and I would so like to actually grab them all and dump them on an island in the middle of the ocean. They could scam one another then and leave the rest of us alone.
No, I haven't been scammed but an elderly neighbour was and it has rocked his self confidence. I spent some hours helping him sort the situation out yesterday. It has involved the police, another authority, a bank and more. In the end he has lost money sorting the situation out but, fortunately for him, someone at his bank queried a transaction that "didn't seem right". No, it was not right.
I do worry I will get scammed one day. Scammers are getting ever more convincing. Their websites are getting ever more sophisticated. There are people out there who, it seems, can do anything. I know more than one teenager who can break into a computer system. It's there. It's a challenge. They don't see it as breaking the law.
In the early stages of the pandemic though I was made aware of a much younger child who had been scammed. She had saved her pocket money to buy a present for a friend who was (and still is) seriously ill. She went on line to find what she wanted. She read everything very carefully so, with parental permission, she went ahead and bought the two desired items. Now the website looked completely legitimate. There was a street address for returns (which appeared to check out), an email address, a phone number and payment was through Paypal. It all seemed safe. The price was about what she was expecting she would need to pay too.
Her mother, proud of her daughter's willingness to save her pocket money and spend it on a seriously ill friend told me about this a couple of days later. She went to show me the goods on line - only to find that the website was not there. She tried all sorts of things. We were both suspicious by then. I suggested "try typing in.... and add scam." Alarmed she did so - and discovered it was a scam. She alerted Paypal to put a stop to the payment which, for some fortunate reason, had not gone through.
It didn't stop there though. The scammers sent messages that the goods were on the way. And yes, something did come. They were not what was advertised. I wouldn't have given them to a charity shop they were so shoddy. Other people, who also complained about the scam, said the same thing. The scammers tried to tell us that their "suppliers" must have made a mistake, that they dealt with thousands of orders and of course they would follow it up. They were very sorry and perhaps ten percent off the next order might help?
No, it wouldn't help. I dictated a letter and it was sent. The shoddy goods have gone in the bin and Paypal has, for once, refunded the money - perhaps because someone at that end has a young child too? The problem is that the same scammers are still at it. They are still advertising the same goods for the same prices. They are just doing it under other names and street addresses but, apart from that, the website is in exactly the same format. It's a very clever scam because people do get something - but what they get is not what was advertised.
I wish the teens I know would put their talents to stopping the scammers but I suspect that the scammers have sophisticated security. And am I worried? Yes.
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2 comments:
You're generous. I don't usually wish for an island for them. Just a nice piece of deep ocean with no land in sight.
There's been talk in some designers' forums on Ravelry about scammers who have used designers' photos or even project photos from Rav to advertise not patterns for sale but the actual item. Of course when the order arrive, the products are excessively shoddy and the website has often moved on to another address but, as you say, the content of the new site is often identical to the last one.
Yes. I keep telling FB about advertisements for "jigsaws" but they still keep popping up - and all they need to do is google the so called "company".
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