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The victims didn't come forward because they felt so ashamed about falling for the con. This is such an interesting essential part of scams. I guess it's a par

The victims didn't come forward because they felt so ashamed about falling for the con. This is such an interesting essential part of scams. I guess it's a part of human nature. I remember tracking down a phone scam that caught my grandmother once (based out of Montreal) and I eventually got to a point where I discovered that my grandmother had provided a verbal consent over the phone that had kept it just this side of being outright fraud. The scam company played a recording of it for me. I wasn't sure this wasn't fabricated, so I tried to confirm with my grandmother and she was just like, "Well, thanks for all your help, honey, but really this isn't that important. Let's just move on." I recognized how pushing it would just cause her unnecessary pain. So I dropped it and we moved on. Good to know there are people like Felipe around helping to keep things in check. Now when Felipe just lives his life or goes out in the world, he can't help but think everything can be a con, and everybody can be a mark. Yeah, I guess I see the world more or less the same way. And I suppose it makes me a little unusual. Hopefully not too cynical.

mgleason_3 7y ago
I found it so interesting to hear that finding victims was the top impediment to prosecution. The amount of pain and anguish these scammers inflict upon some of our most vulnerable citizens is almost unbearable to think about. I couldn’t help but wonder why the FCC hasn’t required CallerID Verification years ago. Especially in this age where we are all being forced to get RealID cards so that our every move can be monitored...
- dboreham 7y ago
  >I couldn’t help but wonder why the FCC hasn’t required CallerID Verification Because corruption?
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    Because carriers (and thus the FCC since it's in bed with them) profit from delivering these spam calls and authenticated Caller ID would significantly decrease the amount of these calls.
gumby 7y ago
The shame part is huge for elder folks. Not only the feeling "I must be old; I wouldn't have made this mistake when I was younger" (though you might have) but the feeling that others will realize you are losing it. It's bad enough that banks and such are starting to set up arrangements where (adult) kids can intervene to prevent their parents from losing all their savings this way.
rdtsc 7y ago
> This is such an interesting essential part of scams. I guess it's a part of human nature. Absolutely. It happened to my relatives too. The way I found out was I was there visiting and they got a call which I picked it up. It came from what sounded like an Indian person. You see, they wanted to "refund the money" and just needed the bank account details. Aha! I thought, I'll play dumb and pretended to mistype their remote desktop installer's web address and diverted the conversation to random stuff. Eventually they realized I was wasting their time and called me some exotic slang names, I hand't heard before. I am always up for cultural enrichment, so that was fun. Then they started playing this really high pitched sound into earpiece, I guess to "punish" me and trying to hurt my hearing. However, it became less fun later when the relatives told me they had already lost close to $10k with them. They had contacted the bank and the police and apparently the bank refunded them some part of it. But otherwise they hadn't told anyone as they were terribly ashamed. They were professionals, already retired, with advanced degrees, and they felt like they should not have been the ones easily fooled, but they were. So make sure you talk to your older family members, and tell them ahead of time to not be embarrassed if it already happened. Teach them how do respond and how to handle these scammers.
- munificent 7y ago
  > Teach them how do respond and how to handle these scammers. Concretely, the way to respond is this: If you ever get a call that claims to be from business X, tell them "OK, I'll call you back." Then get off the phone, look up the number for X yourself, and call them. If it was really X calling you, you'll get back to where you need to be. If it was a scam, X will tell you they don't know what you're talking about. Never trust that a cold call is from who they say they're from.
  - knowow1 7y ago
    It works in the average situation, but unfortunately there are some huge scams happening(passing unnoticed) in undeveloped countries where somehow the scammers can hijack the number for a certain time frame. If you call the same number the next day the real institution is going to answer, but nobody knows a thing. Apparently, in some cases, they can hijack the phone number of an institution, but only for the specific caller that they are applying the scam. If someone from another context call the same number it goes to where it's supposed to be. It's becoming more normal than ever down here... Happened next to me. We are entering the age of personalized crime, targeted and framed just for you, considering your personality and necessities.
ALittleLight 7y ago
In college I worked at a computer repair center for students. When I was new, and before I knew how to talk around this, some people would describe to me what they were doing when they contracted the malware they were there about - at times being perfectly explicit and specific about what videos, exactly to the title, they were watching when they got malware. I think the layman expected there was some character of a pathologist to my job. Like I would understand or diagnose that they had porno ransomware X on their system and the only solution was to do computer thing Y. In reality, of course, regardless of the malware, I would just help the person back up all the data and configurations we could. Use a virus scanner on the backups, and reinstall their OS. How they got the malware was completely irrelevant, and I actually preferred not knowing. With a bit of experience I learned to preempt any detailed explanations by just stating my plan early and being clear that it didn't matter how they found the malware.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  I would find it fascinating honestly. Maybe I'd throw in some tips on how to avoid reinfection.
avgDev 7y ago
Ha! I feel the same way but I encountered so many con artists. My favorite con artists was actually a dentist and I fell for part of the "con". I guess you could argue if its a con but I feel like it was. I went in for a simple fillings in two teeth, he starts drilling, then tells me I need inlays $800 a piece x 2. Being young and stupid I said, ok. I was so broke at the time, I needed to borrow money to pay. When I came back another customer was fighting with billing. 2nd con that dentist office did was sending bills for bs charges. I got two, but did research and asked for a detailed bill, which never came. A year or two later I start getting pain, and my new dentist is surprised I have inlays in back teeth and has to drill them out because they were done incorrectly. So, yeah....don't pick a dentist based on google reviews and talk about treatment plan before drilling.
- p1esk 7y ago
  So how do you pick a dentist?
  - thiagomgd 7y ago
