Gird your coins: A phishing tsunami is smashing into America The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has put Americans on red alert following a massive increase in reports of phishing and malware attacks targeting taxpayers. The US tax authority said in an advisory that so far this year, reports of email and SMS-based scams were up 400 per cent and can be expected to continue in the build …
If an email or SMS message is claiming to be from a government agency, its obviously a fake; governments are too incompetent to use any technology made after 1965; seeing as no politicians seems to know how one of those new-fangled 'comm-poot-ors' work and all.
I worked as a contractor for the Senate for a while, there are far too many senators that have their staff print all their emails so that they can read it, and then have their secretary dictate a response. I personally knew of 5 of them that did that and I heard about several others from the other IT folk while I worked there. One of them is a prominent member of several computer/telecom related committees...
Here is one which just arrived in my inbox:
I am a financial consultant in UK;I am contacting you in respect of my late client fund 12.7 Million British Pounds deposited with a bank here in UK which is about to be confiscate by his bank/British government after many years unclaimed; I decided to contact you because you bears the same last name/surname with him . . .
Who responds to these things?
You should be rest assured that this is 100% risk-free also free from any scam/fraudulent act - Yours Sincerely Mr.Noel Mcgrath
Oh, well in that case . . .
Who responds to these things?
Stupid people, not to put too fine a point on it.
Emails like this are not just targetted at those ignorant of finance or computing (for example), but are also written so clumsily that it's more likely that only less intelligent people will respond. This makes it easier for the conmen to draw them in to the next stage of their scam. And into the stage after that, and so on.
It's fucking evil, regardless.
Much like the MS Support calls. Possibly the same call center in Pakistan or India. Usually starts with something like "the sheriff is on the way to arrest you unless you settle your debt with us, the IRS immediately." Followed by them asking for my name and SSN. My response is usually, "ok... tell Bob to come on by, the coffee is on and I'm running down the street to the donut shop" and hanging up.
There's other responses depending on my mood, like screaming, crying, much angst and then after 10-15 minutes of this along with repeatedly asking "why?" I give a fake name and Richard Nixon's SSN.
One I like that has resulted before now in screaming habdabs from the other end is "What would your mother say if she knew you had taken to crime for a living?", a variant of which is "If your mother in law knew what you are doing she would demand her daughter's dowry back". I suspect that a few of the helots don't even realise that they are involved in a criminal scam.
I nearly fell for one. I was dozing on the sofa and answered a call which sounded exactly like BT's automated tele-voice. It said that unless I paid my bill promptly I would be hit with a late payment charge. I got as far as tapping in my phone number when I woke up and realised that I had already paid my bill the week before.
I suppose it's easy to record lots of BT's automated responses and edit them to create any conversation you like.
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