Currently, I have no active email service. The agents typically don’t want to deal with account numbers, email addresses, “real” names, etc., so that “off” email might be legit. Maybe. Paranoia gets you only so far in a world of incompetents.

No one is going to tell me how a “master list” of email addresses got into the hands of a “fraudster” or what other personal information has been “hidden” on my machines. The system is opaque. I keep personal info in a little notebook, but after I visit a site, is something left on my machine somewhere? There are lots of games in “phishing”.

See, for instance, the case of the young woman sentenced two days ago to an 11 year prison term, plus ordered to make restitution of $452 million dollars.*

* See https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/elizabeth-holmes-loses-bid-avoid-prison-ordered-pay-452m-restitution-rcna84837

Yet, from what I can gather, it is rare for anyone in authority to try to track down, much less to prosecute these cruel scammers.

(I understand, though, that such scammers are very slippery creatures, move around a lot and, even if caught, prosecuted, sentenced, and ordered to pay “restitution,” have hidden, or spent the money, and quite often don’t even have “a pot to piss in.”)

At which point the phisher can hoover up the victim’s contact list and get addresses of people who may be more likely to fall prey because they “know” the person and are less suspicious.

This guy causes havoc and tries to claw back or prevent scams from succeeding. IIRC, he’s fluent in Hindi, but it might one of the other major languages of India.

https://www.youtube.com/@ScammerPayback

I haven’t been caught in an e-mail scam, but do check many of them out for their sophistication. One key is URLs. Big companies always have their own domains. But make sure that you look at them right to left (backwards), since that is how they are parsed. There are ways to append what look like legitimate addresses to the left. Usually, I first check out the sending email address. It had better match the domain name for the business. Very often, I find a gmail account, which get forwarded to their spam address, as a public service. Even that though can be faked, and if I am still suspicious, I open up the email header, and check it out. It’s possible to fake some of it, but that is a lot more sophisticated than most spammers can get. (Eliminating the hidden header information was why Crooked Hillary’s attorneys provided the FBI with printed emails, making automatic deduplication with the emails found on Huma’s laptop impossible – which is what was going on during 10/2016 with Peter Strzok and his team).

One important thing to keep in mind is that most large business, and all government agencies, will not send you email asking you to click on a link to change passwords or pay them money. If in doubt, access their web site normally, and change your password, or pay your bill, that way. And there are services that can review emails for being spam, scams, etc. I do so for my brother and a couple of friends.

@Charles: I miss getting phone scams, especially foreign ones. I love to play along or rather, bait them. I use two tactics. First is for voices with a normal English accent. I force an ‘elderly’ accent and walk down their chosen path, delaying to “go get” something, slipping in false numbers, etc. At the end I switch to my normal voice and mock them directly. Second is for foreign accents. They find themselves talking to Apu. The Indian scammers immediately go ballistic.

(Go figure: “scammers” isn’t in the auto-correct dictionary.)

@Snow: payola is why

I clicked on a bad link and got deluged with spam. It got through my spam filters, and it goes on for a while. It could have been much worse I guess.

Perhaps I’m naive, but I don’t know why anyone in authority never apparently makes a major, concerted effort to shut these operations down, they’re just not a priority.

I don’t know how common our experience is, but over the decades we’ve been the target of any number of scam attempts, a couple of times found fraudulent purchases made in our name (once in France–ooh la la) on our statements, had a cable account opened up in my name, and another in my wife’s name, with a different campany—all of which required many hours of time and effort, each time, to straighten out–and we still receive various scam attempts fairly frequently.

One fraudulent purchase, a decade ago, was for a bus ticket in Arkansas, and when I asked the fraud department person handling the case if they were going to try to find the perp they said no, apparently they were just going to fix the matter, and then let the matter drop.

In the case of the cable account opened in my name, it was never paid, went to collections and, out of the blue, we got a notice from a collection agency alerting us to this scam.

We found out that if you signed up for a low cost, basic cable account, the company involved just accepted your name, date of birth, and social security number as legit (the perp changed my name and DOB a little) and–as a matter of routine–didn’t check any further.

Fixing this scam involved a lot of time on the phone with the collection agency and cable company, hours filing out police forms, and visits to the local police HQ to generate paperwork to send to the collection agency and to the cable company.

We thought this was settled and then, a year or so later, this damn cable company send the supposedly settled, delinquent bill to yet another, different collection agency, and we had to go through the entire process all over again.

First time around, after a lot of sleuthing and a lot of phone calls, we actually got the exact street address of the perp, in another state, where the account was opened up, but in what seemed like a pattern, no one in authority was apparently interested in actually tracking him down, knocking on his door, and taking any action against the thief.

The most elaborate scam–apparently a classic one—was some twenty years ago, and started off with a large, expensive overnight letter, out of which fluttered two Postal Money Orders, each one made out to me in the amount of $750 dollars, to pay for me becoming a “Secret Shopper.”

Those Postal Money Orders sure looked legit, silver strip and all, but when I called the supposedly crack U.S. Postal Inspection Service, they were not in the least bit interested in pursuing those behind the scam, and the phony Postal Money Orders.

There certainly seems to be a pattern here, apparently low dollar amount scams are just not anything that the authorities want to put any effort into investigating and prosecuting.

As for online scams, many of which can turn out to be high dollar scams, the only people apparently trying to shut some of these phony call centers—many of them in India–down are private individuals, vigalantees, some of whom post what they do on Youtube.