Tag: phone scams

Scam Artist Stings Woman for $9,000

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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From the Daytona Beach News-Journal

A man claiming to be her nephew recently scammed a Palm Coast woman out of $9,000, the Flagler County, Florida, sheriff’s department has reported.

The victim got a phone call from a man, supposedly her nephew, saying he’d been arrested in New York City and needed money. He told her to go to Home Depot and buy him $4,000 worth of gift cards–with cash. He called back later and got the serial numbers of the gift cards.

The next day he called again for more money, another $5,000 worth of gift cards. This time she paid with a credit card instead of cash.

Only then–gee, lady, what took you so long?–did she phone her nephew and find out he hadn’t been arrested and that hadn’t been him asking her for money. She then called the credit card company, and they agreed to cancel the $5,000 transaction. But she was still out the $4,000 that she’d paid in cash. Police are investigating. Good luck with that, guys.

Someone tried almost exactly the same trick on me a couple of years ago: a phone call from someone pretending to be my great-grandson, telling me he’d been involved in a serious traffic accident in Las Vegas and needed thousands of dollars toot-sweet. A stranger wouldn’t know that me coughing up that kind of money simply wasn’t on the cards. When I said I didn’t have it, he hung up right away.

Is it really necessary to warn anyone not to fork over big wads of money to some joker who calls you up on the phone with a cock-and-bull story about being in trouble with the police and needing you to bail him out? I mean, okay, it could conceivably be true–in which case you should call the police department involved and ask them for the details. When it becomes apparent that they don’t know what you’re talking about, which shouldn’t take more than a matter of minutes, you’ll know you’re being scammed and–I hope!–hold onto your money.

Original Sin is out there all the time, and takes many forms. This is one of them.

 

First Whopper: A Really Dirty Phone Scam

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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I told you, O readers, that I had three whoppers lined up for you today. Here’s the first one.

Nuisance phone calls–we get at least half a dozen of them a day. Yesterday my wife fielded what she called “the dirtiest phone call I ever heard.”

It was some guy from something called the Volunteer Fire Fighters Assn., requesting donations “for legislators who will make us safe by supporting volunteer fire fighters.” Can you think of any legislators who would publicly oppose or criticize volunteer fire fighters?

So Patty asked, “What legislators?” And all the guy could say was, “That’s a good question. Maybe you’d better visit our national website.”

But the answer isn’t there, either. We do find out that this is “a non-profit political action committee,” but action on behalf of which politicians, we are not told.

I called them back later and asked the guy to name a few of the legislators who’d be getting the money I donate. I must have asked this same question half a dozen times, to no avail. I kept asking until the guy hung up on me.

Now, what legitimate reason could they possibly have for refusing to tell the donor which legislators would be getting his money? Does this sleazy, heavy-handed scam have “Democrat” oozing from every pore, or what?

Bad enough they’ve got thieves out there who call up old people and try to convince them that they once stayed at Shyster Lakes Resorts and had a really good time, they ought to sign up for another week, “Just $1,000 down, and we’ll get everything ready for you.”

But these parasites, hiding behind the universal fondness and respect felt for volunteer fire fighters (and deserved by them), propose not to steal from defenseless individuals, but from the whole country. They refuse to tell you who they’re working for–and that means they’re working for the bad guys: characters we would never, ever donate to on purpose.

No one who’s honest would refuse to answer a simple question.

‘Now for Something Really Despicable’ (2016)

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I really do wonder whatever happened to “Do Not Call,” which actually protected us for several years. Then it sort of went away, and the phone scams heated up again.

Here is one of the less endearing ones.

Now for Something Really Despicable!

They really do target the elderly. As my Aunt Gertie grew into her nineties, every goniff in the Western Hemisphere came out of the woodwork, looking for a chunk of her money. It kept Aunt Joan on her toes, protecting them from these varmints: for poor Gertie had become easy prey, and the villains knew it.

It’s one of those things you simply don’t do if you have sense enough to fear God.

Someone Just Tried to Scam Me

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My phone rang a few minutes ago: “This is Microsoft calling.”

Someone’s trying to hack my computer, see, and if I don’t quick call this number and ask Microsoft to rescue me, the bad guys will get all my personal and financial information and then they’ll destroy all my files and my computer will be “obsolete.” I am sure that wasn’t the right word.

I didn’t believe it, so I hung up. I reckoned something bad would happen  if I called the number that they gave me.

How many poor devils fall for this, and what does it cost them? The answers are not pleasant to imagine.

The scammers are refining their technique. No more getting a call from someone with a thick foreign accent telling you to send $5,000 worth of Target gift cards to some weird address in Peedlestan, which you’d better do in one big hurry if you want them to save you from a fate worse than death. Sure, a few people fell for that. But the new scam is better.

