Adam Jones 00:00
Preston, do you hear that? Hear what the winds of social media change are blowing
Preston Snyder 00:07
a show that’s not our door.
Adam Jones 00:09
It might be our door actually, in all seriousness, but as much as Elon Musk is buying Twitter, we’re actually going to talk about something a little bit more important.
Preston Snyder 00:17
Scams. Scams
Adam Jones 00:25
ended up being said with Twitter being purchased by Elon Musk, there’s so much happening right now that even if we tried to do a show about that, odds are by tomorrow, it is outdated and silly,
Preston Snyder 00:36
sort of waiting for the dust to settle a little bit on that before we deep dive it but we are formulating our opinions, we do have some things to say about it. But later,
Adam Jones 00:47
yep, later. And if you do want to hear some of our thoughts, and just kind of progress and updates, I am going to be doing a little bit more tick tock action. So go ahead and follow us over on tick tock because that’s the platform to do those cool, hot short takes.
Preston Snyder 01:02
Absolutely. But today, we thought it was really important to talk about scams in particular. And you were especially prompted to do this.
Adam Jones 01:15
We live in a fairly small community. And I’ve actually run into about four people that have either been scammed or been actually pretty deep into the script of a scam. And so we did want to talk about that. One of the major things that was really surprising to me, Preston is it looks like they’re actually targeting widows. Oh, yeah. Widows within like the last six months, which I I’ve never heard that. I’ve never seen that. As I’m talking to people, though, that visited and just like internet hearsay, like, this is real. This is I’m interacting and engaging with these people on a pretty regular basis. And these are scams that have been around for years and years. Like Preston, do you have your watch Kitboga. Yes,
Preston Snyder 02:00
he’s beautiful, shameless.
Adam Jones 02:02
Absolutely. Absolutely. Kitboga and our YouTuber on the platform, he basically just like does voice changing and walks people through the scam, while kind of exposing the script, exposing the high pressure, exposing the tactics, and really what a scammer is trying to do in the moment, but he’ll sit and do this for like hours with the scammers. And the number one, the scam that we’ve been seeing is the Amazon scam press. And have you seen that one before?
Preston Snyder 02:31
I’m familiar with it. But I haven’t heard the script.
Adam Jones 02:35
So typically, they’ll say, Hey, we’re calling from Amazon, your account either has purchased a like new phone, a new Apple Watch, or basically a high priced item that’s over 600 $800. Or they’ll say, Hey, someone is made a fake profile of you using your information, and is buying items with your information. And so they kind of come at it from like a fraud prevention angle. And typically what they’ll do is they’ll say, hey, you know, we’re with Amazon, this has happened, this has occurred, let me remote into your computer to kind of confirm and see if people still have access to your computer, then they’ll pull up like a command prompt. And really, it’s just a black box like the hacker box. And they’ll have stuff fake scans running in the background to fool you into believing that, oh, yes, your IP ports are exposed to everybody. There’s a lot that we can dive into. There’s a lot of little nuances. But at this point, I would say if they do ask for access into your account or into your computer, just say no, hang up the phone and call Amazon back. Because I promise you, Amazon doesn’t call you
Preston Snyder 03:47
the responsibility for whether or not high priced items have been purchased, unfortunately, is on you. Amazon will not call you there, there are very few instances outside of like, maybe an issue with a delivery that’s happened that someone from Amazon will reach out to you over the phone. If anything, it’s going to be an email. However, email isn’t necessarily safe either. Outside of a regular Confirmation of order email, odds are you won’t even be flagged for suspicious activity. The most interesting thing with a scam like this is that if you just step back, there’s no reason Amazon too, is heartless as it sends care.
Adam Jones 04:37
Yeah, no, they’re excited when you spend that much money in the platform. They’re ecstatic. And so they’re not going to reach out. That’s just not who they are. That’s not their policies. The other one that we see a fair amount is the security scam. Well, the common methods is what’s called a ringless voicemail. They will drop a voicemail onto your mobile phone or into your home phone, without the phone ever ringing once. Now there is some FCC stuff going through where they might start regulating this. But currently it is not regulated. And so they can drop as many voicemails as they want into as many phones as they want. And they’ll say, Hey, you have a security subscription, when you bought your new computer that is about to expire, we’d like to renew. And they will try and do like a $400, renew. And you know, there’s, there’s upsells, they’ll do upsells for like 750, or $1,500 lifetime security package for as long as you live, regardless of the computer. And there’s variations of that script, each call center will have a slight variation for what seems to work. And that being said, if you are in the process of the security scam, one of the big issues that you’ll run into are kind of big red flags, because they will pass you on to a secondary support. So they’ll have someone who runs all the phone calls. And then they’ll have a closer and they’ll have a closer hop on the line. And that’s a very, I struggle to say a specialized person. But it’s someone who is really good at pushing the high pressure environment, the emotional poll ties. And it’s really hard in the moment to be aware, but the moment you get pushed on to a second tier support that you should know, you should know that that is a scam. At that point.
