Tag Archives: Fraud

Another Scam Phone Prefix: +4487

Posted on by The Old Wolf

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Image from Ontario Ministry of Consumer Services

This one was new to me. It’s long been known that phone numbers which begin with 4470, or 44 070, are designed to look like United Kingdom numbers, but which actually forward to anywhere in the world – usually Nigeria or some other rat-infested internet cafe where scammers tend to cluster.

Last week I got this cute email from a potential “lover:”

Good day my friend, my name is Priya Kadam .I’m 26 years old girl lives in England, but originated from India, I was impressed when I saw your profile and I will like to establish a long lasting relationship with you. Once again ,I am the only daughter of Mr. Nilesh Kadam, my parents are late, and I am living alone , for the past 3 years and life is not easy with me since the painful exit of my late parents in a Fatal car accidents which took their life’s instantly.
But all is now in the past, as I have moved on, and I am grateful that I survive and made it at last.

So to cut the whole story shot, I am very willing to relocate with you, if only you can treat me well and as woman and be my man forever, as I have made all the fortune to sustain our lives with our un-born children, if we invest wisely.

I had a deal with some white dude here, which I was able to stole some huge sum of money from them[1] and now they are in search of me, and they cannot find me because I am in hide out as I am writing this mail to you, but I assure you nothing will happen to me because, them don’t know my country of origin , they thought I am from Lebanon,

So I have in my possession, cool cash of ? 1.5Million Great British Pounds with me, and I am ready to invest it with you, if I am convinced that you will not betray me or treat me bad.
Below attachment are my photos for your identification and I will also like to see yours, in case you are interested with my proposal.

Have a nice day sweetie and waiting to hear from you
Miss Priya Kadam
Cell phone.+448712379440

Beside the usual “Lonely Heart” scam, take note of the phone number: Prefixes like +4487 or +44 087 are also national link prefixes that forwards anywhere in the world. These numbers are not in the UK.

The quantity of human refuse who wants your money and who will stop at nothing to get it is growing at a frightening rate. Be careful out there.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1] In addition to the horrid grammar, notice that this “lady” freely admits that she is a thief, and wants you to be complicit in her crimes in exchange for access to her money. How stupid or desperate would you have to be to fall for something so patently false?

Hackers around the world

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Holy Mother of Mogg!

I don’t use my Hotmail account very often, but I keep it around for a few odd reasons. I just saw a post at reddit and thought I’d better check my own account.

Hackers

And that’s only the last few days!

Folks wonder why their email accounts get hacked; with this kind of assault, if you don’t have a strong password, it’s very likely your email account will be taken over by some random hqiz-eater and used for sending out spam or malware.

Takeaway: Use Strong Passwords! In some ways it may be like keeping honest people honest, but for the average user, it’s usually the best form of prevention. As for the bottom-feeding scumbags, by the sacred skull of Mogg’s grandfather, may the universe reward them according to their works.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Practice Safe Computing!

Posted on by The Old Wolf

This can’t be stressed enough, or repeated often enough. Just got an email today in my business account that looked like this:

Dear Sir/Madam,

The attached payment advice is issued at the request of our customer.

The advice is for your reference only.

Yours faithfully,
Global Payments and Cash Management
HSBC

***************************************************************************

This is an auto-generated email, please DO NOT REPLY. Any replies to this email will be disregarded.

***************************************************************************
Security tips

1. Install virus detection software and personal firewall on your
computer. This software needs to be updated regularly to ensure you
have the latest protection.
2. To prevent viruses or other unwanted problems, do not open
attachments from unknown or non-trustworthy sources.
3. If you discover any unusual activity, please contact the remitter of
this payment as soon as possible.
***************************************************************************

*******************************************************************
This e-mail is confidential. It may also be legally privileged.
If you are not the addressee you may not copy, forward, disclose
or use any part of it. If you have received this message in error,
please delete it and all copies from your system and notify the
sender immediately by return e-mail.

Internet communications cannot be guaranteed to be timely,
secure, error or virus-free. The sender does not accept liability
for any errors or omissions.
*******************************************************************
“SAVE PAPER – THINK BEFORE YOU PRINT !

ttcopy.zip

Unfortunately, far too many people will be stung by a generic sounding email like this. “Wow, someone sent me money!” will be the initial response, and they’ll happily unzip and execute the attached “payment notice.”

Unfortunately that attached file is not a payment notice, but an executable file (a program) which will infect your computer with malware, adware, spyware, and heaven knows what else; turn your machine into part of a robotic network (a botnet) for spreading spam and viruses, search for passwords and sensitive financial data, encrypt all your files and demand a ransom to unlock them (this is a particularly nasty one), or any number of other unholy things.

cryptolocker

I’m going to shout here: NEVER OPEN EMAIL ATTACHMENTS FROM PEOPLE YOU DO NOT KNOW AND TRUST!111

If WordPress supported blinking text, I’d use that obnoxious tag too, just to make sure I had your attention.

Be especially wary of any file that ends in “.exe”. This is one of the basic rules of safe computing, but far too many people don’t know about it. One of the worst things Microsoft ever did was to suppress the display of file extensions by default, assuming people didn’t care or wouldn’t understand what they are for. As a result, far too many people are simply ignorant of the dangers inherent in clicking email attachments that could be programs. All they would see in the above message would be “ttcopy.”

Notice the ironic security warning in the body of the email itself: “To prevent viruses or other unwanted problems, do not open
attachments from unknown or non-trustworthy sources.” This is misdirection at its finest; people will be grateful for the warning, if they even bother to read it, and happily execute the malicious payload.

The executive summary here: NEVER OPEN EMAIL ATTACHMENTS FROM PEOPLE YOU DO NOT KNOW AND TRUST!

