Month: October 2010

Wire $11,000 for bail + $600 handling and don’t tell anybody

The phone or email scam, in which a scammer claims that a friend or relative is stranded in a foreign country, is still out there. Here is a first-person account by a grandmother in northeastern U.S.:

“On Thursday morning, I got a call which I thought was (grandson) — although I said to the voice on the other line ‘This doesn’t sound like (grandson).’

They gave a plausible excuse and I went on from there. 

“The voice said they were in jail in Canada and it involved drugs found in their car.  They wanted me to send two wires of $5,500 each from Western Union — one in KMart and the other in the Weis store. It was money he needed to get out of Canada and bail money. It was to be sent by Friday morning and I wasn’t to tell anyone because if word got out, (grandson) would have a drug record.

“This contact in Canada was a Sergeant Banyon. He gave me his telephone number and I was given my instructions. 

“The so-called sergeant instructed me how I was to get the money out of the bank and if they questioned me about that I was to say it was to buy a car!!!

“This money was to be sent to Miami to a foreign named person. Also, I was to add $600 for wiring.

“Fortunately (son#3 – grandson’s uncle) walked in at that moment and I just couldn’t stand another minute and begged him not to tell anyone about this or (grandson) would suffer.  Well, (son#3) called (grandson’s father) and then the ‘you know what’ hit the fan.  He was working in northern Pennsylvania.  He did take time to tell his company or boss or someone in charge what was going on and they had two company people ready to fly to Canada.

“(Other grandson) said ‘Why don’t you call (grandson’s) cell phone’ — which they did and (grandson) was in class at (college.)   

“All the red flags were in place and when they presented the demand that you do this, or ‘this’ will happen, every sane thought drains from your brain.  In addition to everything else, I don’t know how I’d have gotten to the bank since I felt too bad to drive and I surely couldn’t have walked.

“At any rate, (grandson’s father) got a chance to curse this caller back with words I can’t repeat.  There’s lots more side stories to this, but I think I’ve aged 10 years — which at this point in my life I don’t need.”

Tom Kelchner

The “like” function on Facebook has always seemed such a friendly thing. It’s an Internet-age way for Facebookers to engage in that most primal of conversation pleasantries: “hey, I like that too.”

It’s just amazing that it’s turned into such an effective vector for cheap advertising, affiliate click sucking and bait for rogues and malicious web sites. The words “tawdry” and “silly” also come to mind in the case at hand.

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Today we checked out what was behind a surge of Facebook “like” messages about a girl committing suicide. This seems to be a theme in the last month. There were several campaigns going on at once and some were “liked” tens of thousands of times.

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We’ll give away the ending here really fast. In order to see the suicide story you were required to install adware. Your reward was a link to a six-month-old news story on an Indian entertainment news site.

For some odd reason we were required to “verify” our age and when we failed we were required to complete a short quiz, which was really not a quiz:

We are 19 years old according to the goat Facebook account that these folks had access to, but, no matter, we chose to play Pac Man in order to “unlock” the content. That, of course, required us to install an innocuous, though annoying piece of adware.

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That “unlocked” the premium content.

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And our prize was…

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…a link to a February news story on an Indian entertainment news site “NewsofAP” (which has nothing to do with the Associated Press except the cachet of the letters “AP,” we might point out.)

That took us down a rabbit hole into another whole wacky Internet wonderland:

Their “about us” includes the line that they use “’IMPARTIALITY’ as a weapon.” They also write that although they will be reporting “gossips” they assure their readers that they will double check with the “concerned people to make sure they are quite authentic.”

Thanks Wendy and Matt.

Tom Kelchner

We’re seeing quite a few posts on various social networking sites such as Facebook regarding a program that claims to hack the guts out of Modern Warfare 2 on XBox, Playstation and PC before turning you into an unstoppable super soldier of doom.

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The “program” is called ModBox, weighs in at 319KB and is completely useless. That doesn’t matter to the creators, who have put up a number of blogs promoting not only the program, but fake “past versions” of said program too:

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All very convincing to the average gamer in need of a quick cheating fix.

To get your hands on the program, they follow the well worn tactic of asking you to spam the living daylights out of Facebook, then fill in a Sharecash survey.

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28,220 people have hit the “Like” button on Facebook for this so far. I wonder how many of them still liked it after signing their life away to surveys only to see this on the desktop:

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Can you say Boom, Headshot?

Christopher Boyd