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The magazine scam When I was a teenager, I worked at a telemarketer place for a few months before I realized we were scamming people, then the money was so good I flat out didn't care. The scam: We'd get leads from companies who sold people's information to us who subscribe to 5 or more magazines. We would call pretending to be the people sending them their magazines, and already having their information, sign them up for an additional subscription at a ridiculously inflated rate. I feel bad about it sometimes now, but making 1200 a week as a 19 year old in 2001, I understand why I did it.
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Jul 20, 2016 17:07
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Herbalife Will Restructure Its Multi-level Marketing Operations and Pay $200 Million For Consumer Redress to Settle FTC Charges The day this report came out, their stock shot up like 10% 
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Jul 20, 2016 17:40
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Blackchamber posted:Ransomware. Some just lock up your browser, others can make using your computer near impossible, and the worst kind can encrypt your hard-drive and if you don't pony up it'll delete it. Even if you did pay them off theres no guarantee they'll unlock your poo poo. I'm just wondering how they DO it and it's utterly terrifying to me. I guess they target porn sites because a person is less likely to complain when they were looking at midget/foot fetish/scat/incest videos than "I was balancing my checkbook and then THIS happened" but, still. Just being able to lock your browser like that... I dunno. It's spooky to me. I think it's only a matter of time before they really hijack bank accounts, power grids and credit card info and poo poo, which I know has already happened but to some extent, but aren't the government and military computers notoriously antiquated and out dated? It's this weird digital arms race that I think is only going to escalate. For years, I insisted on writing and mailing checks for bills, only using ONE credit card that had a really low limit for online purchases and what have you, until I realized that all I was doing was mailing in my checks to somoene else who would simply key it into a computer anyway. This whole online privacy genie is WAY out of the bottle. I even think it's weird how Facebook algorithms connect me to people and how certain online sights ask me a car I owned 20 years ago or a place I rented for 6 months as a security question. Creeps me out.
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Jul 20, 2016 20:38
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BiggerBoat posted:aren't the government and military computers notoriously antiquated and out dated? It's this weird digital arms race that I think is only going to escalate.
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Jul 20, 2016 20:54
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BiggerBoat posted:I'm just wondering how they DO it and it's utterly terrifying to me. 1. Really out of date operating systems and browsers 2. Opening an executable file from some random third-party If you're browsing the internet on an up-to-date machine and you're not downloading random programs all / warez all the time, you should be fine. If you have Windows Defender installed and up-to-date (it's free and comes with Windows), you're in great shape. Sometimes you'll hit something in your browser that will pop up and can't be closed easily or whatever, but most modern browsers have figured out how to shut these down. Worst case, you can just restart your computer. It's really hard to permanently wreck your poo poo if they can't execute arbitrary code (e.g. applications) on your machine.
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Jul 20, 2016 21:16
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BiggerBoat posted:I'm just wondering how they DO it and it's utterly terrifying to me. It's very, very hard to remotely hijack a computer these days. Security on computers has actually gotten increasingly tight for exactly those reasons but you don't see it so you don't think about it. Think about firewalls, antivirus, and the like; aside from that the internet infrastructure itself has actually gotten better about that. Financial institutions are also way better at spotting fraudulent charges and watch very carefully for things. I just moved so a poo poo load of transactions started rolling in from my new place and the bank called me in short order like "yo, you spending this money in these places?" That and they're tight as gently caress about international transactions (no, my bank, you do not need to call me every time I buy things from GOG...they sell things I want and they can have some money from me from time to time). Really, think about how drat much money is on the line; a company like Amazon very, very badly wants to keep raking in rear end loads of money so you can bet your rear end they're sinking some of that cash into security. Same with the open source software that runs basically the entire internet; software with a poo poo load of vulnerabilities is going to crash and burn (exception: WordPress). Granted this is why  YOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTED! YOU MUST DOWNLOAD THIS IMMEDIATELY SO WE CAN HELP YOU!!!!! is the go to thing now. Most of us understand that that is 100% bullshit 100% of the time but, well, your grandma might not know any better.I'm pretty sure that if you do end up with fraudulent charges on your cards you aren't on the hook for paying them; plus even if you are and your bank goes "nah, get stuffed" if you end up with that sort of thing you're going to switch banks in short order. edit: To tell you how seriously this is taken there are people you can hire to prod at your system/website/server/whatever to find every vulnerability they can and then give suggestions on how to fix them. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Jul 21, 2016 |
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Jul 20, 2016 23:57
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Chuu posted:No, I'm not talking about the "herbal viagra" type sites. What I'm saying is that those online sites that claim to sell you actual prescription drugs without a prescription actually do send you what you order. Things ranging from basics like Clindamycin for people who can't afford to see a doctor or who have a doctor that won't prescribe broad-spectrum antibiotics for your cold, Adderall for your upcoming eSpots star or finals week college student, to Viagra for those people who are too embarrassed to talk about ED with their doctor. Haha, that's amazing. Corporate espionage, Internet edition.
