We had plenty of callers ringing to complain about a scratch card in a major newspaper on the weekend. Everyone who scratches, wins. The catch is you need to text or call a $20 premium number to find out you only won a free ring tone. One caller managed to get his money back by complaining.
An Indian man has been wandering the streets of Melbourne claiming he can read fortunes. He’d write a prediction on a small piece of paper and then ask victims what their favourite flower and number was. He always got it right leading to several women giving him $20 and $50 notes. To find out how he did it, talk to this man or head over to the Melbourne Magic Festival.
Plenty of callers has been infected by a worm attached to a facebook message. The email claimed that their facebook password had been changed. It was also asked “how can you tell what is a real page and what is a hoax page. The key is to look at every between the http:// and the next / . The address reads from right to left. So scam.facebook.com would be a real site as it falls under the facebook.com domain. facebook.scam.com would be a fake site as it falls under the scam.com domain.
Finally, serial swindle Wayne Charters is behind bars after being found guilty of five counts of obtaining money by deception. He married a Rosebud woman and then convinced her to sell all her assets so they could move overseas together. He claimed to be an ASIO spy trying to escape the organisation. He got out of sleeping with her by claiming that he ‘didn’t believe in sex before marriage’ and ‘had a bad back.’
If you’ve got a scam question for the show, email me at sleightofhand@conman.com.au.
Imagine if, right now, Phishing became legal worldwide. Any individual, organisation or government could legally try to gain access to your personal information using faux websites, fake emails and other social engineering techniques.
Would we see a rise in phishing?
I’d wager not. The main barrier in the way of phishers is not the law. The law does nothing and can do nothing to stop them.
The police in the victim’s country does not have the power to press charges against aa scammer thousands of kilometres away.
The police in the scammer’s country usually have better things to do then hunt down non-violent criminals who, behind locked doors, are swindling foreign nationals.
The problem is too big and the solutions too hard.
If the police and government are not going to protect you, you need to protect yourself.
This week on statewide drive with Kathy Bedford we discussed:
Casino Conjuring: The Victorian Commission for Gambling Regulation spent $25,000 being Las Vegas magician Barron Stringfellow (best. name. ever.) to Australia to teach investigators how to spot a cheat.
A good investment of taxpayer money?
UPS Scam: A caller asked whether an email from UPS was really a scam (it was) and another called wondering why we get more scam emails this time of year. (the answer: we all need to cash after Christmas)
Twitter: We discussed the various frauds associated the social networking site and how to avoid getting swindled while tweeting.
Is the openness and anonymity of tweeter a breeding ground for swindlers?
Climate Change Government: Scamwatch warns us to be on the look out for fake offers of grants to fix climate change.
Back in the dark ages when everyone had dial up modems and burnt witches at the stake, con artists would distribute ‘free porn’ on the internet through dialer programs.
To access the porn, you’d download a program that rang a specific number using your modem.
While the porn was free, the phone number your modem was calling was a premium, high toll number and you ended up getting stung on your phone bill.
That swindle is dead since no one but nannas uses a dial up modem any more. (and nannas don’t download porn, what with being dead from the waist down)
Owners of Iphones who jailbreak their handset, overriding the Apple controls, are being hit with offers of “Free Porn Via Java”.
They download the free, non-approved, application which, then sends a text message to a premium text service.
You end up signed on for a premium account, with no chance of ever being able to unsubscribe because, in most cases, people aren’t even aware the text has been sent.
Looking at some of the fandom drama out there I remembered about a person called Victoria Bitter/Amy Player. She was involved in a fandom convention called tentmoot and defrauded some fans.
I thought if you have a chance to read through it might be useful for the encylopedia of scams. It’s certainly a bit of a bizzare story…
And it is.
Amy Player, a Lord of the Rings fan from Virginia created an online fan club in homage to actor Sean Astin and his LOTR character.
She teamed up with fellow fan and started a ‘Bit of Earth’ - a charity based around gardening and literacy.
The signed up Astin to assist them and, with the actor supporting, created a small army of nerds around the word willing to help out.
They created a LOTR convention in New Zealand which fell apart at the last minute, resulting in several very pissed off actors who had jetted around the world to attend the event.
The failed event revealed the Bit of Earth charity to be a fraud and that Player had being lying to celebrities and businesses to get support for her fake fundraisers.
It also turns out she had multiple characters (both in real life and in the fictional LOTR world.)
She was reported missing by her parents and ended up on the side of a milk carton.
She changed her name to Jordan Wood , Elijah Wood’s male cousin who was on the run from IRA.
The great (great?) grandson of the famous Old West con man Soapy Smith has a great blog over at Soapy Smith’s Soap Box.
Jeff’s blog is packed full of great historical anecdotes such as this greats story about Charles Baggs and the fake safe:
…always had his false safe, an enormous affair made of wood with a silver knob, beautifully painted and labeled ‘Hull’s Patent.’ It looked exactly like a heavy iron safe. One day Doc’s office in Deadwood caught fire, and he surprised everybody by running down stairs with the massive safe on his back. … The thing cost him as much as $100. Of course he wanted to save it. He had it made of wood so he could fold it up and carry it around easily from place to place. You know every time the bunco man catches a big ‘sucker’ he moves his office. When the ‘sucker’ next comes around he don’t find anything but an empty room. Besides, Doc used to keep his money and valuables in that same old wooden chest. No burglars would venture to tackle its massive sides, and it was as secure as it would have been in any vault in the country.
In 1997 - David Mamet released The Spanish Prisoner, a taught pyschological thriller about a scientist who gives up an item of great value when promised an even greater treasure. (Sorry to sound vague but I don’t want to ruin the plot).
13 years later and the storyline is now everyday. Each day, everyone else is bombarded with emails with promises of millions from long lost inheritences, won lotteries and foreign fortunes.
All we need to do is send them a small fee, a little bribe and perhaps a few thousand dollars for expenses and the money is ours.
The Spanish Prisoner, or Advance Fee Fraud, is now one of the biggest scams in the world, netting it’s mostly Spanish and Nigerian perpertrators billions each year.
It’s so common place that the most recent victims are mocked as idiots for not already being aware of the scam.
Which means less and less victims are going public with their experiences meaning more and more people will fall foul in the future.
