Scam Calls and Emails (2 Viewers)

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WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service today warned taxpayers of a recent increase in IRS-themed texting scams aimed at stealing personal and financial information.

So far in 2022, the IRS has identified and reported thousands of fraudulent domains tied to multiple MMS/SMS/text scams (known as smishing) targeting taxpayers. In recent months, and especially in the last few weeks, IRS-themed smishing has increased exponentially.

Smishing campaigns target mobile phone users, and the scam messages often look like they’re coming from the IRS, offering lures like fake COVID relief, tax credits or help setting up an IRS online account. Recipients of these IRS-related scams can report them to phishing@irs.gov.

“This is phishing on an industrial scale so thousands of people can be at risk of receiving these scam messages,” said IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig. “In recent months, the IRS has reported multiple large-scale smishing campaigns that have delivered thousands – and even hundreds of thousands – of IRS-themed messages in hours or a few days, far exceeding previous levels of activity.”..........

 
When George Hart got an email saying there’d been fraudulent activity on his PayPal account, the 76-year-old knew better than to take the message’s word for it.


So he logged onto his PayPal account, and there the supposed charge was again: $699.99 to a vendor he’d never heard of.

An accompanying message said the charge would be posted to his account if he didn’t call customer service in the next 24 hours. So he called the number in the message.
The person he spoke with urged Hart to install an app called TeamViewer, he said.

When he started seeing new windows flicker across his screen when he wasn’t even touching the mouse, Hart bent down under his desk and pulled the computer’s plug.

It might have saved him from a more severe scam. The fraudster had used a PayPal money request to trick Hart into thinking a charge had been posted to his account, then pressured him into installing an app that grants remote access to a computer.

Hart used anti-virus software to reset his computer and purge it of the malware the scammers installed, he said.


Payment apps let you send money with the tap of a button. Unfortunately, that makes them fertile ground for scammers.

This week, Help Desk heard from two readers who had run-ins with fraudsters on PayPal. Hart ended the interaction before the scammers could compromise any more of his accounts.

Another person, 65-year-old Cynthia Parker from Columbia, Mo., lost around $1,400 after speaking with a scammer posing as a PayPal customer service employee.

PayPal ended up refunding Parker after being contacted by The Washington Post. But often once you send money on a payment app, it’s gone…….

Here’s what to look for if you get an unexpected receipt or invoice or find yourself on the phone with a sketchy “customer service rep.”


Get customer service numbers from official websites


Treat every phone number like a potential scam risk. Even if the number came from an official-looking email or text, verify it by checking it against the contact number listed on the company’s website before you call.


Type in phone numbers rather than clicking links


Online links can whisk you anywhere a bad actor wants you to go.

Rather than rely on “call” buttons, find official customer service numbers and type them into your phone manually, advised Jérôme Segura, senior director of threat intelligence at cybersecurity company Malwarebytes.

Double check that you typed it in correctly before you connect, since many scammers set up phone numbers one digit off from common help lines and then rely on “fat fingering,” or lazy typing, to bring in victims, Segura said…….

 
His only mistake was using the number in the message and not the number on the website, the website he was already on btw. I thought people knew this by now. Always go to the official website and never trust an email or text message on your phone. If you are savvy enough to use paypal, you should know this.
 
Sad read. I hope the people who do this burn in hell

It feels like after you have talk with your kids about social media and Tik tok challenges you need to have a talk with your parents about these scam calls
=================

My 78-year-old mother-in-law handed an envelope containing $25,000 cash to a Florida Lyft driver who showed up one morning on her doorstep during the early days of the pandemic.


The cash was intended to bail out her beloved nephew from jail, where he sat after crashing into a pregnant woman and killing her. Or so my mother-in-law was told by the man on the phone who pretended to be her nephew’s lawyer. The man instructed her to tell no one or he would rot in jail.

On two consecutive days, she made large cash withdrawals at her bank and the “lawyer” sent the Lyft driver to collect the loot.
But there was no accident and no jail stint. My mother-in-law, reacting with her heart and not her head, was too scared to call her nephew or other family members to verify the tale.

Days later, she mentioned to my husband that she had bailed the nephew out of jail — with no idea that she had been scammed.

That was my family’s introduction to the pernicious crimes that strip senior citizens of their money and dignity. It also served as a wake-up call for my husband. He drafted a strategy to better protect her, which included overseeing her finances.


Scams have skyrocketed, according to the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission, fueled by a pandemic that further isolated senior citizens. As seniors tried to navigate the virtual world to keep in touch with loved ones or shop, they became even more vulnerable to fraud. The pandemic has subsided, but the threat has not.


