We, humans, can become an easy target for malicious actors who want to steal our most valuable personal data. Criminal minds can reach these days further than before, into our private lives, our homes and work offices. And there is little we can do about it. Source: Federal Trade Commision. For this reason, we need to know what are the most popular techniques malicious actors are using to get unauthorized access to our private information and financial scamminf. Use the links below to quickly navigate the list of online scams you need to stay away from right .
2. Just Play Dumb
Many people jump at the opportunity to make money quick when it presents itself. But, have caution that these opportunities may actually turn out to be scams that take your money, rather than help you make it. Drive for long enough in any good-sized city, and you’re likely to see a car that’s been wrapped in an advertisement. Unfortunately, scammers have started to catch on to the popularity of bogus work opportunities on car ads. Whether you have a little money or a lot, you’d probably like to have more to «feather your nest. The pitch is that you will make money by paying to participate in the program and recruiting others to join. But if it’s really a pyramid, you and your friends will lose money, not make it. The ad says you can make lots of money working from the comfort of your home. But if this were true, wouldn’t we all be working at home? Toggle navigation. Money-making scams Many people jump at the opportunity to make money quick when it presents itself. Common Scams. Bogus car advertising Drive for long enough in any good-sized city, and you’re likely to see a car that’s been wrapped in an advertisement. Learn more. Investment scams Whether you have a little money or a lot, you’d probably like to have more to «feather your nest. Pyramid schemes The pitch is that you will make money by paying to participate in the program and recruiting others to join. Work-at-home The ad says you can make lots of money working from the comfort of your home. Was this helpful?
SCAMWATCH RADAR
Taking control of debt, free debt advice, improving your credit score and low-cost borrowing. Renting, buying a home and choosing the right mortgage. Running a bank account, planning your finances, cutting costs, saving money and getting started with investing. Understanding your employment rights, dealing with redundancy, benefit entitlements and Universal Credit. Planning your retirement, automatic enrolment, types of pension and retirement income. Buying, running and selling a car, buying holiday money and sending money abroad. Protecting your home and family with the right insurance policies. Scams are getting more and more sophisticated, particularly when it comes to targeting you online and through mobile devices. They can do this by getting you to reveal your personal details, stealing your information, or even getting you to willingly hand over the cash. The tactics used by scammers and fraudsters can vary from someone coming to your front door to an unexpected phone call. The internet and advances in digital communications have opened other ways for scammers to target you and steal information.
And how cybercriminals use them to trick you
Don’t worry, let me assist you with. And may I know, is that a desktop or a laptop? Nearly two hours and 20 minutes — and several transfers between call center staff — later, Kitboga drops the vulnerable-old-lady act.
I’m not actually a grandma,» Kitboga says as he turns off his speech manipulator and begins talking in his normal, male voice. And the lengths that you went through to try to take advantage of her are A few words into the next sentence, the scammer hangs up.
And to think, 40 minutes earlier they were singing Sia’s song «Cheap Thrills» to each other over the phone. Scams come in many forms. Sometimes it’s a cold caller claiming to be a government employee. You owe the IRS money for unpaid taxes, they say, and will face criminal charges if you don’t pay immediately. Another, relatively new confidence trick preys on the allure of cheaper airfare. For the record, a legitimate American Airlines agent won’t accept Google Play or Steam credit as payment.
Tech support scams are one of the easiest to stumble. A pop-up will scare you into believing your computer has been hacked or infected, and provide a number for a Microsoft technical support center. There is no virus, of course, and the person on the other end of the line has no Microsoft affiliation.
They will fix the entirely fabricated problem with your computer, though, for a fee. It’s impossible to know exactly how much money tech support scams bring in. Microsoft estimated in that in America alone, 3. This April, the company said it had receivedreports worldwide regarding support scams inup 24 percent from the previous year. You may think the call centers, the vast majority of which operate from India, prey primarily on elderly and vulnerable people.
But a Microsoft survey in found that millennials were actually the generation most likely to be duped. So much for growing up on the cusp of the internet age, it. Being generally tech-savvy doesn’t mean you can’t get got. But just as there are scammers, so there are scam baiters. These real-life vigilantes make it their business to deceive the deceivers. A common strategy is to simply call fraudulent support lines and waste as much of their time as possible before the person on the other end realizes they’re the one being tricked.
Every minute spent with a scam baiter is a minute that call center worker isn’t spending with someone who might be talked into paying up. Some scam baiters take it. Part of the fake support routine is to talk the caller through granting remote access to their machine.
The caller can then see the «expert» fiddling with their computer, pretending to run diagnostics to make the whole pantomime look legitimate. Few, if any, of these call center workers are genuinely computer literate. Kitboga takes the lighter approach. His goal is to keep scammers on the phone for as long as possible, testing their patience while demonstrating the lengths to which these people will go to extract a few hundred bucks from their victims. He uses different personas and voices, notably an elderly grandma type who goes off on irrelevant tangents that can drag the conversation out almost indefinitely.