Preston Snyder 06:31
Yeah. And even outside of these there, there are a lot of spunk funds, specific ones that take a lot of different and familiar forms. The IRS is a huge one. If somebody calls you saying from the year they’re from the IRS, like, there’s a lot of ways you can push back because it’s public information versus private know. And anything from the IRS you should receive like a letter in the mail. Yeah, something big is happens. Odds are no then you’re not qualified for an audit, because it’s not how they run audits, you’re not gonna get a random phone call from a person. Medicare. That’s one that we’ve gotten in our office a lot recently. Hey, are you interested in Medicare support, there’s no information. There’s no backlogs, not even an introduction of a department or who they’re with, which is the big one is like doesn’t vaguely say who they are. But if you press a little bit, either they’ll have a fake identity. That is something that doesn’t make any sense. Or they won’t answer at all. That’s a red flag. I’ve just Okay, are you interested in additional Medicare benefits. Nobody in our office, I think qualifies for any list, which is another, it’s like you didn’t do your research. But no interesting one that we’ve dealt with a while ago. And it does tend to come back into circulation every now and then is Google My Business is one we dealt with awhile ago, where they were upselling people into these packages are basically like a standard web design package. But the main central feature was while we’ll pay you to finish up, setting up your Google My Business Profile. That is something you can do on your own for $0. So if you’re paying $400 to make sure that your Google My Business is taken care of. You may have been swindled a little bit outside of that. One of the last things I wanted to cover is that phone call is rampant right now. I think there’s now this culture of people don’t really answer their phones, because a lot of time it is spam. But email is just as dangerous, if not more so in some cases. And our special word of the day we’ll end with is called phishing, not the fun recreational fishing of which we many people enjoy. But the p h i s h fishing, where people will email you they will send you a Okay click this link to check your status or, Hey, we’re concerned very similar themes of your Amazon account has been compromised. Click on this link to verify
Adam Jones 09:03
Yeah, till to login and verify because they need they need that username and password. Amazon has been having that happen. PayPal has had to happen Citrix has we’ve seen a couple of those come through. And they will look they’ll use the PayPal and Amazon branding to look super legitimate. Usually if you hover on the email address and the name usually is going to be PayPal misspelled or pay pal.id There’s a lot of ways that they’ll try and cover it. But if you’re vigilant with it, you should be able to spot the difference visually. The other issue that we’ve seen, and I say we’d have seen is organizations that have been hacked and have had a basically an email and password breached and so then you have a third party person in the email. Now they might not know Do anything immediately, sometimes they will wait. But then, when the right time comes, they’ll send out a blast saying, Oh, hey, actually, go ahead and I made this report for you, my customer coming from Bob. Go ahead and click on it log into the portal and you can view your report. There’s some variations to it. But there are some times that a hack will occur. And an organization might not know it for a while. Linus Tech Tips actually just featured this. I think within the last two weeks, he actually had a pretty major one that was exactly that there was a bad someone had hacked into, there was like a landscapers email account, and waited for the right opportunity in the business deal saying, Great, let’s move forward. wire the money to this account. And it came from Bob at landscaping company. And you’ve been emailing with Bob, and they just slid it in at the right time. That one’s a hard one. Like that’s not necessarily like you can do all the vigilance and that one’s a tough one. And thankfully, your banks, local law enforcement can help. For us this really is a PSA This is on our hearts because we live in a community where we care about our people. And if we are seeing this, we want to alert people that you need to be careful,
Preston Snyder 11:19
and we care about you too. So immediate action step especially like right now if you know are aware of yourself, or anybody that has encountered any kind of these scams, you need to change your password on whatever it is and have that specific password anywhere else it appears or anything similar. So, if you have your I love cats 1234 And your I love cats 4567. And it’s everything you use, and you have are like even adjacently involved in an email phishing scam, you need to change your password radically. So, whether it’s write it down, you use a tool like LastPass or one password that generates the stronger passwords for you. We highly recommend that because this stuff is dangerous like that. They can take your data, your identity, bank information, your socials if you’re not careful, like as much as the Internet is a bright joy and a very good use of our time was also very dangerous and can if you’re not careful, it can cause some damage.
Adam Jones 12:21
And that’s for today’s show. I know it’s a little bit different than our usual weekly social. Like I said next week we are going to talk more about the Twitter action that’s occurring. We are excited we have some thoughts. Check us out over on tick tock but feel free on YouTube to please hit subscribe, hit the bell, give us a thumbs up. If you have questions about this. We don’t have all the answers but we can direct you to the places that have all the right answers. So thank you so much and bye
