I prevented my mom from a hacker who was talking to her on Facebook messenger. It was really creepy because the hacker had assumed the identity of one of her real world friends. The hacker had made a duplicate FB account, using the identity of her friend, so she immediately accepted the friend request. As she was telling us what her friend was saying, she thought it was strange, but she almost fell for the scam. The "friend' was promising large amounts of money from a gov. program. Scary thing though is she was conversing with the scammer via messenger, and she believed it was her friend!!!!!
Once I started thinking about what she was doing, I knew it was a scammer. Then we reported this account to Facebook, and also tracked down the others who had befriended the scammer account. It was really spooky, but after we did all this, Facebook banned them.
I have also not allowed my parents to do anything without me reviewing everything first. I am on the extremely paranoid/cautious spectrum, and i just assume everything is a scam. Having an obsessive-compulsive personality actually comes in handy with security issues.
They are a lot smarter now, because I live by this rule:
Assume everyone is a scammer. Find evidence pointing otherwise. Trust very seldom. Even FB friends can be fake.
That's quite scary. I've seen similar things happen to older people that I know. These people would never have fallen for such scams when they were younger.
It looks like this is just something which happens to us as we get older. Us steemit users wouldn't fall for any scams like this right now, but I wonder if we'll be more vulnerable after we're retired...
Wow that is even more scary than the call centre thing. Do you have any idea what he was trying to do - this sounds a lot more sinister than the usual cold call method?
I think sadly nowadays it is best to assume everyone is a scammer until proven otherwise.
given it was "money from a gov program" they were offering, they were probably the more... dark... kind of scammer.
I imagine they were aiming for full-on identity theft, by getting her to give social security number, bank details, etc... (seeing as government forms need so much information, it would seem "reasonable" to provide it to them)
Right so maybe cloning the identity to take out loans and things, make false papers etc?
Yup, and, being the little malicious monsters that they are, proceed to scam all her friends and family too if they can.
a friend of mine has the same experience as Leah's parents - the worst part is they got to hack her FB and have asked a few of her friends to send money to that hackers account using her FB tsk tsk
modus operandis like this have no souls
It's scary!
.... Having an obsessive-compulsive personality actually comes in handy with security issues.(smiles) it sure dose my dear. am sure you still don't think that steemit is scam..? lol nice comment @stellabelle,this is the fifth comment of yours am reading in various posts and they have been really engaging. hope you don't mind if i follow you.
i never thought steemit was a scam. I did my homework for 2 weeks solid (and slept very little).
abi..is alright dear,was just being funny.