Ahh tis the season! No not Christmas, that’s still miles away. I’m talking everyone getting sick and still having to deal with online scams while they reach for the tissues. And in the last week both the house has come down with a sickness and I’ve had family reach out with words along the lines of ‘So I think this is a scam…’
It’s cold, power bills to keep warm are high, everyone’s sick and now we’re having to deal with online scams on top of everything else. Who doesn’t love this time of year?
Mark them all down with a sickness
My wife is currently sick with a cold, my daughter has one upped her with a sore throat on top. A couple of suburbs over my nephews have been playing the game of ‘who’s nose is the runniest?’ Meanwhile at work my co host is battling through a cough that appears when the air pressure drops and tonight was to be the third instalment of ‘Thursday night hour walk’ with my great mate Heath… only he’s working his way through covid at the moment. (Ironically we were talking about the latest strain of the dreaded spicy cough during our last walk.)
Yes winter in Australia certainly brings the joy doesn’t it? Ice on the windscreens, coughs and various lurgies and eye watering power bills thanks to trying to combat the cold. Sadly there’s no reprieve from idiots and online scams during this time either – what a wonderful time to be alive!
Firstly: Not a scam, just an idiot.
Oh it’s been a while since I last had to deal with an idiot on Facebook Marketplace, but I know they’re always out there lurking, just waiting for the right time to message me and make my life momentarily more random and interesting.
Like Mitchell here who decided he wanted some of the Xbox One goodies I was selling that had been up for sale for the last five months. Only he decided he didn’t actually want to pay anything for it.
I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve walked past a Lexus showroom and thought ‘Ha, that price is hilarious! I’m just going to walk in and tell them to give it to me for nothing!’
I could have entertained this idiot to try and get somewhere close to the measly tenner I was asking but then I wondered why I would bother when he’s obviously not in the mood to pay anything for something. Suffice to say all Mitchell scored in the end was a block although I’m sure he wandered off wondering what else he could beg for through Facebook Marketplace.
Right then, onto the actual online scams various family members have been dealing with this week!
Online scams: The too cheap to be true ride on
My father in law Baz has both an eye for mechanical excellence and an eye for bargains. Which means when he’s not fixing something (his list of fixed items rivals the great wall of China) he’s usually on the hunt for Facebook marketplace bargains that he can use around the farm. Like a nice condition ride on mower where my brother in law lives for the low price of $500.
However he was savvy enough to realise something might not be on the up and up when he enquired about popping around for a bit of a look before possible handing over his hard earned.
So to help him out I had a look at the ad and also the sellers profile and instantly started my own collection of red flags:
-Her profile had no friends. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Oh and apparently she’d just joined up on Facebook this year. Now even if she had to start up a new Facebook page for whatever reason (lost her password? Got hacked?) the zero friends is super suspicious.
-Also suspicious, there was no location on her profile. Not even a broad ‘In Australia.’
-The ‘Can’t look without payment’ clause is a dead giveaway that it’s a scam. Ask yourself in your own history of buying anything when you’ve encountered a time that you had to pay money just to view an item you were considering buying? I can’t think of one and I bet you can’t either. Yeah it’s not a thing – don’t fall for fear of missing out by paying for a mythical bargain.
-Finally I reversed image searched the picture in the ad and to quote Jim Cornette, wouldn’t you know who won the pony?
I reported the ad, left a note on the Facebook group that it was a huge scam and later that night it was gone and Baz had wisely saved himself $500. Win!
Online scams – dear mum, I’ve lost my phone!
First the father in law, then the mother. And again I’m happy to see that my paranoia when it comes to dealing with dodgy people online (or in this case on the phone) has spread to my extended family.
Now in Di’s case she is a mother to four kids (and whole heap more grand kids) which means if one of the four sent her a text from a new phone then undoubtedly they’d let her know which child it was! But unless the scammers are doing their homework, they’d have no idea a) what the kids are called b) if the person they were sending it to was actually a mother. There’s a fair chance they’d land on someone who isn’t or could never be.
Also what happened to a simple phone call to your mum when things go south? They’re hoping you don’t think of this either.
This one’s been around for a while but like Hollywood likes to recycle ideas, scammers like to go back to their usual tricks. Suffice to say if you get a message like this one, ring your kids (if you have them) on their actual numbers and don’t be surprised if they have no idea what you’re talking about.
Online scams: There’s a discord pretending to be you
Look, even the most savvy of internet users can get rumbled sometimes as my son found out just yesterday. He spends a lot of time on Discord and unfortunately fell victim to a hacked account (that originally belonged to someone he knew) trying to convince him that there was an account using his name trying to scam and hack others and he had to go through a specific process to prove he wasn’t the one being dodgy.
And that process involved changing his account email and details within three hours before Discord shut him out permanently. In this case the scammers came prepared with a whole heap of made up pictures to fool him and he got led down quite the path before realising something was up. Luckily when he did realise he’d been taken for a ride he switched things back and tightened up his own login security but of course felt pretty rough for falling for it. Reading over the conversations last night I could see how hard they worked on him and as much as I wished they got hit by a self driving empty bus, if anything it’s sharpened up his awareness of online scams in all their shapes and sizes.
The biggest red flag I spotted in this one? The time limit. Not 3 days, he apparently had 3 hours to sort things out and apparently one had already past leaving him with even less time to do what they were asking. It’s that sense of urgency in online scams that makes recipients not pause for a sec and think wait, what’s really happening here?
And what would they have done with his hacked account? Plenty of things. But that’s one less these idiots get to play with.
So stay safe and aware of online scams and if you’ve got the sniffles this time of year, get well soon!