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1stGear posted:This is especially funny when a small amount of research makes it pretty clear that the ice cream machines are a deliberate way for McDonald's Corporate and the company manufacturing the ice cream machines to scam their franchise owners. I'm sure this is probably posted in this thread somewhere but this is new to me.
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Sep 4, 2021 09:46
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Thank you 1stGear for posting the video. I had not heard anything about this story at all (non-US goon and I basically never go to McD) and I found it a riveting watch. Pro click!
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Sep 4, 2021 11:35
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One that’s intriguing me at the moment. A friend says her printer is broken and needs a new one. I say I prefer laserjets as no ink scam then, and the Brother ones we use in work have always been decent enough. She finds a Brother inkjet on OfficeMax and buys it. Then the fun begins.  So she confirmed this morning that it was a scam of some kind (they convinced her to send a photo of her ID, did a TeamViewer esque remote connection) and that she’s getting a refund, which I’m now warning her is going to be another step in the scam and to just eat the loss, cancel the bank card etc. But the odd thing, so she told me the company dealing with is https://www.alldayhelpllc.com/ who seem a little sussy, but looks like more wanting to sell physical products. I ask how she came into contact with them in the first place, I presumed googled something and they were a top hit for Brother support etc. but no. Said the number was on the lcd screen of the printer. I’m probably going to go around in a day or two to take a look at the Mac and see if I need to wipe it, but I want to see this lcd screen message if that’s really where it came from.
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Sep 4, 2021 16:12
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"Intriguing" is an apt description, please keep us posted.
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Sep 4, 2021 16:17
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Me: I’ll have to see what tools they use on Macs, it might be less invasive than the Windows one and might just be a case of deleting things. I’m guessing there’ll be a text file on your desktop called Tech Support or similar and it’ll have their contact details. It’s fun to feel like a magician with non techies, but yeah the second she talked about remote access it was obviously more than just an unnecessary software sale. The text file has the same contact info as that website so it’s just a front for this nonsense. I’ll do some lookups and see if I can get the domain registrar/host to pull it to slow them down a bit. But it’s this lcd screen bit I reeeeally want to know. As a few scenarios 1. She’s misremembering and the phone number didn’t come from the screen, but a Google search that’s been poisoned 2. The phone number on the screen is very slightly different to these guys and she misdialed / the old support number expired and someone swooped in and took it 3. Malicious firmware on the printer that’s changed the real tech support contact details! Ok it really isn’t likely to be 3 but I so want it to.
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Sep 4, 2021 16:29
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99% sure she googled/mistyped the support website or phone number that was shown on the screen. If she bought it off a reseller on Amazon or something similar, there’s a possibility that they mailed a “tech support” pamphlet together with the package. I suppose it’s feasible that they could have hosed with the printer itself but that’s a lot of effort when it’s already relatively easy to scam folks with a sus website and a free screen-sharing app.
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Sep 4, 2021 17:03
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Yeah, the most exciting option is the least feasible for sure and doesn’t come close to the benefit/effort ratio needed. I’m going to swing on by shortly to remove any applications they’ve added, they’re now doing the whole ‘sorry if you aren’t satisfied’ spiel but I’ve told her to stop communicating full stop. Sucks that her ID is out there, but nothing can be done now. Card is canceled at least. I’ll be looking through her phone call logs to see how exactly this happened as I agree it’s almost certainly down to user error and then misremembering how it happened. As much as I don’t like doing tech support, I’d have rather she just messaged me yesterday and I would’ve had the thing up and running in 5 minutes I’m sure.
