In addition to being incredibly busy the last few weeks, I’ve been feeling under attack from persons unknown. It started a few weeks ago, when, out of the blue, I got a call from… myself. Not knowing what was going on, I answered the call, and was told that my phone account was suspended, and that I needed to talk to customer service. It then prompted me to press 1 to pay my bill or press 2 to talk to customer service. Somewhat confused, I pressed 2. It then prompted me to enter my PIN, and it was at that point I hung up and checked my phone company app, which stated everything was fine. I even called my provider, who said they would never call me to tell me that, it would be reflected on the bill, and they would send a letter. Good to know!
A couple of days later, one of my staff came to me with a confused look on her face, and asked if I had emailed her that day. I replied I had not. She then showed me an email in which someone had written her asking (actually more like telling her) to buy $500 in iTunes gift cards.
Of course that person pretending to be me was busy, and couldn’t answer calls (which is funny since I was cleaning rugs, and have no problem talking when I’m cleaning rugs) or texts but could email. I hate email, and I hate texting. I prefer to call, especially on something like that. She emailed the person back saying that she couldn’t do it, she didn’t have $500 to spend and the person she was talking to said it was an emergency and to figure it out. And then to scratch off the foil off the security code and then email the numbers of the cards to them. Fortunately, one of my other staff thought the whole thing sounded fishy, and I was consulted about it. A few minutes after figuring out what was going on, one of my other staff member rushed in, grabbed a credit card, and was starting to run out again. We stopped her and asked her what was going on, and she said she was going to buy gift cards.
While part of me is glad they were trying to figure out how to get through the problem, it is a little disconcerting they didn’t stop to question what was going on. We figured out the email was not from my email, but from someone totally different. I made sure to let my entire staff know I would NEVER ask them to purchase something without first giving them the means to do it. It was a clever attack, that almost worked.
The next attack happened a couple of days ago where some one claimed to be from out of the country, and to have hacked my computer when I allegedly clicked on a porn video. They said they hacked my contacts and would send out a video to all of my contacts of me masturbating if I didn’t pay $450 in Bitcoin to them. Fortunately for me, I know there is no way they had such a video, because nothing in their email could be true. In thinking about it though, that could be an effective phishing scam, due to the overwhelming number of people that do look at pornography, and probably do masturbate. I thought about messing with them a little, but I’m busy enough that I didn’t.
It’s sad to me that people feel they can do this kind of thing. I know my wife’s grandma has been hit with several phone scammers, saying they will fix her computer for money, even though the computer she has is so old and outdated its almost not worth the plastic its made in.
I guess the point of this post is to just spread awareness- there are scammers out there, people who are trying to steal or destroy, and they seem, at least to me, to be getting worse. Be sure to make expectations clear with your staff, and family members, and friends, about what you will and won’t do. It is crucially important, as the most recent scam shows, to stay away from bad or malicious websites. In addition to the destruction pornography can do to you personally, things like embarrassing emails being sent or ransoms being threatened. Watch yourself online, in other words!
DaveGrigsby.com 