Sometimes he encourages the scammers to sing down the phone to. He’s honed the art of stalling. It’s scam baiting, but it’s also entertainment. Kitboga streams his time-wasting sessions live on Twitchwhere he has more than 5. Edited versions of his calls, which can go on for several hours, are uploaded to YouTubewhere he has more thansubscribers. He’s become the face of scam baiting, a celebrity of this unique form of vigilantism.
And yet, 18 months ago, he was oblivious to it all. Kitboga has a background in software development. One day, he was looking up something to do with virtual machines — emulated computers that behave just like the real thing — when he came across «Lenny. Lenny’s responses are vague, designed to trick any telemarketer or scammer into believing they’re talking to a real person.
Kitboga thought it was fake, but funny, and down a YouTube rabbit hole he went. He was surprised by the persistent and sometimes aggressive nature of the scammers he heard in these videos. He wanted to know. I started doing all this research and realizing this has been going on for years now and that there are people, every single day, who spend 10 hours a day or more calling,» he told me. He was reminded of his grandmother.
There are people who took advantage of. She had several phone lines, internet packages and satellite dishes, though she never watched TV. She would believe every telemarketer. He already had experience with virtual machines — you don’t want to grant a tech scammer remote access to your actual computer, for obvious reasons — and knew not to use his personal network.
To this day, Kitboga won’t share anything about his real identity, so as to deter any form of reprisal from scammers they are criminals, after all. When he was comfortable enough with his setup, he called his first fake tech support line. And I’m thinking, You don’t know! How do you know? They connected to it so willingly, and within 15 minutes they were sitting there telling me I had all these viruses and I need to pay, and I was just beside myself, thinking, This is true, this is easy.
They were so willing to scam me. For a few months, he spent some free time here and there learning about different types of scams and how to report. He shared his initial experiences with friends, and one suggested he stream a call or two on Twitch so they could listen in.
A private scam-baiting party, as it were, because Kitboga was already becoming skilled at killing time on these calls. On one call, he played a silly guitar song through the phone to a scammer. Someone picked it up and posted it to Reddit. I started streaming once a week, and 15 people became 50 people became people, and it kinda blew up after.
Eventually, he was making enough money from Twitch and YouTube to pay his mortgage, and less than six months ago, he made the jump to streaming full-time. In a bizarre, somewhat ironic twist, he now makes a living scamming scammers.
These days, Kitboga’s viewers tend to send in scams they come. He receives a handful of submissions every day, an endless supply of material.
When he first started, though, he would seek them out. He would misspell the names of popular websites intentionally, hoping that opportunistic domain squatters would have sold the redirection traffic to a tech support scam that day. If he did encounter a virus-warning pop-up encouraging him to contact «official» Microsoft agents, he would report the scam and then add it to his to-do list.
He would also try to mimic searches a less tech-savvy person might perform — «How to remove viruses off my computer for free,» for example — and find fake antivirus software claiming that a brand-new virtual machine was compromised. Naturally, there was a phone number attached to this warning. He would sometimes simply search for Microsoft technical support and find scams listed as early as the second page of results.
There’s an inexhaustible supply of targets, it. Kitboga likes to challenge a variety of scammers. IRS scams are fun, he says, because they’re very aggressive and know nothing about tax law. It makes me grin. Tech scams are my favorite, just because you add more depth to the conversation when they’re on the computer.
His elderly grandma act is the perfect cover. She’s not good with computers, and scammers spend forever just talking her through granting them remote access to her machine. And that’s just the beginning. It’s my little playground,» he tells me. Kitboga has coded his own Notepad for his virtual machines that purposefully changes letters, ignores keystrokes and randomly crashes.
Tech support scams offer the most opportunities to extend the conversation and make each interaction unique. Kitboga doesn’t just do it for the laughs, though, or the views. While every conversation is different, the formula doesn’t change. Toward the end of the call, there’s always the reveal, where Kitboga tells the scammer he knows his virtual machine hasn’t been hacked and the whole tech support angle is a ruse.
He asks them, gently, why they do what they do and whether they ever think about who they’re hurting. Some hang up immediately; others plead ignorance, maintaining that they are legitimate tech support workers to the very end, even when they’ve asked for payment in iTunes gift cards. On occasion, the scammers are angry; sometimes they even say the joke’s on him, because there are «stupid» people on hold right now just waiting to get scammed.
Kitboga is never aggressive toward. That’s just his style. The way he sees it, it’s like a parent talking to a child. Getting angry isn’t always the best approach — telling a child you’re disappointed in them typically has more impact. He doesn’t think there’s any right way to approach the end of these calls.
Perhaps scammers who might shrug off his softer line of questioning would think harder about their work if the last call of the day ended with a scam baiter shouting horrific things at them in Hindi. He hasn’t always been so stoic.
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Our goal here is to deeply exploit human psychology, and get the most vulnerable and needy people to fork over what little cash they. They want the end scanmers, without the hard work. They want the shortcut to riches. They want to bypass all that scamjers work, and get straight to the riches! This is a what a lot of life coaches. They pump people full of belief with irrational logic. It gives them hope. It makes them trust you.
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