    Amazon reviews </sarcasm>
  - Tade0 7y ago
    By word of mouth mostly.
    - alxmdev 7y ago
      Absolutely, real-life word of mouth trumps all the algos and search engines. About time more people realize those are business marketing tools, not tools to help you.
    - doctor_eval 7y ago
      I see what you did there.
      - p1esk 7y ago
jansan 7y ago
Long time (maybe twenty years) ago I read about a fascinating scam. The scammers were announcing a totally cool sex toy (maybe early VR, don't remember), but they never intended to deliver. Through clever marketing they managed to find enough potential customers who were asked to prepay a certain amount to finance production of the product (comparable to crowdfunding). When delivery day arrived, the scammers sent out letters to the customers with an apology that something went horribly wrong and the product could not be delivered. The letters included a bank cheque with a full refund, but the cheque said: "Refund for Sex Toy XYZ". As planned from the beginning, most customers were too ashamed to cash the cheque, so the scammers kept most of the money. Legally (?).
- syntheticnature 7y ago
  Sounds like a bit from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=379784 https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=379784
- _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
  This is something which is discussed in Guy Ritchie's _Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels_ anyway.
- jimminy 7y ago
  I don't know if that was a real scam. It was a bit of a throw away joke from the movie, 'Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels'. The guys need to raise money to repay a debt, and one of them presents this idea, which gets tossed out because it's gonna take too long for them to receive the checks.
  - K0balt 7y ago
    It's much, much older than the movie reference. Embarrassing check scams are an old, tried and true scam. They were more popular backnin the days of physical chain letters.
- jansan 7y ago
  I just found that this scam even has an entry on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassing_cheque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassing_cheque
chiph 7y ago
My dad got taken by the "Hello this is Microsoft Support calling" scammers. They quickly got him to approve a remote connection to his machine and then they showed him a random registry entry as "proof" that his machine was infected with a virus. Which they just so happened to have the anti-virus for, for $300. Dad was computer savvy, but by this point he was 80 years old and they flat-out took advantage of him. He had to mail me the machine so I could reload it. Please - teach your parents to just hang up on these clowns. And to kill the browser process when they get popups trying to cause fear & doubt.
- klenwell 7y ago
  > Please - teach your parents to just hang up on these clowns. That was the other thing. It was impossible to get my grandparents to do this. I think I eventually got them to let the answering machine answer and not return calls for messages from anyone they didn't recognize.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    What would be nice is a service that just forwards unknown calls to someone competent.
    - OJFord 7y ago
      Or just blocks them? Because I'd like to think I'm 'someone competent', and on my own phone I only accept (non-personal) calls that I'm expecting, or can see a reason for.
  - redler 7y ago
    Maybe this is a new angle for Google Voice or similar services. Protect vulnerable members of your family with a fail-safe auto-attendant system with approval rules.
    - dwd 7y ago
      It's not fully automatic and I'm sure scammers will come up with new scripts to still trick people into answering. Over time it should allow Google to flag numbers as potentially being a scam, marketing, etc based on other users flagging a caller. Saves Googling for that information which is what I currently do with an unknown number. The only risk is spoofing/false positives putting your number on some blacklist. https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en
willis936 7y ago
Being careful isn’t a bad thing. Whenever sensitive information is involved I google the company to make sure the phone number is actually correct and if it’s a proper employee of the company I will find their listing. If their voice sounds like it doesn’t match their photo to a large degree or I can’t find the employee I will be very apprehensive about giving information and will ask them some questions. If it’s a con they usually give up quick and move onto the next one.
bdowling 7y ago
> my grandmother had provided a verbal consent over the phone that had kept it just this side of being outright fraud. If it was intentionally deceptive or coercive, it was probably outright fraud.
- klenwell 7y ago
  You would hope, right? It's actually a lot of shades of gray. The most astounding part about it was once the scammers had this verbal consent, they check could print a check themselves against my grandmother's account and cash it. We started with my grandmother's bank, WAMU, thinking surely they would cancel or reverse the withdrawal. Nope, they had their fraud department "investigate" and concluded that the withdrawal was legitimate. Blew my fucking mind. I started documenting my efforts to do something about this on a blog and eventually ended up getting contacted by email by a NY Times reporter who was investigating the subject. Well, if you're not ticked off enough by this story, read on: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/business/20tele.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/business/20tele.html My grandmother was lucky in that she was only taken for a couple thousand dollars. But even that could have been extremely tough on her if she hadn't had family around to pitch in to make up the loss.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    > had entered a few sweepstakes that caused his name to appear in a database advertised by infoUSA, one of the largest compilers of consumer information > InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.” > Vast databases of names and personal information, sold to thieves by large publicly traded companies, have put almost anyone within reach of fraudulent telemarketers > Mr. Guthrie’s name first appeared on a list used by scam artists around 2002, after he filled out a few contest entries that asked about his buying habits and other personal information. This is a good argument against the cancer that is advertising, marketing, etc. Even if you truly have nothing to hide, are happy to receive targeted ads and offers, it's just a matter of time before the information falls into the wrong hands and gets used against you.
ptah 7y ago
you should read Iceberg slim's books. he cites a stronger requirement: the victim should be enticed to do/attempt something illegal so if they ever come forward they will incriminate themselves
DoreenMichele 7y ago
I guess it's a part of human nature. I don't think this is true. I have read that most parents use either a shame model or a guilt model to try to keep the kids in line. So most people are brainwashed from an extremely early age to either feel shame or guilt, hide things from authority figures for fear of getting in trouble, etc. That's not actually necessary.