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Jul 21, 2016 00:29
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Chuu posted:What I'm saying is that those online sites that claim to sell you actual prescription drugs without a prescription actually do send you what you order. Huh, weird. I'd just assumed it was all counterfeit at best.
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Jul 21, 2016 01:09
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BiggerBoat posted:What's the thing where you're browsing online and your screen locks up and tells you you're under arrest or some poo poo and that the FBI has taken over your computer? Usually happens when you're looking at porn. This sounds more like scareware than ransomware, since it doesn't actually do anything to your computer. It just tries to scare you into thinking you've been caught doing something illegal and make you pay money to make the charges go away.
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Jul 21, 2016 22:25
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The second story on this Planet Money episode talks about one of these scareware scams, and even has a recording of someone as they're being scammed. The scammers do a good job of playing into people's fears and misunderstandings, and it's so cheap to run a scam that even if it only works 1 out of 50 times, they're still making bank.
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Jul 21, 2016 22:40
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BiggerBoat posted:I dunno. It's spooky to me. I think it's only a matter of time before they really hijack bank accounts, power grids and credit card info and poo poo... It has happened. A very noticeable one happened in Ukraine this past December: http://www.nerc.com/pa/CI/ESISAC/Documents/E-ISAC_SANS_Ukraine_DUC_18Mar2016.pdf In North America, there are Critical Infrastructure Protection standards and entities that enforce them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_infrastructure_protection For instance there's an organization called NERC for bulk power (electricity). It defines and enforces standards to prevent things like that 2003 blackout which impacted Northeastern and Midwestern United States to things like the Ukraine blackout and everything else in between.
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Jul 22, 2016 03:54
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I'm on mobile so can't find it right now, but wired did an excellent piece on the famous stuxnet worm that wrecked havoc on these kind of closed, extremely carefully guarded control systems (in this case nuclear reactors). Worth a read!
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Jul 22, 2016 11:10
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Old Binsby posted:I'm on mobile so can't find it right now, but wired did an excellent piece on the famous stuxnet worm that wrecked havoc on these kind of closed, extremely carefully guarded control systems (in this case nuclear reactors). Worth a read! Here's a link to it on ars technica: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet-the-most-menacing-malware-in-history/ It is really fascinating. It was developed by someone (presumably the states or israel) to interfere with Iran's uranium enrichment programs. The initial infection vector was by USB stick, and it would spread from there rapidly. It did things in a new way so as to make itself practically invisible, and the goal of the virus was to target centrifuges at one of their power plants. It's a really heavily technical article, but fascinating if you're into that kind of thing.
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Jul 22, 2016 14:47
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Counterfeit Rolex's are hilarious. My boss was given a Rolex to "examine" under the auspices of the seller having received it in lieu of payment because blah, blah, blah and would be willing to sell it for $2,500 instead of it's "real" value of $10,000 . I handled it and immediately recognized it as BS because it happened to be the same kind of fake "Rolex" that my grandfather had. It was hilariously bad, weighed nothing, and had a scratched crystal. Remember, if it's a Rolex, it's heavy. The second hand sweeps, the crystal is sapphire, and the date magnifier should actually magnify the date. Also, it shouldn't turn your wrist green.
