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Re: New scam, pretty good.

Author: Ralph Katz
Date: 2021-02-27 20:37

These kind of things are very common. Anything that mentions Gift Cards or PayPal is liable to be suspect. They prey on grandparents a lot.

4 years ago or so, major corporation Chief Financial Officers started getting e-mails spoofing their CEO's asking for multi-million dollar wire transfers. A number actually started the wire transfer process before thinking, "wait, shouldn't I check this out first?"

15 years ago, an ISP owner in Michigan told me his servers got multiple port scans every minute, 24x7, and it has to be worse now. All it takes is one server without up-to-date patches, and the hacking starts.

My identity was stolen 4 years ago, but I noticed right away because we had never, ever seen two days in a row without any USPS mail. I went to our local Post Office and had the mail forward order cancelled, but they wouldn't tell me where it was forwarded to. Then the credit cards they had applied for started coming in. If this happens to you, cancel the credit cards first - they paid for my permanent credit freeze with credit reporting agencies Experian, Equifax and and TransUnion. Then I setup PIN's with all three.

We were in our 60's and don't need more credit, so things have been relatively good. But many seemingly simple things require credit checks, so I open my Equifax account for a day and then close it again. This has only happened a couple of times.

Personal computers and the internet were not initially designed with any particular security in mind, therefore most existing security really just exists as an after-thought. So you should be very careful with every e-mail and text, and on every website.

But also, many apps, that have attracted 10's of millions of users, were really written by amateurs, such as the one that allowed archiving all those videos of insurrectionists in the US Capitol. Facebook is another good one that, at least originally, could be readily hacked.

You don't need to be paranoid, just really, really careful.

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New scam, pretty good. new

Mark Charette

2021-02-24 19:50