mgleason_3 7y ago

I found it so interesting to hear that finding victims was the top impediment to prosecution. The amount of pain and anguish these scammers inflict upon some of our most vulnerable citizens is almost unbearable to think about. I couldn’t help but wonder why the FCC hasn’t required CallerID Verification years ago. Especially in this age where we are all being forced to get RealID cards so that our every move can be monitored...

dboreham 7y ago
>I couldn’t help but wonder why the FCC hasn’t required CallerID Verification Because corruption?
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  Because carriers (and thus the FCC since it's in bed with them) profit from delivering these spam calls and authenticated Caller ID would significantly decrease the amount of these calls.

gumby 7y ago

The shame part is huge for elder folks. Not only the feeling "I must be old; I wouldn't have made this mistake when I was younger" (though you might have) but the feeling that others will realize you are losing it. It's bad enough that banks and such are starting to set up arrangements where (adult) kids can intervene to prevent their parents from losing all their savings this way.

rdtsc 7y ago

> This is such an interesting essential part of scams. I guess it's a part of human nature. Absolutely. It happened to my relatives too. The way I found out was I was there visiting and they got a call which I picked it up. It came from what sounded like an Indian person. You see, they wanted to "refund the money" and just needed the bank account details. Aha! I thought, I'll play dumb and pretended to mistype their remote desktop installer's web address and diverted the conversation to random stuff. Eventually they realized I was wasting their time and called me some exotic slang names, I hand't heard before. I am always up for cultural enrichment, so that was fun. Then they started playing this really high pitched sound into earpiece, I guess to "punish" me and trying to hurt my hearing. However, it became less fun later when the relatives told me they had already lost close to $10k with them. They had contacted the bank and the police and apparently the bank refunded them some part of it. But otherwise they hadn't told anyone as they were terribly ashamed. They were professionals, already retired, with advanced degrees, and they felt like they should not have been the ones easily fooled, but they were. So make sure you talk to your older family members, and tell them ahead of time to not be embarrassed if it already happened. Teach them how do respond and how to handle these scammers.