“Khello, this Vase Present Joe Biden is, i am calling becose kheep big crinimuls they are trying only to khack your computer and be your privet information stealing-stealing…” Really, they had to make that a little more convincing. And so they have.

What can I say? Hang up. Just hang up.

We Haven’t Got a Mobile Phone

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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Whole Foods offers a discount to Amazon Prime members; but we couldn’t get ours today because we haven’t got a mobile phone.

When my wife called about that, the woman at Whole Foods corporate offices apologized: they had no idea that so many people choose not to have cell phones. Half the calls they were getting today, she said, were from Amazon Prime members who don’t have cell phones. “We never thought of it!” she admitted. So their programmers are working on some way of making the discount available to us who have only land lines.

So why don’t we have a mobile phone?

The thing is, if you have one, people call you on it. There’s no point in having one if you don’t carry it around with you. And then they can get at you while you’re grocery shopping, playing basketball, or trying to drive your car in nerve-racking Jersey traffic without getting killed. “Hello! This is Romaine from Fumble Bay Resorts! Our records show that you stayed with us for two weeks in 1974 and had a wonderful time…” Lie. Scam. Trying to bamboozle poor senior citizens. Plus all these jidrools text you with ads all the time, which you wind up paying for.

Well, it was gratifying to learn that we have a lot of company in this.

Land liners, stand firm! Enough technology is enough.

‘Someone Has Tried to Scam Me’ (2013)

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Some of these people, if they worked as hard at something honest as they do at crime, could make a pretty good living without the risk of being sent to jail. But the scam artist’s ego won’t let him do that: he needs to feel superior to us poor schnooks who obey the law.

https://leeduigon.com/2013/09/03/someone-has-tried-to-scam-me/

 

How to Answer a Telemarketer

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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Lately we’ve been getting more and more nuisance phone calls. Whatever happened to that “do not call” list, I dunno. We have been searching for ways to turn the tables on these pests. Here are some suggestions. When a telemarketer calls:

*Try a lot of heavy breathing, without saying anything. Maybe throw in kind of a breathy little laugh, as if you were visualizing yourself tying Little Nell to the railroad tracks.

*If it’s a real person at the other end of the line, do a bit of acting, make yourself sound anxious, and ask, “Is this about the murder?” Give away no particulars, but act confused.

*More likely, it’s a robo-call. I don’t know what happens if you wait patiently–I don’t have that much patience–for the opportunity to respond, and then project some kind of loud, long, nerve shattering noise into the phone. Something like a tea kettle boiling over, say. Or turn on some horrible rap music, or an odious commercial, turn up the volume, and press the phone to the speaker.

I don’t guarantee that any of these will work, and I welcome suggestions as to how to relieve this irritation. “Hi! This is Jennifer! And our records show you stayed at one of our Halitosis Castle resorts recently–!” And it’s all a big fat lie because you haven’t stayed at anybody’s resort in 15 or 20 years…

Somehow, somewhere, there’s got to be a solution to this problem.

The Newest Phone Scam

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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Would you buy something from, or donate money to, a computer posing as a human being? Well, you would if you were balmy.

The newest thing in scam artistry is the robo-call disguised as a live human. It is a disguise that would only fool another robot, but they think it’ll fool you. Well, hey, we twice elected Obama president: I’m sure they’ve taken that into consideration.

It goes like this.

ROBOT: Hello–Joanne?

MAN: Nobody here by that name, you have a wrong number.

ROBOT: Oh, that’s all right! I was calling everybody in your neighborhood anyway…

Here the person usually hangs up. But now I think I’d like to continue the conversation and see what happens.

PERSON: Is this about the murder?

I want to see how the robot is programmed to handle that. What do you want to bet it doesn’t say “What murder?”

ROBOT: Our records show that you have stayed at our resort, Bedbug Manor, twice before and are qualified to receive our one-time only Satisfied Customer Discount…

By this time you gotta be clued in: you are not talking to a human being. You should either hang up or leave the phone off the hook where your cat can get at it, while you move on to some other detail of your daily life.

 

A New Phone Scam

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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So my wife answered the phone this morning and it was a computer-generated robot voice saying that “The federal government has filed a lawsuit against you…”

Ooh, that sounds scary! Would that be the whole federal government, collectively, suing us, or just some part of it? The robot didn’t say. IRS, Dept. of Defense, Homeland Security, NASA, Dept. of Agriculture–you could spend all day listing them, and still not finish. Oh, the suspense! Which agency of the federal government is gunning for us?

Not to worry, though. The robot said all we had to do was call this number which, as a reasonably moral individual, I will not reproduce here. Yup, just call this here number and everything’ll be hunky-dory, we’ll walk you through it… just as soon as you give us a little information…

How stupid do you have to be, to fall for this? Never mind, don’t tell me.

Somebody just explain to me again why it’s so bad to teach our children the Ten Commandments.