Florida is an obvious target — second in elder fraud victim rankings behind California, according to the FBI. The state’s elderly population, much of it well-off, continues to boom.

Nationally, the FTC says, losses through fraud jumped more than 70 percent from 2020. People over 60 were defrauded of nearly $1.7 billion in 2021, a mind-boggling increase of 74 percent from 2020, according to the FBI. And those over 80 were the softest targets, losing the most money.


The range of schemes is breathtaking: There is the “romance” con where the victim is courted online and agrees to send the person money for necessities and future “together” plans.

The “impersonation” scam, like the one that bilked my mother-in-law. Impersonators also pretend to be Medicare, IRS or other government employees demanding payments. Online “tech support” assistance allows fraudsters to gain access to computers and wreak havoc, a category that has surged.


Then there’s the “sweepstakes” scam. Three months ago, a friend’s mother in Florida received a check for $100,000 and congratulations on winning the contest. The only catch: To cash the check, she needed to send $40,000 to pay the taxes. She wire-transferred the money, and whoosh it was gone. The check, of course, was fake………

 
I've normally been very careful with my email. I messed up somewhere though and went from getting maybe 1-2 spam emails a month to now getting 50 a day. Not sure where I entered my email that started it but I'm guessing there's no getting out of it now short of getting a new email address which is probably what I'll do.
 
About 8 yrs ago I made the mistake of posting a 4 wheeler for sale on Craigslist. I only listed my cell number. The scam calls and nonsense started 30mins after posting and got so bad I gave up the cell number and got a new one a week later. Everything from trades for work in place of money, sex solicitation, 4 fake "your kid/spouse/grandchild has been in an accident" send money for ambulance, payment/ banking verification requests and my favorite will I ship it to an adress in Dallas so they can test it before buying. They were going to send me a "wire" as collateral...
Since then Ive got a burner phone I use when dealing with the public. Anywhere I go and someone at a store or general nuisance asks for the cell #,they get the burner number.
 
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Taking these scams to to next level
=========================


The man calling Ruth Card sounded just like her grandson Brandon. So when he said he was in jail, with no wallet or cellphone, and needed cash for bail, Card scrambled to do whatever she could to help.
“It was definitely this feeling of … fear,” she said. “That we’ve got to help him right now.”


Card, 73, and her husband, Greg Grace, 75, dashed to their bank in Regina, Saskatchewan, and withdrew 3,000 Canadian dollars ($2,207 in U.S. currency), the daily maximum. They hurried to a second branch for more money.

But a bank manager pulled them into his office: Another patron had gotten a similar call and learned the eerily accurate voice had been faked, Card recalled the banker saying. The man on the phone probably wasn’t their grandson.

That’s when they realized they’d been duped.
“We were sucked in,” Card said in an interview with The Washington Post. “We were convinced that we were talking to Brandon.”


As impersonation scams in the United States rise, Card’s ordeal is indicative of a troubling trend. Technology is making it easier and cheaper for bad actors to mimic voices, convincing people, often the elderly, that their loved ones are in distress.

In 2022, impostor scams were the second most popular racket in America, with over 36,000 reports of people being swindled by those pretending to be friends and family, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission. Over 5,100 of those incidents happened over the phone, accounting for over $11 million in losses, FTC officials said.

Advancements in artificial intelligence have added a terrifying new layer, allowing bad actors to replicate a voice with just an audio sample of a few sentences. Powered by AI, a slew of cheap online tools can translate an audio file into a replica of a voice, allowing a swindler to make it “speak” whatever they type.


Experts say federal regulators, law enforcement and the courts are ill-equipped to rein in the burgeoning scam. Most victims have few leads to identify the perpetrator and it’s difficult for the police to trace calls and funds from scammers operating across the world.

And there’s little legal precedent for courts to hold the companies that make the tools accountable for their use.
“It’s terrifying,” said Hany Farid, a professor of digital forensics at the University of California at Berkeley. “It’s sort of the perfect storm … [with] all the ingredients you need to create chaos.”


Although impostor scams come in many forms, they essentially work the same way: a scammer impersonates someone trustworthy — a child, lover or friend — and convinces the victim to send them money because they’re in distress.

But artificially generated voice technology is making the ruse more convincing. Victims report reacting with visceral horror when hearing loved ones in danger.


It’s a dark impact of the recent rise in generative artificial intelligence, which backs software that creates texts, images or sounds based on data it is fed.

