

Cuz I got that call.

I was already dubious but when they tried telling me it was "so powerful" I instantly hung up.

i hung up after they told me to go into the device mangier and start looking at my network card

 

[siffty]

Yea I get the same shit it's really annoying.

 

[xWestie]

My boyfriend had a funny email the other day; a long essay about how some (unnamed) friend of his is moving to live closeby to him, and how their life is going so great even though they haven't spoke for ages. But look! I'm single! This is how I like sex and heres a webcam link! Come see me, I promise I won't charge, winkwink

Also, my mum actually almost fell for one of those "Help me transfer money out of the country!" emails. And tried to convince me that if she opens another bank account it'll be ok.
-facepalm- v.v

 

[Kenjitsuka]

The guy that called you wanted to trick you into downloading a rootkit...
It's actually a form of Phishing via Social Engineering, resulting in you having to fork over money to get your computer and or files back.

Could've gotten expensive!