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Jul 22, 2016 21:14
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The counterfeit watch industry is loving weird. You can get everything from $10 flea market garbage to $1000+ copies that are nearly perfect, with swiss made mechanical movements, sapphire crystals and quality machining work on the case/bands. At that sort of price you can get all sorts of authentic Swiss three-handers from Tissot, Oris, Hamilton, or any other number of companies but there's clearly a market because the drat things keep being made.
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Jul 22, 2016 23:50
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Yeah, you can get some pretty good fake watches. My friend got a fake Rolex on his honeymoon in Bali for the equivalent of £50. We held it against another friends genuine £4000 one and really, to the naked eye there was no difference. Weight was the same, had the same engravings in the right places.
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Jul 23, 2016 00:24
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The other Rolex is also fake.
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Jul 23, 2016 00:45
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Lutha Mahtin posted:Herbalife Will Restructure Its Multi-level Marketing Operations and Pay $200 Million For Consumer Redress to Settle FTC Charges HLF stock isn't a stock anymore so much as the unit of scorekeeping in Icahn and Ackerman's billionaire dick measuring contest tho. Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:The antiquation is actually a benefit. Nobody writes programs in the languages these truly creaky systems run on, and they generally aren't even fit to work on the internet, just send yes/no signals over old-school copper wire, so inserting code is almost impossible. Anything, even embedded industrial hardware, is vulnerable with enough effort. Where there is a will backed up by state-level resources there is a Stuxnet. http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-real-story-of-stuxnet shame on an IGA fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Jul 23, 2016 |
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Jul 23, 2016 20:19
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The majority of ransomware infections is done through email, AFAIK. Some office drone in accounting will receive a mail saying 'Please find our invoice attached' and will call the IT helpdesk after opening it three times because the invoice doesn't show up and their computer is suddenly running slow. Or somebody will find a USB key in the parking lot and put in their computer in the hope it will have some  interesting pics from a collegue or manager on it. Next thing you know, their computer and every attached network drive is encrypted.In the majority of the cases, they won't decrypt your files. What they'll do is decrypt some, and ask for another bitcoin. In corporate environments, IT will just flatten and reinstall from backup. No backups, you're hosed.
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Jul 26, 2016 09:44
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Confirming IT likes to flatten and reinstall anything involved with a cryptolocker. They got one of our people a couple weeks ago with an email from "COMPANYNAME Xerox" titled something along the lines of 'your scanned file'. Nevermind that not only has no copier in the company ever been configured to allow scan to email, or that there's not only no Xerox brand machine at that office, but not one Xerox branded machine in the company, and that the user in question hadn't scanned anything in days.  Thankfully, it announced itself with minutes of him opening it, and we pulled his computer off the network before it got to anything - wouldn't have mattered too much, just would have been a bit of work to roll back everything. Didn't even use the same HDD for the re-image, wrote 'LOCKY' on it and threw it in the bin of HDDs heading for the drill press.Had a fun MLM run in - went out to a bar, caught Uber home. Driver was cute, we exchanged numbers, and she texted me the next day wondering if I wanted to hang out with her and a couple friends. Show up, full fledged MLM pitch for some poo poo called Dreamtrips/Worldventure - you pay a $200 sign up fee and $50 a month to get discounted vacations, and then there's the whole AND YOU CAN MAKE MONEY TOO thing. Super high pressure sales techniques, my personal favorite was at the end they did a bit on how ever person below you counted, so you would lose potential money just by being the second person in the room to sign up. I think they took all three of the other marks for a cool $400 each in a total of three minutes, yelling 'WE HAVE OUR FIRST AGENT RIGHT HERE". Apparently they do actually sell the vacation packages, but they glossed over a few things that made it a really lovely deal - every dollar you spent was converted to points which you could apply to vacations, but there was a limit to how many points you could apply to each given vacation, and I suspect that many did not let you use them at all. Also they weren't available for use for a year, and expired a year after that, so by the time you could actually use them you were $850 in. Also, since they did huge 'wholesale' vacations, you'd be stuck in a different city/country literally surrounded by MLM devotees. It was really depressing how these 18 year old kids ate that poo poo up so quick.
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Jul 27, 2016 05:07
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Why did you stay longer than three minutes? (Not snarky.)
