The one thing that’s missing? The fate of ethically-challenged dimwit Bayard (edit – and anyone at Belkin like him), who the Daily Background has since caught posting his own fraudulent reviews for Belkin.
Belkin Business Development Representative Michael Bayard has been caught offering to pay anyone willing to leave perfect reviews of Belkin products on Amazon, Buy.com, and Newegg. Even worse, the highly unethical strategy seems to have worked—almost fifteen pages worth of Belkin products on Amazon have perfect five-star ratings.
They met Rempel the next day with a suitcase. They said it had $10.6 million in shrink-wrapped U.S. bills. Rempel wanted more proof. His new friends pulled out one bill and “cleansed” it with a liquid “formula,” which washed off some kind of stamp. Rempel was told that process made the money “legal tender.”
Joe’s tribute band was booked by a man named Rodrigues Collin for a gig in San Francisco, but it turned out to be an advance fee fraud. Joe says he discovered that Collin made contact with dozens of tribute bands at the same time, so he’s contacting them himself to warn them. Here’s how it happened to him.
A couple days ago, we wrote about a fake company called Adele that was fraudulently charging 25 cents to credit cards. Personal finance site Mint heard about the scam too, and they reviewed their users’ records and notified them if they found a fraudulent charge.
These two guys somehow managed to make off with an $8,000 purchase at Hattiesburg Cycles in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, by telling the cashier that they were expecting their (fake) credit card to be denied, and to call a phone number to validate it. The catch: they gave the cashier the phone number to call.
This story from Jessica is a good reminder that scammers don’t care about the technology, they care about about fooling you. That means they’ll use whatever method is available—in this case, SMS.
Matt at SteadFastFinances tipped me off to a possible loan-modification scam running ads on network TV.
Phishing attacks are pretty cleverly designed, because they skip most virus checkpoints altogether and go for the true weak spot in human-computer interaction, the human. Lorrie Faith Cranor, a computer security researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, has been studying phishing attacks to identify new ways to fight them.
Kiplinger’s has an article that lists a few “financial meltdown” themed scams that are out there taking advantage of people lately.
Upon logging into his Gold Membership profile in order to view the classmate contacts … Plaintiff discovered that in fact, no former classmate of his had tried to contact him or view his profile,” the complaint reads. “Of those http://www.classmates.com users who were characterized … as members who viewed Plaintiff’s profile, none were former classmates of Plaintiff or persons familiar with or known to Plaintiff for that matter.
Shaun says his 80+-year old grandfather, Steve, is being scammed out of over $10,000 a month. It seems Steve recently hired a female gardener who introduced him to a “wealthy friend,” and now he’s loaning them money to pay for groceries, cable, home upkeep, and, get this, bodyguards to protect her from an ex-husband and son who to want to kill her. When the family tries to intervene, Steve says the family is trying to put him in a nursing home and steal his money. Shaun is at a loss. How can he help his grandfather, who doesn’t want to be helped? Shaun’s story, inside…
Watch out for a charge on your checking account for a charge from “MB Image World.” People are complaining that the porn site, that they’ve never done business with or gave their account information to, is fraudulently issuing electronic check charges for $39.99. If they hit you, report the item to your bank as fraud and reverse the charges.
Here’s a happy story from someone who bought a “Box of Crap” (this is what we call a box that looks new, but contains the wrong item or a used item, due to return fraud). Instead of accusing reader Ryan of some sort of crime, Home Depot simply issued him a gift card. Hooray!
Herman’s tale of eBay/Paypal buyer fraud is unusual because he not only met the scammer in person, he placed his item right in the guy’s hands. Here’s what happened:
Security researchers uncovered over half a million bank account logins stolen via a sophisticated trojan horse known as Sinowal. The data goes back to 2006, an unusual longevity for a trojan horse. Not mentioned in the news reports: who’s to say this is the only cache? [NYT] (Photo: Darcy McCarty)
Apparently, some group of geniuses has been calling people and pretending that they are from the FTC. They start out with some nonsense like “Hi, I’m calling from the Federal Trade Commission to tell you that you have won $250,000…”
I wanted to find out what Robert Allen’s “get-rich-quick in real estate with no money down” promise was all about, so when I saw a full page ad in the Daily Post advertising one of his free seminars recently, I went and checked it out. I’ll give you a full run-down later, but here’s the quick and dirty, and what I can tell about how the darn thing seems to function.
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