Good for a laugh!

[007steveb16]

I know that this isn't essentially a laughing matter but I always chuckle at the fake emails I get regarding "immediate action required" or "a payment from your account has been compromised" in regards to "PayPal"

I mean some of these criminals aren't even trying hard anymore!

The lastest junk alert message I got today was sourced from "PadPal.com".....

[mr.elmwood]

Sadly, Steve, you are Abby Normal in comparison to the rest of the population. For every well informed person such as yourself, there are a hundred people that fall for this sort of thing.

I would find fake car ads, online, show them to intelligent people, even point out all the clues, and they still thought it was real.

Ten years ago, easily 10% of all car listings on ebay.ca were fake. Up until about a year or so ago, a lot of the ads on auto trader were fake. Craigslist is a favourite site for scam ads.

[ricarmic]

Hi 007!

I read somewhere that the spelling mistakes etc are actually intentional.

The premise is that more educated folks, who are much much less likely to fall for the scam, realize that it is fake because of the mistakes and just delete it. Less educated folks do not notice the spelling mistakes etc and are also more likely to fall for the scam. Weeding out the suspicious ones early on saves the scammers time dealing with people who catch on too fast....

Having said this, I know of some educated folks who have fallen for them too so who knows!

[mdf_jersey]

I noticed a couple of adds on what we have here, USED VICTORIA ( like craigslist), where they were posting the wrong car for the ad  description. Not very smart people doing these scams. But your right there is a sucker born every minute.

[triber]

I got 2 scams in the last couple of days. Very official looking from tax Canada, one sending my new tax reporting number that I had to confirm, with a link of course, the other telling me that I had a $265 tax refund which I had to claim. I really wondered how many people clicked on those links?

Not very funny, especially older people who don't realize not to click on links, we have relatives we know would do that.

[mr.elmwood]

Age has nothing to do with it.  There was the story out of Vancouver a couple years back. Young lady was looking for work and replied to an online ad. It was a fake Western Union ad. She was to test the honesty of clerks at WU offices.

How did it go? She would receive, what turned out to be, a fake WU money order. Cashed it at her bank and then took part of the cash and wired it back.

Well, she was not sure if this was on the up and up, so, she checked with her intelligent parents who saw nothing wrong with this scheme and advised her to do it.

Well, the MO bounced, of course, she was out two grand or what ever it was. So, they go after the bank for not stopping them for being Class A stupid. Never heard the end, but, the bank wa shaving nothing to do with that.

[ricarmic]

The law of large numbers says that if you send something to enough people, it will make sense to one/some of them.

I got an email from one of our friends sons, the name on the message even had the right middle initial for his name.

I don't recall what it wanted but it was something to do with getting a job. The only thing that was wrong about the whole message was the job didn't match what he had just graduated from (future electrician). Other than that it seemed normal..... 

It was extremely convincing and just so happened to coincide with his recent graduation.......

Another time, I was having a problem with a payment for something. It just so happened that when I got of the phone, I got a scam message from the same company (like I'd gotten before). My immediate thought was that it was related to the call I'd just made, fortunately before I did anything I realized it was the same old scam message. It was simply the timing of receiving the scam message that almost caught me.... and I get a lot of these blasted things.....