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Saturday 17 September 2022

So many scams



Every now and then, Mrs H receives one of those Apple Pay scam text messages on her iPhone which says - "Apple Pay has been suspended on your device". Of course, it includes a link for mugs to click where the supposed problem can be fixed.

The biggest scam clue is that Mrs H has never set up Apple Pay, but of course these are scattergun scams. Fool a small percentage and presumably the scam is worthwhile. 

Scam texts and calls can be reported to Ofcom, but still they come. I'm sure the number of scams has increased over the past few years. I blame climate change. Or is it Brexit?

9 comments:

DiscoveredJoys said...

Nah, it's just the ubiquity and cheapness of technology making spam almost free to send and resulting money easy to gather.

As an example of the differences from the past... you hardly ever see any children asking for a 'penny for the guy'.

Sam Vega said...

I've only been scammed once before. I needed to renew my driving licence, and clicked on a link that looked very much like the government one, but which renewed the licence while charging a fee. Luckily my wife spotted it, and they refunded the money when I cancelled it. Obviously, it relies on people not bothering to check.

I am currently deleting slews of email messages from my friend Steve. I'm suspicious about them because he was never that keen on emails, and he died in 2017.

Woodsy42 said...

I have been getting ones claiming to be from Marbles. A recorded message 'problem with your card' then asking for my date of birth to confirm who I am. Since I hang up at that point I don't know what else they want to ask. The 3 digit security no is a favourite I believe as that allows use of the card for online purchases. The difficulty is that cards do get hacked, Mrs recently had a genuine call from her card co. because the card security people picked up an unusual purchase and queried if it was her. It wasn't, yet the card hasn't ever been out of her possession or used in an ATM.

Sackerson said...

I blame the teachers. If you couldn't read you wouldn't fall for any of it.

A K Haart said...

DJ - yes, unfortunately that's the problem, it's cheap and easy.

Sam - our scam emails have eased off, but texts have picked up. I suppose that reflects a change in popular messaging. Can't you just block the Steve emails?

Woodsy - tempting fate to say this, but we don't have card problems, although we hardly ever use them other than in places we use regularly. Maybe that makes a difference.

Sackers - teachers can't win. If they manage to inspire a fascination with language, they risk being responsible for producing the professional persuaders of tomorrow.

Scrobs. said...

My latest is a text from a fake Evri number, asking for a small sum to allow delivery.

The last one woke me up at 12.45 am...

dearieme said...

We had money stolen from a credit card about twenty years ago. The card company phoned to ask whether we'd been out of the country recently. "No." Then they asked me to confirm that I hadn't bought a thousand pounds worth of jewellery in Sri Lanka.

The only recent use of that card had been at a nearby filling station. We asked around - apparently it was notorious for the crime. But how to avoid the problem when many local filling stations were apparently owned, or at least operated, by the same extended family of crooks? We started paying with cash.

As for scammers by phone and email: I imagine that someday one of us will fall for one. I'm tempted to try to swap utilities to minor companies. Often the scammers claim to be from BT or Virgin Media. I guess that few claim to be from Chipping Norton Telecom or Wetwang Gas and Electricity.

A K Haart said...

Scrobs - we get versions of that supposedly from Royal Mail or DPD. I had another Apple Pay one only this morning.

A K Haart said...

dearieme - we had an attempt to use a cloned version of our credit card about twenty years ago. This was when credit cards were handed over to be passed through a mechanical gadget and we suspect it was cloned at a hotel where we'd recently stayed. Someone else had had the same problem after staying at the same hotel.

The scam didn't work as the attempt to use the cloned card was made in Glasgow and we'd just used our card in Derbyshire.