Beware The Crooks Of December...

[Guy Fawkes]

It looks very real and it almost got me to click it.

 

However I noticed the tipoff of a con first that it was addressed to: "Undisclosed-recipients" and second it was from "Service" which had an address of "onemessage@pservices" So I didn't click anything on the message and I immediately opened my browser and went to paypal where I found no such transactions.

 

What to do? https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/paypal-safety-and-security suggests forwarding the message to spoof@paypal.com which I did.

 

[loremipsum]

Regrettably, I have to be wary of not just the ides but rather every day. People try to scam me around twice a week on average, and it’s almost always the same con. I’m so inured to it now that it doesn’t faze me anymore.

[+ Keith30309]

I’ve seen a big uptick in phishing emails in the last couple of months.... and they look amazingly authentic.

I fell for one yesterday, ostensibly from Apple, thanking me for my $29 iTunes purchase.

[loremipsum]

I’m now reminded of a peculiar scam — ultimately I suppose that we were robbed of only our time — but it was very odd. There are two specific cons people try to pull on me on a weekly basis, but this one was unique. Incidentally, GF might be interested to know that Armond R., who lives in my city, was like me the victim of this scam a couple of years ago. Armond ended up exposing the man by posting the his phone number to his public Twitter account. The man contacted boys all over the country asking if we wanted to take part in regular strip shows at Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut. He said that there was a large, covert room somewhere and that gentlemen would go in and watch. There were to be no cameras at all which was a draw for the same reason that I turn down offers to do porn. He’d text and call us multiple times and have lengthy conversations and ask for our respective jock sizes, D-size, etc. Asked us what we’d be willing to do. When we were on the phone I could tell that he was actually writing this all down. Made us look at underwear catalogs online and told us to tell him exactly what we’d wear. I grew weary of it all and increasingly skeptical and said I could wear whatever and he said “no you have to be picky.” He’d also tell us the names of other boys/send us their links and asked which guys we’d be willing to put on shows with.

It must have been so exceedingly time-consuming for him that I don’t understand why he’d even do it. When I spoke to Armond about it he told me that the man obviously just wanted to talk to cute boys. Sigh.

[rvwnsd]

My employer routinely sends employees test phishing emails to see what we do. If we do nothing, or delete without opening nohing happens. If we report it as a phishing email, we receive a message stating we did a great job and we get a badge and points on our internal social media profile. If we click on a link in a phishing email or reply to it we get a message stating we failed to identify a test phishing email and have to attend a training class. Those of us who correctly report phishing emails don't have to go through the training.

 

Recently, I reported what I thought was a phishing email. It had the company logo on top and stated that I was required to do something immediately and had a link for me to click. Hovering over the link revealed a URL that was not within the company's domain. So, I reported it. Information Security thanked me, stated it was not a test, and assured me they would pursue the perpetrator and follow up if they needed additional information from me. Turned out that the email was legit, It was from our identity access management team (which is part of information security) who is using a third-party provider for a project. The anti-phishing team's boss talked to the identity access management team's boss. The employee who crafted the email was reprimanded for not following the procedure around email security and I received a Starbucks gift card and a letter of commendation.

 

Phishers are getting more sophisticated. It is more important than ever to be vigilant.