Scams - Phone/Internet

namae

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So what scams are you encountering these days? And where do you suspect the data "leaked" from .....LinkedIN/Yahoo/Facebook/Seeking Arrangement/Other - Office Website?

I am getting a daily call around lunchtime from Colombia - at least that is what the country code indicates? Anyone else getting this call?

Had the "sextortion" email a couple of times recently as well. I wanted to respond that I was wannabe porn star and would be grateful if we could work together on marketing and distribution.
 
Robo-calls. :mad: (And since we’re in Hawaii, we get them a lot of times at 4-5 am :banghead:) at home and at work.:(

And I hate that they mask it so that it looks like the call is coming from a local area code.:mad:
 
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Hmm. I get one or two calls a month on my dedicated office cell phone.
So far, I've never gotten one on my personal phone that I didn't expect.

Usually, it's all in Japanese and if I don't recognize the number, I either don't answer or answer the phone in English which results in an immediate hang-up. I've had a few that tried pretty hard to get me to respond in Japanese and I just explain that this is an 'English only phone service' and just hang up.

Email scams:
One email address that I've used on public sites has gotten swept up on the extortion scam:
"We installed malware on your PC and we recorded you via your camera doing some naughty things, you have some interesting tastes for sure!"
They want some amount of bitcoin and they will 'delete' the data. (Funny, I have one web camera that stays closed unless I'm using it.... lol)
Those are the emails that include an old password I used over 5-7 years ago.... so it just goes in the spam folder and I move on.

Japanese friends get all sorts of junk calls...
 
I had one of those, but the subject had one of my actual fucking passwords in it so it got my attention a little more than usual. Been monitoring all my important shit but everything is OK so far.
 
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I had one of those, but the subject had one of my actual fucking passwords in it so it got my attention a little more than usual. Been monitoring all my important shit but everything is OK so far.

Yeah, most of the passwords they show you are actually real ones. They've gotten them by hacking some website you have been using and have nothing to do with hacking your computer or anything like that.

If I get one of them I will ask them to provide me with the videos of me doing nasty stuff; would probably like to show them around myself! :D
 
the subject had one of my actual fucking passwords in it

They're using an email address/matched password file that was circulated a while back. I got it a few times, all using passwords from years ago....
 
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One email address that I've used on public sites has gotten swept up on the extortion scam:
"We installed malware on your PC and we recorded you via your camera doing some naughty things, you have some interesting tastes for sure!"
They want some amount of bitcoin and they will 'delete' the data. (Funny, I have one web camera that stays closed unless I'm using it.... lol)
Those are the emails that include an old password I used over 5-7 years ago.... so it just goes in the spam folder and I move on.
Oh yeah, I've gotten that one too. Had a pretty good laugh cause the computers I use don't have cameras, so what they are claiming is impossible.
 
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i put black tape over the cameras of the laptops i own ... if they have one ... the office laptop assigned to me gets the same treatment.
 
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i put black tape over the cameras of the laptops i own ... if they have one ... the office laptop assigned to me gets the same treatment.
I just got a X1 Carbon (6th Gen) over the summer and it has a little door that closes over the camera. Apparently, I care about aesthetics, the tape would drive me nuts. (Previous laptop didn't have a camera though...)
 
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I had been very careful not typing a p/w at any request until I got an email last month from a Yahoo-like email address which said Yahoo was part of OATH and asked me to type the p/w to approve the new terms of use. After stupidly typing my p/w in, I immediately realized that I was phished. I changed my p/w first and then ended up setting up the yahoo account key....I am thinking about buying a Yubikey now.
 
i got phished out of my original IG account by not checking From: email addresses properly.

HW 2FA is good until an unrelated SW update makes it *obsolete*. that shit happened to a Fidesmo (from Ledger) card i owned.
 
I got the password scam sent to me in Japanese without them even putting in my password or anything. They just literally sent a message saying that they broke into my account send money by bitcoin or they’ll release videos since they hacked my computer.
This was a super lazy scammer.
 
Found out that my email/password had been leaked via a LinkedIN breach.

(From Have I Been Pwned: LinkedIN: In May 2016, LinkedIn had 164 million email addresses and passwords exposed. Originally hacked in 2012, the data remained out of sight until being offered for sale on a dark market site 4 years later.)

haveibeenpwned.com is a useful site for running a check on your email accounts.
 
haveibeenpwned.com is a useful site for running a check on your email accounts.
We run this through an API on TAG to identify at-risk accounts. (Name, Email, Password combos) - We get a few hits per month, but it's a good idea to check on your own.

Can't stand LinkedIN personally, glad I dumped that a long time ago.
 
Yesterday I got a "sexploitation" email. They spoofed my email address (so it appeared they sent the email from my own account) and the email was in Japanese ( ..that was a first).

One mistake they made was tell me they had my password. The password they quoted was definitely not one of mine. Idiots. Maybe someone is selling a list of public email addresses with bogus passwords linked to them? Scamming the scammers?

Some of these scammers seem pretty thick. Maybe they would be more successful sending these emails to their friends and family :)
 
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"sexploitation" email
Very common these days.... if you have any email address that's a few years old and has been involved in a data leak, it's likely to get spammed with this kind of nonsense. :(