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Jul 27, 2016 08:00
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I've sat through a MLM meeting before (and longer than 3 minutes). I can't remember what they said it was going to be, a job fair or something, but when I get to the rented conference room and I look around I knew it was going to be bullshit. I'm about to turn heel and just walk out but then I hear that after the meeting theres going to be free pizza and I figured sitting though some dumb marketing video and some dumb sales pitch might be worth it for free pizza considering I was already half way across town for this shitfest. You tell people to visit some website and buy things using your code and you get a piece of every sale and then you could hire people to be sellers under you that you get a % of their sales and from anyone they recruit and so on and a piece of a recruitment fee. I'm just sitting there with my arms folded. Testimonials from the upper level guys about how much money they are making and the cars they are driving and so on. Whatever. At the end they go into the pressure to join and the person who invited you to this meeting tries to get you to sign on under them, which I just ignore. Around me there is a lot of excited people who are actually signing up (in my mind half or more are plants trying to build momentum or hype). After another 10 minutes of this I am really determined that I'm going to get that free pizza out of principal for sitting though all this wasting my time, at which point they announce that everyone who signed up was invited to go with the head guy and get pizza and everyone else was free to leave.
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Jul 27, 2016 10:40
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Dramatika posted:Had a fun MLM run in - went out to a bar, caught Uber home. Driver was cute, we exchanged numbers, Is this a thing, or is it only used by attractive women to lure drunk dudes to MLM pitches?
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Jul 27, 2016 12:37
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Lutha Mahtin posted:Is this a thing, or is it only used by attractive women to lure drunk dudes to MLM pitches? My neighbor's entire family signed up for Dreamtrips. The only one who made any money was their 22 year old daughter.
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Jul 27, 2016 14:40
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I meant the "scoring a date with your Uber driver" angle.
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Jul 27, 2016 14:43
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Lutha Mahtin posted:I meant the "scoring a date with your Uber driver" angle. loving your Uber driver is apparently a thing
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Jul 27, 2016 17:05
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Uber's already loving the drivers, why not let the drivers pay it forward?
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Jul 27, 2016 18:50
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Blackchamber posted:After another 10 minutes of this I am really determined that I'm going to get that free pizza out of principal for sitting though all this wasting my time, at which point they announce that everyone who signed up was invited to go with the head guy and get pizza and everyone else was free to leave. That's loving ice cold, drat
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Jul 27, 2016 23:29
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Professor Shark posted:That's loving ice cold, drat The pizza probably was, too.
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Jul 28, 2016 12:20
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Why not just give them some fake info? Do they check ID?
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Jul 28, 2016 18:26
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Cousin came over yesterday to come try to sell the CRAZY WRAP THING??? and it was pretty stupid because she believed it was some sort of miracle cure for her double chin and was in the process of doing it for her stomach
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Jul 28, 2016 18:38
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Tea.EarlGrey.Hot. posted:Why not just give them some fake info? Do they check ID? This reminds me of the time I "signed up" for a credit card consultation. I had just started college and some scummy credit card company was flyering our campus with ads for an event to "talk about your financial future" and "make sure you have the financial resources you need" and so on. The flyers all had disclaimers like "this is being run by Lowtax Capital Credit Card LLC" on them, so it was obvious what the deal was. And the deal was that they were holding this event at the good little pizza place down the block and giving a legit small/personal pizza to everyone who signed up. Being smug 18-year-olds, we thought it would be hilarious to scam the scammers. So we all came up with fake names and left our IDs in our dorm rooms. We get to the place, and oh my gosh the forms they had us fill out. They were full of questions about what we were planning to do with our lives, our majors, and lots of other information that was ostensibly for them to tailor their services to us, but which to me looked like puffery to get naive college students to feel big and important. Then came the damned Inquisition. This was where the cute/professional looking 20-something woman from the company took your form and asked you questions about all the personal information you put down. poo poo, she found us out! Just kidding, we all passed with flying colors. She did legitimately grill each person though, asking about specific things while looking directly at the person (eye contact) with an expression that she probably was trained to make in order to get kids to break down and admit they are lying. I'm curious if these scams are still going today, and whether a stern facial expression still is how they try and weed out fake information. When I started college cell phones weren't ubiquitous, so it would be kind of funny to see a kid's face when they check boxes for "yes this is my cell phone, only phone line" and then the staffer tries the number but the phone sitting on the table somehow isn't ringing.