Advances in math and computing power have improved the training mechanisms for such software, spurring a fleet of companies to release chatbots, image-creators and voice-makers that are strangely lifelike…….

 
Jesus
=====
The voice on the other end of the line said, “mom, I messed up”, before a male voice took over and made threatening demands.

“This man gets on the phone, and he’s like, ‘listen here, I’ve got your daughter’,” Ms DeStafano told local news show WKYT.

The apparent kidnapper told the mother: “You call the police, you call anybody, I’m going to pop her so full of drugs, I’m going to have my way with her, and I’m going to drop her off in Mexico.”

In the background, Ms DeStefano said she could hear her daughter saying “help me, mom, please help me” and crying.

“It was 100 per cent her voice,” Ms DeStefano said.

“It was never a question of who is this? It was completely her voice, it was her inflection, it was the way she would have cried – I never doubted for one second it was her. That was the freaky part that really got me to my core.”

The apparent kidnapper demanded $1 million for the daughter to be released, before lowering the figure to $50,000. Ms DeStefano only realised that her daughter was safe after a friend called her husband and confirmed that she was safe.

The scammer, who police are still investigating, appears to have used artificial intelligence voice clone technology, which has become increasingly competent in recent years at mimicking people’s voices.

It is also relatively easy to access and use, with AI tools freely available on the internet…..

www.independent.co.uk

AI clones child’s voice in fake kidnapping scam

‘I never doubted for one second it was her,’ mother says
www.independent.co.uk www.independent.co.uk
 
The text message created an instant surge of panic.

“Freemsg: Chase, Did you attempt wire transfer amount of $7500. Reply Y if recognized, Or NO to stop fraud.”

For Ohio resident Kelli Hinton, this was the beginning of a hard-to-detect scam in which a man posing as a Chase Bank fraud investigator ended up clearing two of her bank accounts of $15,000.

And Hinton is hardly alone. Her nightmare is part of a huge surge in sophisticated text message-based scams that now affect hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.

Sometimes called “smishing”, short for SMS phishing, the scams trick mobile phone users out of their money using messages purporting to be from a familiar person or company that can be almost impossible to tell from the real thing.

While phishing texts have been around for years, data shows they are on the rise. In 2022 US phone users got 157bn robotexts , or more than 440 a person – an 80% increase from 2021, according to the company Robokiller, which offers a scam-blocking service for cell phones. And last year, more than 321,000 Americans reported having fallen for a phone-based smishing scam, with total losses of over $326m, according to data from the US Federal Trade Commission.

The problem has become so bad that last month the federal government demanded that mobile phone companies start blocking spam texts, in what the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) described as its first of several planned steps to combat the rampant phone fraud.

Scammers use an unending variety of creative approaches to try to trick people out of their money.

Some pretend to offer jobs, only to ensnare people into transferring money out of their bank accounts for job supplies.

Others pretend to be contacting the wrong person in the hopes of striking up a conversation, which may then lead to long exchanges that get the phone user to open their wallet.

Another common scam involves gleaning the name of a person’s boss from a directory or website, then impersonating that boss and asking for a favor that involves purchasing gift cards.

The scammer then asks for photos of the back of the gift cards, saying they’re needed for reimbursement. This, in turn, allows the thieves to cash the cards and make off with the funds.

Many scam texts pretend to be from a familiar company, like Amazon, UPS or a popular bank.

In Hinton’s case, the scam started with a text message on 3 January, claiming to check whether she had authorized $7,500 being wired out of her account. She hadn’t even had time to respond, before a polite man, identifying himself as “Simon from Chase fraud investigation”, called from a phone number that appeared to exactly match the 800 number on the back of her bank card.

He told her that a scammer had accessed her account and she needed to take prompt action to stop the money being transferred out. Meanwhile, more texts were arriving, announcing more unauthorized wire transfers coming from her account.

The professional-sounding scammer kept her on the phone for over an hour and, at one point, told her she needed to reset her bank credentials and password in order to stop the fraud. This reset of her password apparently allowed the scammers to authorize wire transfers out of her account…….

www.theguardian.com

Gone in seconds: rising text message scams are draining US bank accounts

Sophisticated robotexts are bombarding Americans’ phones, costing unsuspecting people millions of dollars
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
I get scam texts fairly regularly. I just hit the delete and report as junk button. I got a text not long ago saying to go to this link to pay my bill for a doctor visit. I was expecting a bill, and it looked legit, but I deleted it anyway. If you want my money, send me a bill in the mail. And that's what happened a week later.
 
