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Scram, Scam!

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Over the past couple of weeks I have received emails purportedly from our internet and landline provider warning me over a variety of false circumstances like having too many emails in storage, and our automated payment not going through. Yesterday I got one warning me that our internet would be disconnected if I didn’t pay our over due bill of $689. I knew in my head that this was a scam, but just to make sure I contacted our provider and found that we owed no money at all.

I also received voice mail messages recently from a law firm in Minnesota and a Disability advocate firm in Minnesota for “Charlotte” asking me to phone them back regarding my disability claim. I looked the numbers up on Google and they are definite scams. Husband has been getting messages on his phone from some bogus dentist office about a missed appointment. I know that they hope we phone them to tell them they have mead a mistake so that they can further ensnare us and get our SS numbers and bank account numbers. We just delete them and block the numbers. Their attempts seem to be getting more sophisticated, though. I wonder how less tech savvy folks manage to not get fooled.

Have you ever been scammed or know of anyone who has? What do you think a fitting punishment would be for these people?

39 thoughts on “Scram, Scam!”

  2. i think having them pay back the money with 4x the legal limit on interest would be good
    put a tracker on them and they can live on 25% of their earnings until resolved

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  3. Stepfather had his ID stolen many years ago. I think it took him about three years to re-establish his credit rating, get new documents, etc. 😦

    Chris in Owatonna

    **BSP** I’ll be at Fair Trade Books in Red Wing tomorrow (Saturday), from 1 to 3 selling and signing books. It’ll be a great day for a road trip down the river. I’ll be highlighting my new book, “Little Mountain, Big Trouble.” It’s a middle-grade adventure that’s a great story for ages 9-99, which qualifies each and every TBer. 🙂 If you don’t know the backstory, the novel is based on my 20 years of experience as a volunteer Big Brother. Note the distinctiong between “a” Big Brother and just plain BIG BROTHER. 😉 **END BSP**

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  4. I have been scammed, and almost took the bait, thinking our friends really were in Europe and desperately needed the $. Yikes.

    Periodically I click on something that makes the screen of our desktop computer go kablooey – bells and whistles saying “we just call this number to save all our files, etc. Whatever we do, don’t turn off the computer…” I know now to just shut everything way down for a while and it finally goes away.

    The one I’m dealing with this week is not a scam, I guess, but probably a “mischief hack”. One of our UU Committee heads has sent out an email, in one case a rather sensitive topic, and somehow inserted in the subject line is the phrase “Nonsense Subject. This has caused hurt feelings, ruffled feathers, etc., and is hard to explain. AND she can’t see it on her computer as she sends it.

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  5. Never been successfully scammed but we get dozens of phone calls, some from podunk small towns and some that show up on our caller ID as “unavailable”. The calls are concentrated on the weeks when our Social Security payments are due.

    My sense is that a lot of the spam call centers are located in small towns and they focus on seniors.

    We also get many emails with bogus invoices for products or services we never ordered. The attachments we are supposed to open are labeled as PDFs but that doesn’t mean that’s what they actually are.

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      1. A call originating overseas and spoofed ought to be recognizable to the phone service hosting the call. They should carry some responsibility for facilitating this and be sanctioned accordingly.

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        1. I agree, but mostly they don’t. My phone company doesn’t seems to care. I don’t have caller ID, mostly because they make you pay for it and then it doesn’t really work.

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    3. We get a lot of those mystery calls too, but I never connected it with timing when I receive my SS deposit. I’ll try to notice going forward.

      My spam folders do a decent job of keeping those out of my inbox, but a few sneak in now and then.

      Chris

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        1. I check every week or two just to make sure mail I want isn’t put into spam. It’s happened repeatedly and for no apparent reason with email from several sources.

          Chris

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      2. If you get SSDI from Social Security, it isn’t on a consistent day for everyone. Payments are sent on four days throughout the month, on the 3rd of the month and on the second, third and fourth Wednesdays of the month. It was typical years ago for everyone to get their payments on the 3rd of the month, but that’s not true anymore.

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        1. Yes, but your SS payment depends on which week of the month your birthday falls on.
          So my birthday falls on the third week and I get my check on the third Wednesday.
          It’s no difficulty to predict when any given person will get their check.

