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Sydin posted:I still get at least ten different "refinance your student loans!!!" letters a month from the same 2-3 companies. They've been sending them to me at this pace since graduation day over five years ago. Calling them off won't do a lick of difference. I have never had a student loan, a car loan, or an outstanding warrant and yet I get those scam calls almost daily.
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Sep 10, 2019 21:12
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Getting automatic transcription of voicemails on my phone has saved me so much time in the last year. I get some legitimate calls from numbers that aren't in my contacts (doctor, utility company, etc) so it's nice to be able to sift through them at a glance.
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Oct 11, 2019 23:37
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:unless your address is so weird that you can't imagine anyone having that address plus a number or whatever, I'd say the most likely answer is that someone typo'd their own address as yours This just happened to me (well, to my wife) and I was convinced it was a scam. Someone paid an online fee for a parking ticket at a college campus several states away, and the receipt ended up in her email by mistake. I had to call up the college’s parking department before I felt reassured that it wasn’t some obscure phishing attempt.
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Oct 18, 2019 06:54
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Achmed Jones posted:Get one of the 85 apps that will block calls originating from your first 6 that aren't in your contacts. Robokiller and hiya can do this; I think at&t call protect does as well. I think every US carrier has an app for that If you are using an iPhone, the latest software version has this built in as a native feature. Sends all calls straight to voicemail if they aren't in your contacts or recent call lists.
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Nov 14, 2019 06:45
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So wait, she enters the amount of money she wants, the ATM dispenses it, but someone says it's broken and takes the money in front of her while she walks away with the card still in the machine? I'm sure I don't have all the details or my mental picture is off, but that sounds less like a scam and more like a very polite mugging.
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Nov 23, 2019 01:27
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I sold Cutco knives for a very brief period one summer in college and I got to see firsthand how cultish it was. I told myself, "I don't care if it's a pyramid scheme, I don't need to make it to the top of the pyramid, I just need to make rent." On the first day of training, the instructor (who I had not yet realized was just another sales guy too) held me and a dozen others back after it ended and said, "I know you guys are special and have what it takes. You're going to see people disappearing from this training over the next few days. That's because they have people in their lives who are trying to hold them back and telling them to quit. But you'll make it." I did eventually quit a couple weeks later when we went to a "conference" and I realized that 90% of the people in the hotel ballroom had only been doing it as long as I had. We were all suckers.
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Nov 27, 2019 16:27
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The monotony of calls spoofed from my area code was broken last month when I got a call from a stranger telling me that he had been spoof-called by my number. (Not that I could do anything about it, but I appreciated getting junk voicemails from a well-intentioned human rather than a robot.)
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Dec 10, 2019 01:33
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You can never go broke banking on people's capacity to do stupid things when their defenses are down. I once misdiailed an airline by one digit and got a call center worker who tried to sell me a vacation package. I thought "what the hell, I didn't come here on purpose but might as well see what they have to say" and listened to them for far longer than I should have (which was zero).
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Dec 10, 2019 01:52
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If the letters don't tell you to go somewhere besides nextdoor.com and aren't QR codes that lead to unknown addresses or something, you are probably safe to treat them as legitimate invitations. The correct move is still to throw them in the trash.
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Jan 18, 2020 06:01
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When I moved into my neighborhood I joined Nextdoor hoping for cookouts and block parties and community gardens. Instead I got people discussing how to drive a local strip club out of business by looking up license plate numbers and harassing its patrons.
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Jan 18, 2020 20:45
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You're a bacon lover, eh? Well they say absence makes the heart grow fonder...
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Jun 16, 2020 02:18
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I've been getting a ton of ads for that Boy Scout lawsuit of Facebook lately. All from "different" advertisers too, so blocking one does nothing.
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Sep 21, 2020 02:24
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I just completed annual security training for my work. Hell is a place where they make you play "spot the phish" flash games forever.
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Oct 13, 2020 17:13
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I choose to believe it's the start of an ARG.
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Nov 6, 2020 19:23
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I just got an email from “American Express” instructing me to submit some info. Obviously did not click the link, but hovering over it I could see that it went to a google docs form. That is like the cardboard lemonade stand of phishing attempts.
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Dec 9, 2020 22:30
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FMguru posted:It's a key part of the training - if you want to be a success, you need to be selling all the time. They explicitly train you to work your MLM into every single conversation and every personal interaction. So MLMs not only wreck your finances, they wreck all your friendships and social relationships! And if you lose all your friends over it, well, it's probably for the best - why, they were holding you back with their negativity and their unwillingness to see what a great opportunity you were offering them, so good riddance to 'em. And now you have even more spare time to work harder on building your MLM downline and making a success of yourself! I briefly sold Cutco knives during a summer in college. This matches my experience. At the start of the three-day training period they told us that we'd see fewer people come back in the room every day, or even after breaks. That was because their family members were holding them back and telling them it wasn't right. But you folks who stay are rockstars and you're going to make it big. I barely lasted a week at that "job" but it was excruciatingly miserable. The prime directive was to hit up as many family members and friends as you could, as fast as you could, so that you could press them for money before you burned out.
