A few years ago in a town near me here in Canada, an old lady was trying to buy a bunch of gift cards from the local Staples outlet. The staff talked to her and realized she was getting scammed and tried to talk her out of it, but she refused to listen and got angry when they wouldn’t sell her the cards. She left and went to a different store in town where the same thing happened. It took the local police to come down and talk to her before she realized she was close to losing a ton of money.
If you’d like an explanation/in-depth look at how this scam works, I’d heavily recommend checking out this guy’s videos where he baits scammers live with voice changing hardware and wastes as much of their time as possible. They’re enlightening and very funny.
Yes, they also do ones where they say they are from Microsoft and even make viruses that make scary red pop-ups with their call center numbers. Some of them even remote into boomer’s PCs with like AnyDesk or GoToPC and they like show them the Task Manager and find like a svchost instance and say “ SEE THIS IS BAD, WE MUST REMOVE THE VIRUS! You can pay now, use Google Gift Cards”
There are even some that make it look like they accidentally transferred money into the person’s account (they get marks to open their bank portal and they literally edit source in front of them sometimes) and then they say”oops! Oh no, I messed up! My boss is gonna be so mad! My family, they will go hungry! Oh please, you must help me get this money back! Do it with gift cards so they won’t catch on!”
Kitboga is a famous streamer who gets these guys on the line and does characters to waste their time, and it’s quite informative about the kind of stuff they do
A few years ago in a town near me here in Canada, an old lady was trying to buy a bunch of gift cards from the local Staples outlet. The staff talked to her and realized she was getting scammed and tried to talk her out of it, but she refused to listen and got angry when they wouldn’t sell her the cards. She left and went to a different store in town where the same thing happened. It took the local police to come down and talk to her before she realized she was close to losing a ton of money.
The scam is just someone calling and telling the person they need to buy gift cards (from other comments, presumably to pay a tax bill)?
If you’d like an explanation/in-depth look at how this scam works, I’d heavily recommend checking out this guy’s videos where he baits scammers live with voice changing hardware and wastes as much of their time as possible. They’re enlightening and very funny.
Yes, and it works with enough people for it to be an ongoing scam for a decade at least.
Yes, they also do ones where they say they are from Microsoft and even make viruses that make scary red pop-ups with their call center numbers. Some of them even remote into boomer’s PCs with like AnyDesk or GoToPC and they like show them the Task Manager and find like a svchost instance and say “ SEE THIS IS BAD, WE MUST REMOVE THE VIRUS! You can pay now, use Google Gift Cards”
There are even some that make it look like they accidentally transferred money into the person’s account (they get marks to open their bank portal and they literally edit source in front of them sometimes) and then they say”oops! Oh no, I messed up! My boss is gonna be so mad! My family, they will go hungry! Oh please, you must help me get this money back! Do it with gift cards so they won’t catch on!”
Kitboga is a famous streamer who gets these guys on the line and does characters to waste their time, and it’s quite informative about the kind of stuff they do