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EL BROMANCE posted:I think gas stations are really common places for stolen cards to be used. My friend in work had to list off charges the other day of fraudulent use, and it was all gas stations. You can do a small-dollar purchase for something most people buy regularly without interacting with people or likely even cameras, thus verifying the card is active without arousing much suspicion, even at a glance of a statement. If someone ran my card at Chevron for $15, I’d assume it was my wife.
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Jun 10, 2018 04:00
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Proteus Jones posted:You pretty much have it. They work as a middle man for a monthly payment plan. Except you pay them and then they pay the IRS on your behalf. Except they get a fee on top. So instead of paying $500/month, you pay $650/month with the company pocketing the difference. The IRS, sadly, doesn’t do themselves a lot of favors on this front. If they just opened with “You owe us $XXXX. We know this was probably a mistake, so we’d like to offer a zero-penalty payment plan of $YYY/month for ZZ months,” it’d probably kill the IRS scam industry. Instead, it’s written to be about as daunting as possible. This could also be resolved by loosening the tax prep industry’s chokehold on Congress and just letting the IRS autoprepare a 1040 based on the records they already have, and asking people to make changes if they want to itemize deductions, contest things, etc.
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May 22, 2019 22:22
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tinytort posted:Last I checked, they don't even have payment terminals that can be brought to the table at restaurants. You expect them to have tap-and-go or chip and pin when they don't even have the ability to keep their credit cards in sight when paying at a restaurant? That’s to maintain the sanity of the staff. How many times could you endure an old person looking you in the eye as they stiff you on the tip that is somehow the way you make minimum wage? Better to take the card, run it, bring back the receipt, and go back to the kitchen to scream into a dish towel as they write “go to college” in the tip line.
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Aug 2, 2019 19:21
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MrNemo posted:I am part of a scuba diving club in the UK. SEA PATROL will have something to say about that, you scoobydoo.
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Aug 3, 2019 17:53
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bamhand posted:If carnival games are rigged then lotteries and casinos are also rigged by the same definition. They're all specifically designed so they take in more money than they give out. I don’t know that’s true - lotteries and casinos are strictly regulated. It’s common knowledge that “the house always wins,” but they’re doing it according to a rule book that is public knowledge, if not law. Some guy bending the rims on his hoop game isn’t operating to any regulation or spec.
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Sep 4, 2019 20:09
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So, to summarize, the common con/scam is representative democracy.
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Sep 6, 2019 01:49
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bird with big dick posted:One thing that’s good about it is I haven’t lived in the area code that I have for my phone for 12 years, and all the scammers spoof your area code, so I see 319 I know it’s safe to ignore but if I see 775 (where I live now) it’s usually legit. I’ve noticed they’ve started branching out into area codes that are geographic neighbors (example for me: I have a 503 number, and I’m starting to get auto dialed scams from 541 and 971, all Oregon area codes).
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Dec 9, 2019 01:46
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When I was on Nextdoor in Cupertino, CA, there was some old lady complaining about night construction on 280 being a violation of her rights, and threatening to contact the ACLU over it. Other than that, it was filled with people fighting over whether developers should be allowed to tear down a dead mall, largely because it would provide more housing, meaning their property values would go down. One of these people went on to become the Mayor of Cupertino and promptly made a joke about building a wall to keep the undesirables out.
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Jan 20, 2020 21:01
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Fried Watermelon posted:We need a Nextdoor thread. For as much as people (rightly) complain about how people abuse the anonymity of the internet to be dicks, Nextdoor is proof positive that said anonymity is not a requirement.
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Jan 23, 2020 18:33
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Absurd Alhazred posted:A lot of these sex spam emails I get are really weird, but what the gently caress? Presumably the same audience that thinks “daddy’s cummies” is sexy.
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Feb 3, 2020 02:46
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If Microsoft’s Xbox decision was run like Theranos, they would have just put a PlayStation in a custom case, overwrote the boot loader with some sweet chip tunes, and ripped and sold PS games as their own and called that the Xbox 360. Depending on your POV, that might have been the smarter move.
