sparksbet:

theghoulnebula:

kyra-monroe:

irrepressiblenaiad:

hazeldomain:

I just got off the phone with a girl who was literally crying because scammers got into her machine and all her immigration papers (with her SSN and everything) were right there on her desktop and may have been accessed/stolen. 

I said scammers, not hackers. Nobody “hacks” into your computer any more. They don’t need to. They will literally call you on the phone and pretend to be IT and ask for access, passwords, whatever and most of the time? You’ll give it to them because you don’t know how the hell your computer works and they’re saying it’ll break if you don’t. 

The scarier a message is, the more likely it is that it’s fake. If you get a call from someone “monitoring” your computer security you are either paying out the ass for that service, or more likely, it’s a scam. 

The government will not call you. Apple will not call you. Microsoft will not call you. They do not give a single fuck whether your computer is infected. Your computer could be patient zero for the fucking black plague of computer viruses and literally no one gives a shit, I promise. 

Also? Your bank will not email you asking you to verify your password, that doesn’t fucking happen, if you’re that worried, call your bank. NOT using the number in the suspicious email. 

And do me a favor- if YOU know all this, call up your elderly relatives and make sure they know all this too? There’s nothing more fucking heartbreaking that having to try to talk a 90 year old man through changing aaaaallllllll his passwords when he barely knew how to use them in the first place, because some fast-talking asshole got him on the phone and convinced him he needed to fork over his banking passwords to keep his internets from being stolen. 

I FUCKED UP ONCE

I got a call from some scammers saying they could help my computer deal with all its malware and viruses. I listened, cause I was naive and dumb and my computer DID have masses of issues. I gave them £50. My bank even queried it, but they’d told me to expect that so I casually said it was fine. Fortunately, my stepdad got home soon enough to tell me to turn the PC off /right then/, and spent an hour or so removing all the dodgy stuff they’d put on.

You know what was worse? They kept calling me/my family for like a year. They wouldn’t leave me alone.

listen to the psa

I fucked up once too. Luckily nothing happened because I turned my computer off fast enough but I tried to go to Youtube when I got redirected to another page with a popup and a voice recording (later I realized I had switched two letters in the URL and the assholes had bought the page to scam people like me). It said that they were part of Microsoft and that my computer had been affected by a virus that was stealing my bank info and all of my personal information. This was particularly scary for me because I had used my SSN on that computer to apply for college and they could have stolen it if they dug deep enough. I let them access my computer and then called my dad, who told me to shut it down immediately, which I did. They called me again and I had to block their number to stop them from contacting me. Luckily Microsoft, actual Microsoft, told me that the method they were using would have needed more time to take anything off my computer of importance, so I got of lucky.

But seriously. Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, you name it will never have a popup on your computer saying there is a virus. Your bank, the IRS, etc. will never call you or send you an email demanding your information or threatening to call the police on you. Be safe, please, and don’t let these scammers catch you unaware. If you are ever unsure about an email or call, find the actual contact information and ask them about it before proceeding.

if this ever happens to you and you have access to your online banking through the computer, you NEED to call your bank ASAP. it doesn’t matter if you explicitly gave them your login or even if you have your password saved, if they have access at all to your computer then they have access to your bank account.
CALL YOUR BANK SO THEY CAN DISABLE YOUR BANKING LOGIN

also, your bank WILL NEVER RANDOMLY EMAIL OR CALL YOU TO ‘CONFIRM’ INFORMATION, NEVER GIVE OUT YOUR ONLINE BANKING PASSWORD, YOUR SSN, OR YOUR BANK ACCOUNT NUMBERS VIA EMAIL OR IF ANYONE CALLS YOU OVER THE PHONE

Any online service to which you give money will probably have a way to report scammers, too. I got a scam email about someone hacking into my paypal account, which I probably would’ve fallen for if a friend hadn’t recently been fucked over by a similar scam and if paypal hadn’t recently changed their logo. I went to their website to check and they gave info on how to recognize if an email’s from paypal (for instance, they always address you by the name tied to your account, not as “user”) and an email address to forward scams to.

If you get an email or phone call like this, a legitimate company will not mind you taking time to verify their claims.

pettyrevenge:

Several years back I began to receive the scam emails from Nigeria. I’m sure you are familiar with these so I won’t go into a great explanation. Normally, I can just ignore them, but these were coming to an email pertaining to a domain that I owned for my computer repair business.

It started with a few, and then grew to about 20 per day - every single day. It was irritating to get an email notification only to find out that it was one of these BS emails.

I thought…what to do, what to do…then I had an idea.

I went to Angelfire and created a free website with nothing more than a counter on it.

I shelled out to a command prompt and wrote a batch file that when executed erased boot.ini, nrldr, ntdetect.com then launched a browser which loaded the website I had created (I put a pause in it, silently recursing the windows directory just to make sure their PC made it to the website) then it would shut down the PC.

For those of you not in the ‘know’, this will prevent a computer from booting, stopping at a black screen displaying an error message. A good tech could have it back up and going with not much issue, but I was betting against that - after all, this is Nigeria.

I packaged the file into a password protected zip file and emailed it back to a few scammers stating that ‘This was given to me by the bank, and contains my banking and credit card information. It is set to give a false virus warning to stop scammers, the password for the first file is <password>. Please do not steal my information, I trust you’.

Within 2 days, the counter on my website had went from 3 (where I tested it) to over 140.

I have YET to receive another email from scammers at this email address.

From what I understand, they hack each others email in hopes of stealing ‘victims’ from each other. I hope that the down-time I forced upon them was enough to allow for at least a few people to be educated about this scam.