munificent 7y ago
> Teach them how do respond and how to handle these scammers. Concretely, the way to respond is this: If you ever get a call that claims to be from business X, tell them "OK, I'll call you back." Then get off the phone, look up the number for X yourself, and call them. If it was really X calling you, you'll get back to where you need to be. If it was a scam, X will tell you they don't know what you're talking about. Never trust that a cold call is from who they say they're from.
- knowow1 7y ago
  It works in the average situation, but unfortunately there are some huge scams happening(passing unnoticed) in undeveloped countries where somehow the scammers can hijack the number for a certain time frame. If you call the same number the next day the real institution is going to answer, but nobody knows a thing. Apparently, in some cases, they can hijack the phone number of an institution, but only for the specific caller that they are applying the scam. If someone from another context call the same number it goes to where it's supposed to be. It's becoming more normal than ever down here... Happened next to me. We are entering the age of personalized crime, targeted and framed just for you, considering your personality and necessities.

ALittleLight 7y ago

In college I worked at a computer repair center for students. When I was new, and before I knew how to talk around this, some people would describe to me what they were doing when they contracted the malware they were there about - at times being perfectly explicit and specific about what videos, exactly to the title, they were watching when they got malware. I think the layman expected there was some character of a pathologist to my job. Like I would understand or diagnose that they had porno ransomware X on their system and the only solution was to do computer thing Y. In reality, of course, regardless of the malware, I would just help the person back up all the data and configurations we could. Use a virus scanner on the backups, and reinstall their OS. How they got the malware was completely irrelevant, and I actually preferred not knowing. With a bit of experience I learned to preempt any detailed explanations by just stating my plan early and being clear that it didn't matter how they found the malware.

im3w1l 7y ago
I would find it fascinating honestly. Maybe I'd throw in some tips on how to avoid reinfection.

avgDev 7y ago

Ha! I feel the same way but I encountered so many con artists. My favorite con artists was actually a dentist and I fell for part of the "con". I guess you could argue if its a con but I feel like it was. I went in for a simple fillings in two teeth, he starts drilling, then tells me I need inlays $800 a piece x 2. Being young and stupid I said, ok. I was so broke at the time, I needed to borrow money to pay. When I came back another customer was fighting with billing. 2nd con that dentist office did was sending bills for bs charges. I got two, but did research and asked for a detailed bill, which never came. A year or two later I start getting pain, and my new dentist is surprised I have inlays in back teeth and has to drill them out because they were done incorrectly. So, yeah....don't pick a dentist based on google reviews and talk about treatment plan before drilling.

p1esk 7y ago
So how do you pick a dentist?
- thiagomgd 7y ago
  Amazon reviews </sarcasm>
- Tade0 7y ago
  By word of mouth mostly.
  - alxmdev 7y ago
    Absolutely, real-life word of mouth trumps all the algos and search engines. About time more people realize those are business marketing tools, not tools to help you.
  - doctor_eval 7y ago
    I see what you did there.
    - p1esk 7y ago

jansan 7y ago

Long time (maybe twenty years) ago I read about a fascinating scam. The scammers were announcing a totally cool sex toy (maybe early VR, don't remember), but they never intended to deliver. Through clever marketing they managed to find enough potential customers who were asked to prepay a certain amount to finance production of the product (comparable to crowdfunding). When delivery day arrived, the scammers sent out letters to the customers with an apology that something went horribly wrong and the product could not be delivered. The letters included a bank cheque with a full refund, but the cheque said: "Refund for Sex Toy XYZ". As planned from the beginning, most customers were too ashamed to cash the cheque, so the scammers kept most of the money. Legally (?).

