Yes I thought a Australia may be at the top with scammed victims but the USA with an astounding 466,501 online scams in 2022, the U.S. leads the world as the country with the most scam victims per year.28 Nov 2023
I just watched The Beekeeper ,some mindless violence towards fictional scammers.
I know people who never answer their phone if they don't recognize the number ,there must be a lot of people like that now. Not that this would help much if a scammer has spoofed the phone number which is easily done, I've had fake ID messages sent to my phone ,pretending to be someone you know.
I guess a lot of the time people aren't expecting people to blatantly lie to them because that's not what they would do to other people.
Yes Max, It is a never ending cycle with these scammers and the problem with not answering the phone with no caller id is that quite a few places like hospitals come up with that and I know of a person who was trying to be contacted by a hospital and she kept ignoring it. When she did answer it one day they told her they had been trying to contact her for weeks as they needed to discuss something. You are between a rock and a hard place
I've heard of that happening too Norm ,Hospitals using a private number so people don't answer the phone.
It's a bit of a problem all the scammers these days, your not even meant to say yes or no on a phone call these days in case a scammer records your voice and uses that .
When I checked my Gumtree account today a lot of the scammers have been blocked,it looks like Gumtree has finally done something.
Hi Max, that is good to hear at least they are trying. My grandaughter was enquiring about a car listed on Car Sales yesterday, got an email this morning to say to contact this email address and nothing else. Red flags came straight up and an hour later she got a notification from Car Sales that this was a scam listing.
It's the first time Gumtree have blocked scammers in 14 years of scammers messaging me.
I read somewhere that Fake sellers account for around 70% of used car sales scams.
These days you shouldn't list your number plate number and you need to blur the number plate in images when selling a vehicle online because of people who clone the rego number with 3D printers and then use your plate number to commit crimes.
I sold an unregistered car on car sales in 2009 and put some old number plates on the car just to drive the car to the end of my street to take the images, then I blurred the number plate numbers before uploading the images to car sales but they wouldn't allow the images and the advert until I showed the number plates in the images so I had to upload the original images showing the plates that weren't even from the car I was selling ,then they allowed the ad, funny how now it's the opposite and they don't show the plates.
The government is meant to be stopping scammers this year.
Hi Max, things have moved a long way since 2009, nobody would have thought about 3D printing number plates or even 3D printing anything. Scamming has moved a long way since 2009 as well
I remember in the mid nineties Swinburne in Hawthorn had 3D printers and in 2009 Windows 7 was new.
In 2013 anyone could download the plans for a 3D printed gun.
Pre 2009 criminals would clone all id numbers on stolen vehicles and sell the vehicle and the owner wouldn't find out that they had a stolen vehicle until the next registration payment.There would be 2 cars on the road with the same numbers and plates.
Also remember seeing car plates printed on paper and put behind a perspex number plate holder.
20 years ago i remember a company started making novelty plates and would sell them at swap meets, there has always been someone who can make number plates.
I had people wanting to pay by check for second hand goods back in the nineties instead of cash ,I would never take a check as you never knew if it would clear ,just like when people wanted to transfer money to buy an item , I wouldn't be giving them or sending the item until the money had cleared.
How Is Digital Fraud Becoming More Sophisticated As Technology Advances? link below.
I don't know why people ever bothered with user passwords on computers when you turn them on because of how easily they were circumvented, then they bring out secure boot processors to fix the problem but they can still be exploited.
I've recently heard a group of 3 Chinese nationals have been arrested in Sydney after being responsible for eighty million scam text messages , they were sending out the toll and parcel scam messages among others to millions of Australians .
I think this explains why the gumtree scammers got blocked ,police say as soon as one site closes down another operation springs up and they know of similar operations that are already up and running.
Apparently these scammers had 3 sim boxes with 192 sim cards sending out scam messages 24 - 7.
Possibly less phone message scams at the moment .They say don't trust any text messages from a business as they don't generally contact you that way and if someone rings from a business you're meant to hang up and google the business name to get their phone number and call them back..I guess most people these days don't trust anyone and don't answer calls from private or unknown numbers.
It is hard Max because I had a hospital ring me a couple of days ago with no caller ID. I wasn't going to answer it but I did and I was lucky I did answer it. Problem is you never know.
Yes I don't see the problem answering private number calls ,I've had a few when selling on Gumtree and just ask them for their number so you can message details back.
If you get a time waster on a private number I just hang up .
The thing is there are people who won't answer a call from a private number ,I've even seen a few ads on Gumtree and the sellers say that private numbers won't be answered but as you say they could miss a call from a Doctor or a Hospital.
Another phone scam is when someone rings your phone so it rings once and hangs up before you answer , then if you ring back it's a high priced number that you receive an excessive bill for.
I saw a show the other day where scammers in India were making $20,000 a day ,all from people who weren't very tech savvy but the governments have now arrested them so it looks like it's not a good time for scammers ,I just don't understand why the governments have let them get away with it for so long,
I'm was still getting all the Gumtree scammers sending messages every time I put a new ad on Gumtree but a lot of the messages were only blocked by gumtree from me replying to to scammers messages so I had to log into my email account and block them ,then send them all to the spam folder this stopped all the old scammer accounts sending messages, now there is a report button in Gumtree messaging and I just report them all to gumtree and Gumtree blocks them but you still need to block them in your email account.
I'm still getting at least 3 scam messages every week on my phone ,usually click this link as your parcel was not delivered and the click this link you have unpaid toll etc. It's easy to know when a scammer calls as they always tell you to do something .
The other day a group of scammers were caught and they have a list of all the scammers and are arresting them all no mater what part of the world they live in, if they continue to steal from Australia.
So it's only a matter of time and the scammers will be arrested.
Hi Max, Yes the scammers seem to have dropped off of late, obviously they are being flushed out. I still get a few in my emails but they are so easy to spot, they are so crudely put together they just stand out so much, I can't imagine why they keep bothering to send them. The odd one comes on my phone but they to are easy to spot and flick. Hopefully they keep getting caught.
As for free range eggs if you are a person that has chickens you will know the difference quite quickly. First is the yolk color will be quite dark when compared to hen house raised chicken eggs. My neighbor once complained that the eggs was turning her white cakes orange. But these so-called free range eggs has a another tell tale sign of something not right they are too evenly color; otherwords, no variance between the eggs. Many are just while egg shells dyed brown like Easter eggs.
Here my eggs range from white to brown to blue/green depending on the hens. And even the none white eggs varies in color each day from the same hen. And I know mine are truly free ranged as they call it. THey are free to go anywhere on the property but they get corrected if they stray out of bounds.And boy they hate when they see me with the mop as they know I am going to clean up their act. I don't hurt them other than scare the heck out of them.
Hi AVB, Out here if you have chickens you will have foxes hanging around waiting for any opportunity. Not sure if you have foxes over there but I know you have problems with opossums
Too many Foxes here ,I snuck up on some in the yard then took a photo just before they all bolted off in different directions.
Always dead possums in my yard ,the fox kills more than it can eat and just leaves them to rot, same if you had chickens doesn't kill one or two for a meal ,Foxes will kill them all and probably eat one.
I think if I had my own Chickens I would tell the difference in the eggs AVB ,I have heard it's difficult to tell the difference especially if free range can just mean that the chicken had a small patch of grass for part of it's life .
