Friday, July 11. 2008Welcome to the Republic of Poyais☎
Scams will always exist as long as the general population of the world remain stupid and ignorant. I attribute any rise in the number of scams to be directly related to the state of the economy — any increase from the “normal” level of scams usually corresponds directly with any economic uncertainty within the market. Unless you've been living under a rock for the last twelve months, you have surely noticed that there is a bit of a problem with the global economy. If you haven't noticed then you must have at least noticed that scams are on the rise; Ingenious as some of them may be, now is a good time to use your brain. Over the last two weeks, I feel like I'm being bombarded by phone scams. Interestingly none of these seem to be originating from Belgium, but they are quite clever. Even as I write this, I've just received a flash SMS — a type of text message that immediately appears on your phone and does not save itself into memory — from +44 7624 4313, telling me in Dutch that I've been selected to win a 3G phone, and all I have to do is send a message back to a specific four digit number. In this particular example, the number is designated as a pager number Manx Telecom in the Isle of Man. Of course, this could be rubbish depending on where the message originated from. The four digit number they wanted me to respond via is called a “short code”, often used for marketing. Sending messages to these numbers incur significantly high charges, and if the message I received was actually legitimate then it would have mentioned the cost of the SMS, as required by the law. The scam here is simple: Set up a short code in your target country with the highest tariff possible, spam mobile phone numbers in the country with a message urging them to respond via your short code, and finally sit back and watch people throw their money your way. With e-mail spam being so common and recognised now, why do people think that an SMS message from someone you don't know is somehow more legitimate? There is an interesting bit of phone fraud originating in France and gradually spreading to more and more European countries. I've been the target of this for the past two weeks, where every day I receive a phone call from +33 1 70 44 77 90. There's nobody on the line — not even background noise — and I'm definitely not the only one! This scam is particularly interesting because whoever it is leaves their caller ID on. The phone call itself is technically broken, in that they call but they don't completely let the call complete where possible, leaving the line dead if you manage to answer it in time. This ensures that they are not paying for their outgoing calls. In technical terms, they initiate the call with normal signalling but if the call is answered they break the call in such a way that you never really get connected. By calling every day, they make the phone call seem very important, or even urgent, provoking people to call them back to find out what it's all about. By calling them back, you have successfully saved what is undoubtedly a clever yet malicious telemarketing company the cost of a phone call. Interestingly, this must be working successfully for this scam to be running for so many months. My father is being hit by a common scam in Melbourne now too. This scam targets overworked and understaffed small businesses, calling them up and referring to an advertising opportunity that was discussed several months ago. They provide some false ABN information (normally valid, but for some other company), and eventually invoice the company for non-existent advertising in a fictitious publication. Small businesses are often struggling to manage day-to-day business, let alone conversations from many months ago. For the scam artist, this is excellent bait. The final hook is that the “invoice” discretely states that it is optional, falling into a legal grey-area, turning the payment into donation, protecting the scam artist from the ACCC. Has anyone else noticed a rise in scams? If so, what's the most impressive one you've seen lately? Trackbacks
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