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Sep 4, 2021 17:10
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you need to pull a reverse printer goon and have her carry it to your house
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Sep 4, 2021 17:40
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Got to balance the universe! From what I could gather it looks like it started from reading setup.brother.com on the printer screen as setupbrother.com (it’s a tiny display) but the homepage for there seems to be just a holding page so maybe there was another step before it. It’s definitely shady from the first step tho, so as expected nothing particularly exciting (another friend in the group chat said they had a similar experience where they believed a legit support person passed them over to a malicious one, so most of my battle has been convincing them that they were duped at stage one. The phone call that was established was not the first stage). Had a good laugh looking through the terminal where I knew there would be some bullshit entered.  MODEL NUMNER. She even was alert enough to tell the guy entering this crap he was making spelling mistakes she said! But she obviously had trust so didn’t question the bigger stuff. All in all the biggest surprise is they actually got the printer online, but then just made up crap I guess to give her confidence to call them in the future. I think I’ve seen them use the word ‘firewall’ in videos before just as a buzzword and I didn’t see anything installed that had me concerned, and I just dumped the install of TeamViewer. They said they were processing a refund and I told her under no circumstances to speak with anyone about this again, and explained how the refund scam they’d undoubtedly try to pull worked. I’ll send her some Jim Browning videos so she can see what would’ve happened. So alas nothing new or exciting, I feel bad she spent as much on ‘tech support’ as she did on the printer, but the bank was contacted early enough so maaaaaybe she’ll luck out but I’m nots convinced. Was a debit card not credit, ouch. Doing tech support for people is boring and sucky but it’s a million times better than having them fall for this stuff, so I told her to always call me first. EL BROMANCE fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Sep 4, 2021 |
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Sep 4, 2021 19:59
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EL BROMANCE posted:Got to balance the universe! Setup brother what are you doing?
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Sep 4, 2021 20:06
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StormDrain posted:Setup brother what are you doing? Oh no I've slipped and fallen into this honey pot and now I can't stop myself from banging out mistakes
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Sep 4, 2021 20:17
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quote:From what I could gather it looks like it started from reading setup.brother.com on the printer screen as setupbrother.com (it’s a tiny display) but the homepage for there seems to be just a holding page so maybe there was another step before it. It's also possible that the response returned for you was different than the one for her. It wouldn't surprise me if there was an innocuous response for business address lookups, but a malicious response for residential ones. Or user agent or etc etc etc
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Sep 4, 2021 20:19
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Volmarias posted:It's also possible that the response returned for you was different than the one for her. It wouldn't surprise me if there was an innocuous response for business address lookups, but a malicious response for residential ones. Or user agent or etc etc etc I went there while sat at her computer, there was a few references to it in the browsing history and it looks like one with a whole bunch of referral IDs and tokens is what triggered downloading the screen sharing apps, but it feels like something prior is missing. She said she was using web chat with them originally but couldn’t find anyway to bring a page like that up. Not super important, I was just looking for closure on exactly how this started and I think I’m close enough with the misreading the url.
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Sep 4, 2021 20:27
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Nuke Chrome user profile directory. All of them, including the ones at \Program Files\Google and that one place MacOS hides its prefs. E: Not much MacOS malware experience but on Win7/8 they would burrow into the install/skeleton new profile template. Uninstalling the program didn’t do poo poo on Win7/8 and probably does nothing on 10. goatsestretchgoals fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Sep 4, 2021 |
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Sep 4, 2021 22:22
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Bumping this thread because I'd hate to see it die and also since I have such a hard on for MLM's but if you ave Amazon Prime, here's a documentary about Lalarue that was basically the Amway of Sweatpants. It really shows the creepiness of the whole industry and business model and how much crossover it has with megachurches and cults. https://www.amazon.com/LuLaRich-Season-1/dp/B09CFXPNSX
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Sep 15, 2021 19:23
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BiggerBoat posted:Bumping this thread because I'd hate to see it die and also since I have such a hard on for MLM's but if you ave Amazon Prime, here's a documentary about Lalarue that was basically the Amway of Sweatpants. It really shows the creepiness of the whole industry and business model and how much crossover it has with megachurches and cults.