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Mar 3, 2020 00:39
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Rhandhali posted:I’m an ICU physician and a bunch of my colleagues have been getting unsolicited text messages about a COVID test that doesn’t exist yet. This is solidly something that should be reported to the FTC. Let the government’s helpful Peppa Pig-esque illustration lead the way...  Heck, I’d bet the FDA and FEMA might be interested too, though I don’t know how you’d go about doing so (maybe they need Peppa Pig illustrations too). Edit: you might want to edit out your/your coworker’s phone number at the top of the screenshot. Edit 2: vvvvv Good suggestion, thanks. Blue Moonlight fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Apr 13, 2020 |
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Apr 13, 2020 00:20
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nonathlon posted:What does a skimmer look like? Obviously enough like the real thing, but at a job I once had, we were regularly told someone had fit a skimmer to the nearest ATM and to "beware". But I was never sure what to look for. They can be pretty clever: 
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Oct 19, 2020 06:54
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PhazonLink posted:is there any tech solution to making spoofing numbers/IDs impossible? STIR/SHAKEN is intended to address this, but it’s somewhat slow going as I believe carriers not only have to implement it internally, but individually with other carriers as well (I recall AT&T and Comcast, for example, getting things wired up with watch other). Not sure how it looks on Android, but if you check the recents list on an iPhone, any call with a check mark has cleared this protocol.
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Nov 9, 2020 04:53
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I think my favorite part was when the developer left a bunch of files titled “SpermBankRaw” on the device.
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Feb 6, 2021 20:02
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Pekinduck posted:Even if you take their explanation at face value its pretty clearly planned obsolescence. They pile more and more crap in forced updates nobody wants until you need a new device with a more powerful processor. All the iPads released in 2015 and 2016 were initially running some iteration of iOS 9. Those “forced updates” are the only reason you’re able to even try to use many web sites, because web development is a loving garbage fire done by people who only use the latest version of Google Chrome. I had a meeting today with engineers drooling over the possibility of dropping iOS 10 support, and a meeting yesterday about getting resources to properly support older browsers. Seriously - the majority of web engineers give less of a poo poo about you using your six year old iPad than Apple does.
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Feb 10, 2021 05:16
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Volmarias posted:Browsers get hungrier and hungrier for resources, while your battery starts to get more and more anemic. That's not counting all of the increasing numbers of ad servers and metrics tracking scripts that get shoved around, or the straight up full fetches and parsing of some random 3MB js library because someone wanted something to go THIS way instead of THAT way. Guess what, fucko, we're auto playing a video for you now, whether you want us to or not, get ready and start parsing! Oh, I know - I’m anticipating clearfixes in my future if the parked legacy browser code comes to being. But that last paragraph is kind of what I’m getting at - providing rich, encouraged, and long-lived update support means it’s fairly rare to encounter terrible old browsers, so you can ignore them relatively safely. If the OP’s iPad, and millions of others, had been stuck on iOS 9, it changes that calculus pretty dramatically. Right now, every third article about web development is basically “this feature is active in the latest Chrome beta channel behind a config flag, so start using it now!” Browser compatibility is something that is so often played fast and loose, so it’s generally a good thing when browser manufacturers encourage people to be on their latest versions. What I will say is that Apple probably needs to move Safari towards a more evergreen release strategy decoupled from OS releases.
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Feb 10, 2021 07:45
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I got an email the other day from Warren Buffett himself saying he wanted to give me 2.5 million dollars. He helpfully suggested that if I didn’t know who he was, I could Google Warren Buffet or visit his web site, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett. He signed the letter “Warren Buffett Billionaire Investor” and even gave me his personal email, wbuffer803@gmail.com. 
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Feb 25, 2021 03:40
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At least in the US, I’ve heard there might be some spikes relating to scammers trying to test workarounds to STIR/SHAKEN before some deadlines land.
