Scamsters & Con Artists
From the editor…
Conning innocent and naïve folks out of their hard earned bucks has been a perennially popular method to rob people while avoiding all that drama that a stick-up entails. The con artist gets the money, the victim gets robbed and frequently also gets a little moral lesson if the scam played off his or her greed.
You know what they say about stuff that sounds too good to be true!
I got a phone call recently that offered up a new twist…to me, anyway, on phone scams. The caller was clearly a telemarketer of some sort…you know, the phones and racket in the background… and she launched right into her play.
In a rapid fire delivery she told me that she works for Windows Security and that they could see that my computer had been hacked and that I now have all sorts of bogies in my system that they need to take out.
Then the caller sternly ordered me to “get in front of my computer”
This struck me as quite hilarious and all I could say was, “You’re joking, right?”
Although I think internet marketers and scammers are parasites upon the planet, and that they possibly deserve their own special spot in Hades, I still had to admire this gal’s cheek and dedication. She was on a mission and she stuck to the script, and ordered me again, impatiently, to “get in front of my computer” with an attitude that seemed to convey the message that I was some kind of moron for taking a chance with my system.
This whole conversation was so surreal that I stayed on the phone and said that in no way shape or form was I falling for this obvious racket, and she continued to order me to get in front of my computer. Even as I told her goodbye and hung up the phone I could still hear her shouting at me “get on your computer”!
It was such a bizarre call I discussed it with Jonny. He said this scam has been around for awhile, and that plenty of people fall for it. The scammer will walk you through letting them inside your computer to do a scan, then they will infect you with their own malware which they will then pretend to find so they can charge you $199 to clean out.
This is kind of like those old stories about vacuum cleaner salesmen who’d pretend to vacuum your supposedly clean floor and then show you a bag full of dirt that their super duper vacuum supposedly just sucked up.
At any rate, the moral of this story is that there is no Fairy Computer Godmother gonna call you on the phone to tell you that you have bogies in your system. This is why you have anti-virus software.
But the scary thing was, the gal who called me was so pre-emptory, so stern, and so dismissive of anything that it was easy to see how vulnerable folks would get manipulated. Obedience to authority figures seems to be hardwired into our systems, so we believe people who act like they know what they are talking about….
Stephanie Kelley
