Better Beware!

Phone scammers who threaten you are now insisting you don’t hang up until you send the money; people have been getting mysterious packets of seeds in the mail, and phone apps from Presidential campaigns have big differences. Three things to watch out for!

Digital Assistants can be anywhere, are getting to be everywhere, and can be turned on when nobody realizes it. Ordinary language mistaken for a “wake word” can mean your privacy has just disappeared. Here’s what to watch out for. [English Majors: I dangled that participle deliberately. So there.]

An outfit called the “Freedom To Breathe Agency” is distributing official-looking but totally bogus cards that claim the bearer is exempt from facemask requirements. Don’t accept them, don’t use them, and beware of anyone who does!

Here are a couple of the latest things to beware of — parents take note! — and a couple of heartening stories about scammers who ran out of luck.

The Federal Trade Commission has just issued a report on the effect of COVID-19 on scams and swindles over the last six months. The fraudsters switched their targets and methods very quickly, to concentrate on the most lucrative con jobs in the new conditions of the pandemic. For instance – we’re all staying home a lot, and are easy to …

If you, or someone you know, has filed for unemployment insurance – watch out. There have been massive unemployment fraud schemes hitting states literally from coast to coast. The state of Washington has admitted to paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in fake claims. When claim filings in Washington shot up from six thousand a week to eight hundred …

Stalkerware is a program – a very sophisticated and perfectly legal program – that you can install on your cellphone. Or…and this is the point…somebody else can install on your cellphone. It’s a program that lets another person know who you’re talking to, see your text messages, know your exact location at any given moment – in fact, see whatever …

Today I’m going to tell you a story. Once upon a time – like right now, this very minute – there was an investment adviser in Rochester, New York, named Christopher A. Parris. He was arrested and charged last January with a massive securities fraud. Court papers charge that Parris and his cronies discovered an investment firm which was about …

Just because scammers are thinking up new ways to swindle you, with Coronavirus hooks, doesn’t mean they’ve stopped doing their good-old – I mean, bad-old Standbys. Duke Energy is warning of Disconnection Scams again – that’s where you get a phone call or email from somebody claiming to be from Duke (maybe with the correct Caller-ID), threatening to cut off …

Gee, you think we’d be safe, staying at home all the time. Well, that does make it hard for a stranger to pull you into a dark doorway, or a pickpocket to stumble into you and lift your wallet. But ironically enough, it’s actually made it easier for swindlers to work some of their games. The Better Business Bureau is …