New twist on an old scam

those are the ones i mentioned in your text thread. i get about one a day in the junk folder.
i've never called them though. it's funny (not) one of our banks just reported that our name and acct. # was stolen.
we get free credit reporting if we sign up, but to sign up, you have to give them your ss number.

 

With scam text messages on my iphone, I made a contact called Spam Report, with the number 7726. I open the text, touch-and-hold somewhere other than a link (if there is one), choose "More" from the pop-up, and then forward it to good ol' Spam Report.

Not sure if it's gonna catch up with them, but it feels good.

 

as time goes by , we receive more and more fake invoices, fake alarms on the phone saying that my credit card has been used , fake calls from Amazon ..telling me that prime will cost more....fake ups that cannot be delevered...and so on...finally i just ignore all that crap but do check my credit card bills to make sure. We live in a world where good simple values , honesty ,and respect is vanishing.
and yes spam is invading text messages

 

While it's non uncommon for a router to NAT you like that, there is also a routable IP your provider is giving you (necessarily so, exactly because your 192.168 is, as you say, non routable). Web sites like whatsmyip can show you what the rest of the world is seeing as your address, while your computer is showing you the non-routable local one.

The provider could still be giving you a stable external IP, or one that changes. Typically, if you haven't asked them for a stable one or they haven't promised one, it changes.

Of course your scammer was a scammer and none of this was important to him anyway.

This whole NAT business has been the mother of some weird inventions like STUN, TURN, and ICE.

 

What was the "new twist" part?

 

I believe a friend was struck by such an attack quite a few years ago, received by direct phone call. The caller somehow knew exactly what computer she had, and where and when she bought it, which gained her trust, so she went to the requested website to load the remote desktop app that was needed for the 'technician' to perform the purported fixes. But when she handed over control, the screen quickly revealed it reading files it had no business accessing for any purported bug, prompting an immediate yank of the plug. I went to help her rebuild the system.

That "AnyDesk" link is for a similar remote desktop app, which should be a very legitimate product for internal corporate IT and HelpDesk support. It is just that scammers have no legitimate reason for such access.

The other link is not familiar, so probably is the malware bit.

 

I never go through my junk folder, so I couldn't tell you what's in there. I'm thinking that this is WHY we have junk folders in the first place.
Every now and again I will get instructions indicating that I should 'check my junk folder' if I don't get this activation code or that link.
I'm thinking that if they fail to reach me using an email address that I JUST GAVE them then I might want to rethink our relationship and offer my patronage to one of their competitors.

 

Had a similar email a few weeks back and called them too. Me, it was someone with an Indian accent. I told them I don't know computers (I've been in IT for 35 years lol) and my son had installed an antivirus but it wasn't that one. Told me he would help me to remove it and to download that anydesk client. He had to help find my Chrome browser on my desktop, blah blah blah. Wasted 15 minutes of his time (I'm retired so I have time to waste lol) before I told him that I knew he was a scammer, then, click. At least, he wasn't scamming someone else is the mean time.

 

Every now and then, good emails wind up in the junk folder. I’m not sure why

 

Every now and then 'good food' winds up in dumpsters too.
I don't actually care why this happens, nor do I go 'dumpster diving' to see if there's something that I might like to eat.
If somebody sends me something and I do not get it, that's a 'them' problem, not a 'me' problem.

Whether or not this makes me a harder target for scammers or just a 'mudge I will leave to the judgement of the folks playing along at home.


One of the (many) tactics that scammers use is to get you to do something that you would not normally do - like go dumpster diving for that valuable 'x' thing that got put in there by mistake.....like that 'link' you should not be clicking.....

 

Sometimes it's a 'them' problem, sometimes it's a 'your choice of email provider' problem.

I regularly email people who receive their mail on gmail.

I had messages I sent yesterday blocked because gmail didn't like the three letters ending the file name of an attachment I had included. The explanation was that attachments ending in those three letters had been used sometimes for malicious content.

I renamed the file and attached it again with no other change, and it sailed right through. So much for malicious-content protection. (That was different from gmail's suggested fix, which was that I should gratuitously package up the file as a zip file and attach that instead. Which would just have forced my recipients to fuss with running unzip on it, and then, if indeed it had been malicious content, there it would be again. )

The moral is that the filter rules these providers use are nothing like a science; they're a constantly growing and changing hodge-podge of sometimes-smarter, sometimes-dumber rules cooked up under fire to try to block the latest stuff the bad guys were sending, and which the bad guys are constantly figuring out how to get around.

When a legitimate sender sends you an email that happens to get caught up in that nonsense, blaming the sender means assuming they somehow should have known what crazy rules your email provider was enforcing that day. Just not realistic, sadly enough.

 

With three different email providers for my household now -- legacies of different eras not being fully cut off (not counting a gmail account held only for certain application specific requirements) -- I find that each has different filtering patterns. Filters get more aggressive over time, so messages that used to come through, start get blocked until the filter is re-tickled to mark a source is good. Some never appear even in the quarantine folder of one provider, but can appear promptly if sent through another provider.

Inbound delivery times vary sharply, most arriving promptly, but numerous delayed by many minutes or hours or even more than a day. Inspecting headers for delivery chain postmarks reveal that the delays are not at the source or destination servers, but instead at various other company's servers along the way. If their resolution to their server problems had included purging the queue, which I'm sure does happen, I'd never have received those messages at all. That is one of my reasons for refusing paperless billings and statements as much as possible.

Outbound messages sometimes get blocked by the receiving end because some third-party spam list marks my provider as sourcing too many spams. Usually resolved within a few days, though happening less frequently anymore.

Thus, message filtering problems are a moving target, and the delivery problems I'm able to identify are not just "them" or "mine", but also many third parties in between.

 

Sometimes there are emails that are beneficial to me.
Blaming the sender won’t help me, but regularly checking my junk file does.
And I delete everything that is junk, so it’s easy to look.
Reminds me of people who won’t drive electric because it takes so much time to plug and unplug

 

... of that phone number you should never call. With or without CallerID blocked.

 

Yeah its bad. Anybody who asks you to go to anydesk....................................RUN. Total scam.
ANYDESK is a Buzzword....right up there with mother madian name.

 

better than a buzzword, it's a tool that lets you hand over complete control of your computer and everything on it to the scammer