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Jan 5, 2021 19:43
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e: ^^ yeah, the tactic we were explicitly told to use was to ask Grandma if she could sit through your pitch "just for practice" and then go in for the hard sell at the end.Sydin posted:2. They did hire you no questions asked, but they then made you travel to and sit through hours and hours of training that you were naturally not reimbursed for. This was what did it for me. Shortly after I was hired and trained, my manager (who I eventually realized was just the guy one step above me on the pyramid, making a cut of all my sales) told us there was a big regional conference a few hours away. We were supposed to snappily dress in all black with "a hint of lime" and take turns calling a list of prospects from our cell phones as we carpooled. Once we got to the Great Wolf Lodge where they were holding seminars I couldn't take it any more. The big hyped guest speaker showed us how to carve a watermelon with the exact same cadence and flourishes that my manager had showed us and it all rang hollow. There was an audience participation thing with a show of hands for seniority, and looking around I realized that like 90% of the people there had been hired in the last week. I made sure my carpool buddies had alternate rides home and then I bailed. The next day I made zero sales calls and felt completely, blessedly free. I returned my demo kit soon after. My mom was a little bummed about that, she said that she liked the knives I'd sold to her under duress and that she'd have bought the whole demo set from me for the price of the deposit.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:19
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Tubgoat posted:The fake handwriting is a new thing the real estate predators are doing, my best guess is because the conman thinks it looks more authentic and amateur, but if it's a consistent type font, you're not fooling anyone. It seems to be pretty consistent around my area, across multiple companies and agents. My friend sent me a good one of these recently. Look at these three mailers that came to her house:  (It's covered up, but her name is misspelled two different ways on two of them, and the number of her address is wrong on one too.) The text is re-used between printings, but I'm on the fence as to whether it was originally written by hand. On the one hand, within a given line of text the letters are pretty distinct so it's not just a typeface (though the "y" in "my" and "property" does look suspiciously re-used). On the other hand, if a human was responsible for writing this then they must be unfamiliar with English and are just copying the shape of the letters. I'm not sure what order they were received in but my guess is that the middle one was last since it's error-free. They must have done some quality control between printings. But how lovely is that quality control if it took two tries to get there?
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Jan 31, 2021 02:02
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ravenkult posted:Might be an AI handwriting generator. It would explain the weird typos. My other guess was OCR. Still not sure how/why it messed up the same sentence in multiple ways though.
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Jan 31, 2021 03:24
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That's why the trick is to sign up for their sales team and then quit as soon as they make you buy the demo kit. You get the knives at a reduced price (in exchange for suffering through three days of MLM training).
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Mar 1, 2021 18:10
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Those emails are extremely sad.  Seeing her go from "maybe your intentions aren't good" back to "I sent you more money, why haven't you fixed things" without missing a beat is heartbreaking.I'd encourage you to tell her some hard truths but I think you're right that it may not make a difference.
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Mar 7, 2021 15:47
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This is not even close to the same thing as what you posted earlier.
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Jun 9, 2021 03:40
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BiggerBoat posted:Turns out my step father sent them to me for some reason and sent some to my son too. My boy saw them on a table and said "grandpop got me some of those too". No reason why and nothing in the delivery said who it was from. I suppose they might come in handy next time another hurricane hits me. Sooo... month or so. A similar thing happened to my friend the other week. A mysterious package arrived for her with no indication of the sender except a PO box in California. Googling that address turned up a bunch of complaints related to fulfillment companies using it for shipping. We were all prepared to write it off as some kind of scam until another friend in the group chat chimed in and said "oh yeah that was me, I ordered a gift for myself and filled out your address because I was originally thinking of a gift for you".
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Jul 16, 2021 02:54
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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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419-eater style reverse scam where you contact the assassin from a separate account and outbid yourself to keep the hit up
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Oct 29, 2021 18:34
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Sydin posted:I get maybe 1-2 scam texts a year on my android phone, and it's been about that pace for years. A month or so back I had a company iphone thrust on me, and holy poo poo I get like 1-2 scam texts a day on the thing. Constant phishing, group chats with a million randos trying to get me to click links, the works. I had to completely turn off the iMessage feature on the phone and just tell people at work to call, not text if they need something. I get virtually no scam texts on my iphone but plenty of calls about my auto warranty, student loans, cancelled social security number, etc.
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Nov 4, 2021 21:29
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 09:40 |
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End goal could be anything from scamming you out of money to convincing you to click on malware, but the first, biggest hurdle is starting a conversation. Someone who replies to a text, even to say "sorry wrong number", is infinitely more likely to be a mark than someone who doesn't.
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Dec 17, 2021 19:42
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