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Jun 2, 2021 19:24
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Tubgoat posted:What is that? To simplify it a great deal (and likely introduce some hopefully-forgivable inaccuracies), it basically is a signal a telecommunications provider adds to an incoming call indicating that they can guarantee the call is being made by equipment authorized for the given phone number. So, if my cell phone is 555-555-1212, and I call someone’s cell phone, they might get the OK that I’m legit, but if a spammer calls that same person with a spoofed number of 555-555-1212, they won’t get the OK. It won’t say it’s spoofed, it just won’t have the additional endorsement. It works fairly well between cell phones, or VOIP lines, but once there’s analog equipment in the mix, transfers between telecom providers, etc., it gets a bit iffy. On iPhones, you can check the call log - any incoming calls with a ☑️ symbol have been verified. Oddly, no toggle to only accept verified calls, which I’d prefer over the blanket “block anyone not in your contacts”, but so it goes for  products.
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Jun 2, 2021 21:32
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Cage Kicker posted:Go gently caress yourself, if you fall for an OBVIOUS SCAM you are at least partly to blame for not exercising better judgement. I mean, this is the same argument people have for why it’s OK to pay gig economy workers a fraction of a a fair wage. It’s also the same reason why so many of those workers fight for a job that is so commonly exploitative. When you have few options, it’s easier to ignore the flaws in what remains.
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Jun 9, 2021 00:14
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Volmarias posted:Pretty sure there's "handwritten" fonts on the addressing of some of these letters. I kept getting these kinds of letters you're describing from, for no reason I can understand, a company that sells old people hearing aids. Again, making GBS threads on the elderly by making them think someone might have cared about them and all, but this isn't a scam so much as it is junk mail. I’ve got a few of these for various insurance policies, if I recall correctly.
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Mar 16, 2022 02:09
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Nighthand posted:Another thing is that the age of a site matters to SEO, so if Subaru DID announce a hybrid, that site could rapidly publish real content and strip out the garbage and be better ranked than others trying to spring up out of nowhere. It's kind of like a slightly more effort parked domain. Amusingly, this happened recently in the Nintendo community - someone created a Twitter profile, set it to private, then tweeted every possible rumor they could think of for an upcoming Nintendo press conference well in advance. After the conference, they deleted all the inaccurate rumors, set the account to public, and boom - a Twitter account that appears to be a legitimate, previously unknown leak. https://twitter.com/waddledeeknows/status/1491915837476855809?s=21&t=0WICN0K-zNVngMwsV6MFzA
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May 11, 2022 04:31
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Volmarias posted:They probably just leave "we are experiencing higher than call volume due to connection outages" on loop regardless of what's happening in the world. It's probably a scam. At the same time, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, whether or not a customer realizes it, something is wrong with their Comcast service. It’s just that likely. For example, my account has a phantom cable box on it. They don’t charge me for it, it’s labeling can’t be changed, and it always shows up in the list, so now, “Living Room 2” is my living room box.
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Jun 7, 2022 00:55
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thrakkorzog posted:I'll admit, I'm a bit weak on the slurs. "Please stop calling me," doesn't work. Kurt Vonnegut posted:We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
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Jul 2, 2022 19:08
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I’m honestly amazed that YouTube Kids doesn’t take an allowlist approach, where certain creators are given carte blanche to upload so long as they stay in line. Way more manageable to maintain a list of not-awful creators than a list of not-awful videos. Let the kids creators all fight with each other for relevancy - it’ll probably end with ⅔ of Disney+ on YouTube for free. On the other hand, kids watching Elmo extract Peppa Pig’s molars with rusty pliers is really good at making the lines go up, so it’s not surprising which way the winds blow.
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Aug 23, 2022 02:55
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I got caught by a car rental place today when I assumed the “standard” coverage was what came with the rental, and the “premium” coverage was additional. Oh no. The “standard” coverage was also additional, and I didn’t figure that out until I was looking at an itemized statement while waiting for the car because trying to get through renting a car with a family waiting to start their vacation fun has a lot of cognitive overhead. Common cons/scams: anything having to do with vacation.
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Oct 5, 2022 07:11
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greazeball posted:This was the opening slide of the Tesla Investor's Day livestream: That’s a lot of words to cover their rear end on whatever arbitrary bullshit falls out of Elon Musk’s mouth.
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Mar 8, 2023 20:47
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