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Sep 15, 2021 20:53
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hyperhazard posted:Gonna give this a watch, thanks! I was at a fall festival the other day and one of the booths was LLR. I thought they'd been sued out of business a couple years ago. Poor woman had hundreds and hundreds of leggings. Like, easily $100k worth. I felt so bad for her. That's how those things work. Every "Independent Business Owner" has thousands of dollars worth of unsold product in their garage or basement. The parent companies literally just create consumers of their own products and their customers are the "salespeople" or IBO's who are slavishly loyal and have to buy a certain amount of Amway soap or whatever every month to get their "bonus checks" Which they'll show you if they try to rope you in and you press a little. They MIGHT show you a $3000 check they got and claim it's for a month's worth of work. What they leave out is they bought $9000 worth of unsellable poo poo during that month that cost Herbalife less than $1000 to manufacture and ship. poo poo like, I dunno, sweatpants and leggings that no one needs or even wants. The ONLY people in MLMS who make ANY money are the 3 or 5 people who start it. In my example, Scamway just got you to buy $9000 worth of product that cost them $1000 to build, paid you $3000 and maybe the rest of your downline another $1000 combined. Except actually that comes out of YOUR END. They made 4+ grand and the other people in that downline, like you, might have made $1000 combined but are also stuck with $4000 worth of poo poo which they also buy from Herbalife that's gonna be in a flea market, a garage sale or a landfill very soon. You ALSO had to pay out of pocket to attend the rallies and seminars that are ESSENTIAL to your success and don't teach you poo poo about running a business beyond "believe in THIS business". It's a cult. TL/DR: Never believe ANYBODY that tells you they know someone who makes some good money doing that poo poo either. Ever. No you don't and no they don't. EDIT: Good Lord the documentary I linked is like a Christopher Guest movie BiggerBoat fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Sep 16, 2021 |
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Sep 15, 2021 22:03
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It's not just the people at the tippy top, the born sales people can absolutely clean up because they understand that they're not selling clothes, they're selling dreams to other people and the organization for THOSE people to get their own downlines.
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Sep 16, 2021 00:36
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It's extremely rare to see a natural sales pro in an MLM, because a natural sales pro will immediately understand they can make far more money in a traditional sales job. The people that get into MLMs are in fact the exact opposite of salespeople: they're marks.
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Sep 16, 2021 01:12
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Volmarias posted:It's not just the people at the tippy top, the born sales people can absolutely clean up because they understand that they're not selling clothes, they're selling dreams to other people and the organization for THOSE people to get their own downlines. lmao no, those are just the rubes who thought they were too smart to be bagholders. They'd go get a real rear end sales job if they were any good and would probably make 10x the income, "be your own boss" be damned.
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Sep 16, 2021 02:08
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I never said they were GOOD, mind you.
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Sep 16, 2021 02:47
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I think a few of the most talented sales people do actually make quite a lot of money but that’s because their job is entirely different. They get hired to promote MLM schemes on a temporary basis and their job is not to sell product but rather run a bunch of barnstorming conferences and promo videos to recruit as many new suckers as possible. Then they move on to the next MLM to do the same. I heard an interview with one of these guys in a podcast about noted scam OneCoin. The impressive part was the dude clearly didn’t understand what OneCoin was, nor did he care. He was still able to get a ton of people to fall for the con.
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Sep 16, 2021 04:40
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There's also this long but IMO interesting interview about the intersection of MLMs and mormonism, related to the LLR documentary.
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Sep 16, 2021 05:21
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Fruits of the sea posted:I think a few of the most talented sales people do actually make quite a lot of money but that’s because their job is entirely different. They get hired to promote MLM schemes on a temporary basis and their job is not to sell product but rather run a bunch of barnstorming conferences and promo videos to recruit as many new suckers as possible. Then they move on to the next MLM to do the same. I was just about to post about this guy! This is the Dutch couple, right? Absolutely fascinating, they just pretty much held a conference to shift all of their existing down lines onto a completely new product - as above, the product didn’t matter in the slightest, it’s just another product. Everyone in here should check out the BBC audio series “the missing crypto queen”, it gives such a fascinating look at MLMs.
