The podcast "Search Engine" recently had an episode about this [1]. One aspect that came to light is that while some targets will sometimes waste these callers time by playing along just to mess with them, they can actually be putting these people in harms way.
PJ Vagt (from Reply All) has a FANTASTIC episode about this. Give it a listen, it's one of the most interesting podcasts I've heard since the golden days of Reply All.
There are also scams costing people money without using iOS, for example where the person is tricked into thinking they have a debt and sending thousands of dollars in cash to a random address[1]. What’s your point?
A friend of my wife’s fell for this exact thing, and lost her life’s savings.
She’s not a stupid person; has a masters degree and writes children’s books.
Kitboga, Harvey Denttt, Scam Sandwich and numerous other youtubers seek out these scammers and use virtual machines, elderly voice filters and other special effects to lead them on, sometimes for hours. It’s very satisfying.
I wonder if there is a personal aspect to this, not just being scammers but also kinda creepy people / maybe already familiar with harassing people/ know people who will do it for them.
The theory is that by chatting with the scammers, they have to expend resources (time, which is money) in order to attempt to scam you. This won't convert and thus reduces their capability to actually harm another individual.
Sure. I've been scammed. It felt really bad. And I consider myself quite knowledgeable. On the other hand, I noticed what was happening before greater harm could have been done. Perhaps that's what distinguishes so-called experts from the regular folks. Because an expert would know sooner, without being impervious.
Long story short, I could have ended up with a subscription on a set of questions for 20 dollars a week, which was given only after a set of legitimate surveys were given on behalf of Apple. I of course notified Apple of this, but I never got the 20 first dollars back, before cancelling the "subscription" I had apparently signed up for.
I really wanted to track the guys down, but they had been very careful in covering their tracks with proxies and mailbox addresses, so in the end I considered it too much work. But I did spam them. Perhaps I could have even used their mail for even more spam, but I suppose they just use throwaway mails anyway.
Not sure how they got through the cracks of Apple, though. IMHO it's pretty damning for the reputation of Apple to work with guys like that.
I had an uncle actually get scammed and send money because of a call like these. He's a pretty intelligent guy, I was really surprised he got fooled by it. But goes to show how effective these scams are. There never seemed to be much interest from anyone in helping him recover his money / tracking down who did it. I also wish there was more action to stop this kind of thing, although maybe there's a lot more action than we think in the background.
This happens with scammers a lot from what I've seen. I watch Jim Browning and it's interesting to see how often a scammer will say "No, that other person was trying to scam you, do not talk to them, only talk to us" when they see evidence of a previous scam.
I just listened to an interesting podcast about these scams [1], but in this case they were mainly making outbound calls. The podcasters actually travel to India to track them down, and it's kind of crazy the way they run their operation.
What I thought was really funny was the scammers literally type "Zeus troan found" into the console (typo included) and people are falling for this and giving them money. Crazy just to let someone remote into your desktop though..
The videos have a pretty broad appeal -- even if you don't always get the memes he references, it's still funny to watch him pretend to be an old lady over the phone -- and you'll learn a lot about the way these scams usually operate.
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/whos-behind-these-scam...
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