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Jul 28, 2016 19:57
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Tea.EarlGrey.Hot. posted:Why not just give them some fake info? Do they check ID? I assume that "going with the the guy" meant you signed up and bought a starter package
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Jul 28, 2016 22:52
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At the one I was at the other day, they just brought out a laptop and tried to get you to put your payment info in right there.
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Jul 29, 2016 00:40
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stringball posted:I assume that "going with the the guy" meant you signed up and bought a starter package Exactly. Most of these MLMs require some sort of initial buy-in which is how the people on the levels above you get paid. And whenever you recruit someone else you get a cut from their buy-in.
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Jul 29, 2016 01:05
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stringball posted:Cousin came over yesterday to come try to sell the CRAZY WRAP THING??? and it was pretty stupid because she believed it was some sort of miracle cure for her double chin and was in the process of doing it for her stomach Someone on my FB feed is trying to sell this. It seems to be targeted towards women, a lot of 'inspirational' images about how women in business should stick together etc. She posts a lot of pictures of emails saying 'congratulations, It Works! has paid you £xxx', with a little stamp over the amount, which looks like she's just being given these images to post, and images just chock full of emojis, something I've noticed with other people selling it. Most tellingly, far more of her posts are of the 'I need 3 people who want to take control of their earning and their free time! Send me a message to join my team and start your journey now!' type, heavily leaning towards recruiting than actually selling the product. Maw fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Jul 29, 2016 |
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Jul 29, 2016 08:11
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She didn't come over to try to sell it to me but my slightly overweight stepmom who is actively trying to lose weight with exercise and diet and she asked how it worked and gave me "wellllll it has some medication and can pull the toxins and other bad stuff from your fat, and It Really Just Does Work" They're crazy expensive for a one time loving use too late edit : The stupid thing is that she's worked for an urgent care, a neuroscience center and now a physician all as a receptionist for years, but still bought into the bullshit, I would at least expect some small sense of snake oil garbage but I guess not! stringball fucked around with this message at 10:22 on Jul 29, 2016 |
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Jul 29, 2016 09:51
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stringball posted:She didn't come over to try to sell it to me but my slightly overweight stepmom who is actively trying to lose weight with exercise and diet and she asked how it worked and gave me "wellllll it has some medication and can pull the toxins and other bad stuff from your fat, and It Really Just Does Work" They all say 'TEMPORARY COSMETIC RESULTS ONLY' all over too, everything about it is just terrible bullshit. I considered writing an effort post about them in this thread before, but am p lazy.
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Jul 29, 2016 11:46
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grack posted:The counterfeit watch industry is loving weird. You can get everything from $10 flea market garbage to $1000+ copies that are nearly perfect, with swiss made mechanical movements, sapphire crystals and quality machining work on the case/bands. At that sort of price you can get all sorts of authentic Swiss three-handers from Tissot, Oris, Hamilton, or any other number of companies but there's clearly a market because the drat things keep being made. I used to be quite into fake watches, and own a bunch of them. Some are crap and some are of higher quality where you need to know exactly what to look for to tell it's a fake. The most common scam isn't people selling fake watches as real. What's endlessly more common is scam sites claiming to sell the higher-end replicas, taking your money and then sending you nothing at all, a $50 lovely one, or charging $2-300 more for the good replicas than what they usually sell for. There are like 3-4 big replica watch forums where you can find "trusted" sellers that to a certain degree has been vetted by the community and will sell at a competitive price with some quality control.
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Jul 29, 2016 11:56
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Maw posted:They all say 'TEMPORARY COSMETIC RESULTS ONLY' all over too, everything about it is just terrible bullshit. I considered writing an effort post about them in this thread before, but am p lazy. All of these quicky weight loss scams have the same thing in common. If you read the fine print at the bottom of the screen (if you can. It comes up and then disappears pretty fast), it says "Results not typical." "Normal results are a loss of 1-2 pounds per week when used in conjunction with a program of diet and exercise." Which is typical of the weight loss you could expect when doing a program of diet and exercise. In other words, they're straight up telling you that it's worthless.
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Jul 29, 2016 12:25
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Cat Army