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Hawking snake oil to the elderly

Posted on by The Old Wolf

I still get mail addressed to my mother on occasion; she left this world last year at the age of 94. But she was getting ads like this regularly for about 15 years before she finally caught the bus, and as time went on (before we took over her financial affairs) she ordered lots of products, either on her own or at the insistence of skilled but sleazy telephone salesmen. As a result, she ended up on every sucker list out there.

If you have older loved ones, please make sure they throw solicitations like this into the trash, even if they come from places as respectable as the Mayo Clinic – they’re not above drumming up business in the elder sector, and there are thousands of others who are looking for a chance to separate mentally-diminished but resource-wealthy seniors from their incomes, savings, and pensions.

The letter above is pure crap. The company makes a glaring mention of the FDA and implies that said agency has endorsed their product. This is a load of hqiz: the actual FDA letter is here, and if you read it you’ll see that the agency is clearly saying that evidence for effectiveness of phosphatidylserene as a memory-enhancer is feeble at best, although the product is Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) based on the information provided to the FDA by the company involved, with the additional disclaimer that the FDA has not done its own research. They went on to say, “FDA continues to believe that the science provides very limited and preliminary evidence sufficient for qualified health claims about phosphatidylserine and reduced risk of these conditions.FDA continues to believe that the science provides very limited and preliminary evidence sufficient for qualified health claims about phosphatidylserine and reduced risk of these conditions“.

Now don’t get me wrong; I’m a long-time proponent of optimal nutrition and there is a lot of science out there about vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other co-factors that do benefit health. What I object to is outlandish claims and weasel words from companies looking to make a quick buck from the unsuspecting and uneducated, and there are far too many of those out there.

If you’re looking for things to help your loved ones, be sure to do your due diligence. Research as much as you can on the product involved, and make sure you’re not buying smoke and mirrors, which is what 90% of the stuff being marketed out there really is.

The Old Wolf has Spoken.

Blog Spam

Posted on by The Old Wolf

I love the way WordPress filters out spam comments automatically – they have a strong system (Akismet) and thus far nothing has slipped through. In the last few days alone, I’ve accumulated the following shill “comments”:

  • Perfume sales – 1
  • Brazilian email marketing lists – 6
  • Sex related or Viagra – 4
  • SEO – 1
  • Scout underwriters (whatever the hqiz that is) – 1
  • Translation Services – 1
  • Swedish refrigerators – 1

Many of the comments are written to look like real comments from real people, but contain embedded links or additional commercial text. An example: “This is a nice site over here. I think I’ll visit your website more if you post more of this kind of specific information. Many thanks for posting this information.” But the comment was posted by a sex chat website. These comments are automatically filtered and no one ever sees them; in your face, spammers.

It just blows my mind how many people out there ignore all conventions of decency when it comes to pushing their product. Simply astonishing. Discussion forums are also frequently the target of what are called “spambots” – programs that register on a forum with usernames like “bksjwevrruz”, exclusively for the purpose of posting spam. Even if the comment posted is innocuous, somewhere in the username or user profile is a link back to the spammer’s website which a crawler will pick up and count as a linkback, thereby raising the host site’s ranking (or so they hope.)

It’s a jungle – as Quaritch said about Pandora, “Out there beyond that fence every living thing that crawls, flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes.” Except on the internet, the eyeballs they want are clicks on their pages, so they can get your money, steal your personal data, or infect your computer with malware.

Be careful out there.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

No, you didn’t win this. No, you can’t have it. No.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

DEAR,

MY NAME IS GENERAL MARTINS TANJUL. I AM THE DEPOSED MAGNATE OF PETROCO IN LAGOS, NIGERIA, AND I NEED YOUR HELP IN MOVING THE AMOUNT OF $US 205 MILLION IN CASH OUT OF MY STORAGE VAULT TO YOUR COUNTRY…

So goes about every scam letter from the Lads from Lagos, often accompanied by pictures like the one above. For some strange reason, people continue falling for these mind-bendingly absurd emails; if they didn’t, the boys would give up their trade and find some other way to separate suckers from their money.

The photo above actually does represent about $205,000,000 and was seized as part of the biggest cash-drug bust in history, somewhere in Mexico City.

Yeah. So if you weren’t sure, it’s a scam. It’s always a scam. Any email from anyone you don’t know, where the subject is money, is a scam.

Be careful out there.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Combatting Elder Fraud

Posted on by The Old Wolf

A buddy of mine in the UK linked to this cartoon, which despite being humorous also points out a very real danger for the elderly:

2012-02-24-ScamArtist

(Click the image to see the full-size cartoon)

My own mother, go ndéanai Día trocaire uirthi (Irish for “may God have mercy on her”), was victimized unmercifully by fraudsters, and lost substantial amounts of money to these miserable wastes of human cytoplasm. As a result, I was moved to put together the Sweepstakes Fraud Factsheet, as this was the kind of operation that caused her the biggest problems.

Be aware that these solicitations, while causing minimal financial loss themselves, are typically bait for larger operations. Once a victim has responded, they’ve not only lost $19.95, or however much they send for one of these worthless reports, but they are now on an ever-more-widely-circulated “pigeon list,” and can expect floods of additional solicitations and personal calls from advance-fee criminals.

This is only one of innumerable ways that the scum-suckers of the earth target the elderly; disreputable telemarketers will sell anything to anyone who is willing to give out a credit card number, and many of these spurious sales also result in recurring charges to bank accounts and credit cards.

Moral: Be careful yourselves, and if you have elderly loved ones, especially ones who are becoming senescent, do all you can to take charge of their finances or appoint guardians with power of attorney before the douchebags get their foot in the door. The FTC has a raft of additional information which lists the most common scams and how to protect yourself and your families.

The Old Wolf has spoken.