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        2. It is pretty complicated. According to the SSA blog –

          “There are exceptions. For example, children and spouses who receive benefits based on someone else’s work record will be paid on the same day as the primary beneficiary.

          For others, we may issue your payments on the 3rd of each month. Among other reasons, we do this if:

          You filed for benefits before May 1, 1997.
          You also receive a Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payment.
          Your Medicare premiums are paid for by the state where you live.
          You live in a foreign country.
          Individuals who receive SSI payments due to disability, age, or blindness receive those payments on the 1st of each month.

          If your payment date falls on a federal holiday or weekend, you can expect to receive that month’s payment on the weekday immediately prior.”

          Scammers often have only your phone number, and haven’t connected it to your date of birth. Even if they have, there are a lot of other variables involved, and I suspect they usually just dial people at random.

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    1. I answered a lot of questions –blueberries were the theme today, as well as rabbits chewing on trees and bushes–then saw tim walk right by me. It was blasted hot and my feet hurt. I am laying in bed with my feet up, watching tv now. I found “Lonesome Dove” on Roku. 1989–lots of young actors became big stars out of that series.

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  7. I’ve received a number of calls from “Amazon” asking if I ordered a $499.00 computer. I say, “No. I ordered 10 $499.00 computers.” They hang up on me!

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  8. Back in April this spring, the Rochester Public School system was hacked and they had to shut down their entire internet system for a couple weeks to get things sorted out. That means copiers, projectors, ANYTHING at all computer related was off for a bit. Took a while for teachers to get back into the swing of doing things the old fashioned way.
    Just this week I finally got my school district email password reset. (Only because I don’t really need it and it wasn’t a priority).

    My mom would get spam calls and then she’d call me and put the two phones together. I was yelling “JUST HANG UP!”

    I was scammed a couple months ago out of $55 for gas. I suspected it might be, but I had just saved $150 at Menards, so I kinda figured it was Karma and I was still up $95.

    Still those people are the lowest form of scum.
    Cut their fingers off.

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      1. I was in the Menards parking lot when a man pulled up in a car and offered me a large gold ring, then asked for gas money. I didn’t have any cash, and he wanted me to go to the gas station with them. Again, mind you, I had just gotten the $150 from Menards (too much to go into) and my first thought was ‘karma’, but the ring was a warning. I said, sure, OK, I’ll do a tank of gas for this man, wife, and 10 yr old son in the car.
        At the gas station he got out of the car, offered me a GOLD NECKLACE PLUS THE RING if I’d give him $400 to have gas all the way back to Florida. Said they were on vacation. And it was like, ‘You came to MN on vacation?’ I asked what he did and he said ‘Contractor’. Hmmm…. and I said no, I wasn’t giving him money, and he became very uninterested after that. Yep, Scam. But again. Karma.
        A week later was an article in the paper of a man, woman, and kid scamming $20,000 out of a local guy when they asked for travel money. Different vehicle. I gave the police my version.

        What I keep thinking is, how does the young boy feel about this? He looked very uncomfortable about the whole thing. And I’m wishing now I would have asked him a few more questions.

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  9. Sometime in the past 24 months I was scammed out of a few hundred dollars by a group of people on a cable TV thing. Warning flags were flying all the way through the process, but I kept going. These guys had snagged me by my own greed. In the end, I learned an expensive lesson about my own weakness. I’d sure like that money back, but maybe it was “well spent” for the lesson I got.

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  12. People who are not at all affected by identity theft are increasingly the exception rather then the rule. When my identity was stolen, you could get an identity protection PIN from the IRS only if you had filed a police report saying your personal information had been stolen, but that is no longer necessary. IMHO, everyone should get an IP PIN. Everyone should also use the credit bureaus credit freeze options even if they haven’t had any problems yet. The Equifax breach that happened six years ago involved 147 million people.

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  13. Falling for all these types of scam has become inevitable these days, I was a victim also but was lucky to be introduced to winsburg.net ,where i was able to tender adequate proofs and I was able to get my refund even though it wasn’t that easy.

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