It’s going to get to the point that you need to set up code words with your family if they call in an emergency
==================

This year, I was sent a link to a video of myself, passionately explaining why I had invested into a new technology company. In the video I spoke enthusiastically about the great faith I had in the company’s leadership and encouraged others to try the service out. The problem was, I had never met the company nor used its product.

It looked and sounded like me, right down to the fading Mancunian accent. But it wasn’t. It was an AI-generated fake used in a business pitch and designed to wow me into investing in a company. Far from impressing me, it left me concerned about the myriad ways these new tools could be used for fraudulent purposes.

From data breaches to phishing attacks, where fraudsters trick people into sharing passwords or sending money to an unknown account, cybercrime is already one of the most commonly experienced and pernicious forms of crime in the UK.

In 2022, the UK had the highest number of cybercrime victims per million internet users in the world. In part we are victims of our own digital success. Britons have been fast to adopt new technologies such as online shopping and mobile banking, activities that cybercriminals are keen to exploit.

As AI becomes more sophisticated, these criminals are being given even more ways to trick us into believing they are someone they are not.

Many of the impressive advancements in human imitation are being developed on our doorstep. The company ElevenLabs has built and released a tool that can almost perfectly replicate any accent, in any language. You can go on its website and have its pre-trained models read out statements using the fast-talking New Yorker “Sam” or the more mellow, midwestern tones of “Bella”.

The London-based company Synthesia goes further. Its technology allows customers to create new sales people. You can generate a photorealistic video of a synthetically generated person speaking in any language, pitching your product or providing customer support. These videos are incredibly lifelike, but the person doesn’t exist.

ElevenLabs make the rules about use, and misuse, of their technology very clear. They explicitly state that “you cannot clone a voice for abusive purposes such as fraud, discrimination, hate speech or for any form of online abuse”. But less ethical companies are launching similar products at pace as well.…….

How will you now know, when you get a video call from your teenage child asking for emergency gap-year funds, that it is really them?

How should you respond to an agitated voicemail that sounds like it’s from your boss demanding you wire the company funds, when you can no longer be sure it is really them? These questions are no longer hypotheticals.…….



www.theguardian.com

Imagine your child calling for money. Except it’s not them – it’s an AI scam | James Wise

Fraudsters are being given more sophisticated ways to trick us into believing they are someone they are not, says James Wise, a trustee of the thinktank Demos
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon Prime Day is here. And, once again, experts are warning consumers of scams.

Scams targeting online shoppers — often by impersonating companies like Amazon and other major retailers — are nothing new. But phishing attempts increase amid busy spending seen during significant sales events — from Black Friday to, of course, Prime Day, according to the Better Business Bureau.

“This is a huge moment on the retail calendar,” Josh Planos, vice president of communications and public relations at the Better Business Bureau, told The Associated Press. “And because of that, it represents an enormous opportunity for a scammer, con artist or even just an unethical business or organization to capitalize on the moment and separate folks from their hard-earned money.”

Prime Day, a two-day discount event, kicks off on Tuesday and runs through Wednesday. In guidance published last week, the Better Business Bureau reminded consumers to watch out for lookalike websites, too-good-to-be-true social media ads, unsolicited emails or calls and more near Prime Day and other sales events this month beyond Amazon’s.

Scott Knapp, director of worldwide buyer risk prevention at Amazon, identifies two scams that the company has seen in recent years around Prime Day: Prime membership and order confirmation hoaxes.

Last year, for example, people reported getting unsolicited calls or emails saying that there was something wrong with their Prime membership. Then, they were asked for payment information, like a credit card, and sometimes login credentials as well, Knapp explained — adding that Amazon “or any reputable business” wouldn’t ask for those details in that way.

Urging consumers to confirm an order they didn’t place is also a common tactic at this time of year, he adds. Scammers might pick something expensive, like a smartphone, to get attention — and again ask for payment information or send a malicious link.


“We sell a lot of stuff and people know the (Amazon) name,” Knapp told the AP. “Bad actors try to take advantage of that.”

Of course, there’s loads of additional scams out there — it’s hard to identify more specifics for this year’s Prime Day before it begins. Still, experts add, scams will often iterate year after year.……….

apnews.com

Be wary of scams as Amazon Prime Day kicks off, experts warn

Amazon Prime Day is here. And, once again, experts are warning consumers of scams. Scams targeting online shoppers — often by impersonating companies like Amazon and other major retailers — are nothing new.
apnews.com apnews.com
 

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