syntheticnature 7y ago
Sounds like a bit from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=379784 https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=379784
_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
This is something which is discussed in Guy Ritchie's _Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels_ anyway.
jimminy 7y ago
I don't know if that was a real scam. It was a bit of a throw away joke from the movie, 'Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels'. The guys need to raise money to repay a debt, and one of them presents this idea, which gets tossed out because it's gonna take too long for them to receive the checks.
- K0balt 7y ago
  It's much, much older than the movie reference. Embarrassing check scams are an old, tried and true scam. They were more popular backnin the days of physical chain letters.
jansan 7y ago
I just found that this scam even has an entry on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassing_cheque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassing_cheque

chiph 7y ago

My dad got taken by the "Hello this is Microsoft Support calling" scammers. They quickly got him to approve a remote connection to his machine and then they showed him a random registry entry as "proof" that his machine was infected with a virus. Which they just so happened to have the anti-virus for, for $300. Dad was computer savvy, but by this point he was 80 years old and they flat-out took advantage of him. He had to mail me the machine so I could reload it. Please - teach your parents to just hang up on these clowns. And to kill the browser process when they get popups trying to cause fear & doubt.

klenwell 7y ago
> Please - teach your parents to just hang up on these clowns. That was the other thing. It was impossible to get my grandparents to do this. I think I eventually got them to let the answering machine answer and not return calls for messages from anyone they didn't recognize.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  What would be nice is a service that just forwards unknown calls to someone competent.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    Or just blocks them? Because I'd like to think I'm 'someone competent', and on my own phone I only accept (non-personal) calls that I'm expecting, or can see a reason for.
- redler 7y ago
  Maybe this is a new angle for Google Voice or similar services. Protect vulnerable members of your family with a fail-safe auto-attendant system with approval rules.
  - dwd 7y ago
    It's not fully automatic and I'm sure scammers will come up with new scripts to still trick people into answering. Over time it should allow Google to flag numbers as potentially being a scam, marketing, etc based on other users flagging a caller. Saves Googling for that information which is what I currently do with an unknown number. The only risk is spoofing/false positives putting your number on some blacklist. https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en

willis936 7y ago

Being careful isn’t a bad thing. Whenever sensitive information is involved I google the company to make sure the phone number is actually correct and if it’s a proper employee of the company I will find their listing. If their voice sounds like it doesn’t match their photo to a large degree or I can’t find the employee I will be very apprehensive about giving information and will ask them some questions. If it’s a con they usually give up quick and move onto the next one.

bdowling 7y ago

> my grandmother had provided a verbal consent over the phone that had kept it just this side of being outright fraud. If it was intentionally deceptive or coercive, it was probably outright fraud.

klenwell 7y ago
You would hope, right? It's actually a lot of shades of gray. The most astounding part about it was once the scammers had this verbal consent, they check could print a check themselves against my grandmother's account and cash it. We started with my grandmother's bank, WAMU, thinking surely they would cancel or reverse the withdrawal. Nope, they had their fraud department "investigate" and concluded that the withdrawal was legitimate. Blew my fucking mind. I started documenting my efforts to do something about this on a blog and eventually ended up getting contacted by email by a NY Times reporter who was investigating the subject. Well, if you're not ticked off enough by this story, read on: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/business/20tele.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/business/20tele.html My grandmother was lucky in that she was only taken for a couple thousand dollars. But even that could have been extremely tough on her if she hadn't had family around to pitch in to make up the loss.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  > had entered a few sweepstakes that caused his name to appear in a database advertised by infoUSA, one of the largest compilers of consumer information > InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.” > Vast databases of names and personal information, sold to thieves by large publicly traded companies, have put almost anyone within reach of fraudulent telemarketers > Mr. Guthrie’s name first appeared on a list used by scam artists around 2002, after he filled out a few contest entries that asked about his buying habits and other personal information. This is a good argument against the cancer that is advertising, marketing, etc. Even if you truly have nothing to hide, are happy to receive targeted ads and offers, it's just a matter of time before the information falls into the wrong hands and gets used against you.

ptah 7y ago

you should read Iceberg slim's books. he cites a stronger requirement: the victim should be enticed to do/attempt something illegal so if they ever come forward they will incriminate themselves

DoreenMichele 7y ago

I guess it's a part of human nature. I don't think this is true. I have read that most parents use either a shame model or a guilt model to try to keep the kids in line. So most people are brainwashed from an extremely early age to either feel shame or guilt, hide things from authority figures for fear of getting in trouble, etc. That's not actually necessary.