Posted on 01/30/2014 4:23:29 PM PST by John W
Edited on 01/30/2014 4:25:28 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Same with my mother, age 93. She didn't fall for it either but it pisses me off all the same, picking on the elderly is despicable.
That's a HUGE tip-off.
Con artists usually don't want their victims to use the US Postal Service or a bank wire. That (especially with the Postal service) can be classified as a federal crime. And that means a federal investigation. Con artists don't want that, so they use Western Union and the like.
Are you saying that SBC Global is part of Yahoo, or the other way around???
I reset my password for the 2nd time in the last 6 months.
AT&T and Yahoo! merged in 2003, creating AT&T Yahoo!. This merger provided users with AT&T Internet service, including SBCglobal users, with access to all services that Yahoo! offers their members, such as Yahoo! email, chat rooms and instant messenger. My home page, where I can also access my email via web mail, is att.net powered by Yahoo!
I remember when the previous so-named AT&T mangled their Internet offering by not being committed to either a really good ATT.NET or to a really good other outfit it had bought - named Excite, and wound up showing that their lack of commitment to just one or the other made for a mangaled and mismanaged Internet identity.
The current so-named AT&T seems to be repeating the earlier one’s Internet identity and management errors. Maybe some of the same execs came over from the older one.
“My Mom had one of those calls. Shes elderly and played alomg with it. What tipped her off is he called her gran. None in our family call her that. She reported it to the FBI and BBB.”
About 3 years ago, I went to get my wooly locks sheared, and I was telling the lady doing my hair about these scams and in particular those scamming grandparents.
The owner of the shop had walked in and told me to come to the Western Union shop in their mall. She said that a grandmother was there trying to send money to the LA area to rescue her grandson from the evil LA cops.
I got the poor grandmother to calm down, and a lady cop arrived. The lady cop convinced the grandmother it was a scam. They contacted the LA Leos and apparently got the bastards trying to scam the local grandmother.
“I thought something was up when I started getting spam from myself. Ive since changed my password and ran a virus scan. No infected files of mal ware.”
BOL! That is so funny.
“This is not news to me.
I have had more than person with a Yahoo account, in my contact list, whose Yahoo account was breached and all their contacts, including me, began getting lots of phishing expeditions, pretending to be them.
Its happened at least four times in the last two years, and my contact list represenets a very small insignificant subset of America.”
The most creative one I got, happened 3 summers ago.
A fly fishing buddy is a fairly big name in certain flyfishing circles. He and his wife went to Scotland for a tournament. He had told many of us on his list about the trip to Scotland and a short layover in London on the way back.
Several of us got a panic email supposedly from him, that he and his wife had been viciously mugged in the famous London park. She was in a hospital, and he need thousands of $’s to pay for her hospital bill and their hotel bill.
The famous hotel supposedly had their passports and wouldn’t release them until they paid their bills. So he needed money for the hotel bill.
The email had a lot of personal data like first names, the trip to Scotland and other data they had gotten from his hacked email acct. Basically, everyone on his mailing list got the same email.
I played along with them and promised a Western Union cash.
They got all excited until I informed them that a Scottish cousin, a former SOS/MI6 guy with his Gurka buddy would hand deliver the money, when the emailers identified themselves to him outside the American Embassy.
All emails from them stopped at that point.
My friend contacted the London Police and was told that they couldn’t/wouldn’t do anything because no real crime was committed. He got a similar response from Scotland Yard.
Our Scottish friends, later, said that these scams bought a lot of money into London during a recession. So, there was no urgency/need on the London leos to find the guilty guys.
Good for your Grandmother.
Below is a severe warning by Comcast re not using Yahoo/ATT/SBC email system. This just came up a few minutes ago.
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