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Sep 16, 2021 08:50
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Yo I'm watching Lularich on Prime now thx for the rec
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Sep 16, 2021 11:35
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Organza Quiz posted:There's also this long but IMO interesting interview about the intersection of MLMs and mormonism, related to the LLR documentary. Also found another cool article by one of the women interviewed in the doc. https://jill.substack.com/p/caught-with-their-pants-down Her main point is that people crave recognition for the work they do, whether it's public recogniton or monetary recognition, or some other sort of thanks. Housewives in conservative settings don't get this recognition (especially public/monetary recognition) for their work, and MLMs are designed to fill that gap. MLMs are very good at telling their members that they're changing the world, and uplines make a huge deal whenever a person hits a sales goal or tier or whatever. It's a way to have a "career" and still be accepted by the conservative religious community because you're still a housewife or mom first. In that way, it's incredibly sad.
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Sep 16, 2021 22:52
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hyperhazard posted:Also found another cool article by one of the women interviewed in the doc. Yeah. They're cults and use cult tactics. Or gang recruiting tactics. Basically making outcasts and "losers" feel like they belong to something big and important. It's a loving shame.
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Sep 17, 2021 00:00
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Just finished LuLaRich -- totally pro-watch, thank again for the recommendation. What really got me was that only one of the women who had massive downlines seemed to feel any sense of guilt or remorse for all of the people she'd suckered in. I know these things are edited and who knows what they left on the cutting room floor, but most of them seemed angry or upset that they lost all of their money when LLR switched its business model to be less pyramind-schemey. One woman with like 2,500 downlines was pissed that her monthly checks were getting cut in half. A few of them never quit the company, but were kicked out as distributors when they complained that they were losing At least two of them jumped ship to another MLM scam afterwards, which didn't surprise me in the least.
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Sep 18, 2021 17:30
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My dad just got this email. Phishing scam? Context: He does have an account paying Google like 1.99 a month for cloud storage. His credit card info is up to date and Google has been properly billing and collecting for the cloud storage including very recently (like a week ago). An account number has been redacted out of the email. But hovering over the links, the addresses do not correspond to the blue text in the link (both links are notifications.google.blahblahblah) He did click I believe on the second link but according to him did not enter any credit card info. I'm assuming it's a phishing scam and told him so given that his credit card is not expired, Google has and has had that information and is still functionally billing him through it. He's considering canceling his cloud storage account and/or getting a new credit card issued.
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Sep 23, 2021 05:52
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It's a phish. If he didn't type the card number in anywhere he's okay and it's unlikely the google accounts were compromised either. Likely he can go about his business; for paranoia safety in case of malware on the link he clicked flatten and reinstall the operating system but that's probably not very likely.
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Sep 23, 2021 07:13
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It's a phish, especially if the links aren't to a google.com or .google domain, or g.co iirc
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Sep 23, 2021 19:01
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So what's the scam? Change the hyperlink text to a legit URL while the actual URL for the hyperlink is the phishing site, counting on people not to hover over the link to verify its veracity?
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Sep 23, 2021 19:28
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D34THROW posted:So what's the scam? Change the hyperlink text to a legit URL while the actual URL for the hyperlink is the phishing site, counting on people not to hover over the link to verify its veracity? Yeah. Most people won't think to do that.
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Sep 23, 2021 20:33
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D34THROW posted:So what's the scam? Change the hyperlink text to a legit URL while the actual URL for the hyperlink is the phishing site, counting on people not to hover over the link to verify its veracity? That exact type of scam has been common in the wild for a few years now.
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Sep 23, 2021 21:22
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That kind of scam has been around since mIRC and goatse.cx.
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Sep 24, 2021 00:33
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That was a legit email from Google. I got it too and all my payment stuff was current and working. They sent an email today saying it was sent in error.
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Sep 24, 2021 23:52
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What was the full domain name in the links? I wonder if they inadvertently exposed an internal-only test domain.
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Sep 25, 2021 00:52
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 I've been getting an increasing number of these. Did they gently caress up their spoofing software? Is it to get me to answer out of curiosity? 
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Sep 28, 2021 00:29
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Maybe $4.99/mo gets you working caller ID. 
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Sep 28, 2021 00:46
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Never before have I wanted to receive a scam email so much. https://twitter.com/kmunroutrgv/status/1453744923967172609
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Oct 29, 2021 16:53
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