Showing posts with label scam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scam. Show all posts
2012/10/03
Today in scamming news
They got shut down. I don't know if it's the scammers that have phone me and Papy.
2012/09/10
More scams
A scammer with a Indian accent just called me, CLID was 760-705-8888. The caller claimed to be from "National Hydro Regulatory something or other" and that he was going to reduce my "hydro bill" by 40%. The connection was really bad and laggy so I didn't get much out of him. He didn't seem to know what he was talking about. When I asked why he sounded so much like a scammer and if the next bit of info he wanted was a credit card number, he called me an asshole and hung up.
Had the connection not been as laggy and me less busy I might have tried to get more info out of him.
You now all have a pre-warning of this specific scam.
What's more, if ever someone phones you up, that you've never heard about, asks for CC info or pretty much anything and won't give you a call back number, well HEY IT'S A SCAM.
You now all have a pre-warning of this specific scam.
What's more, if ever someone phones you up, that you've never heard about, asks for CC info or pretty much anything and won't give you a call back number, well HEY IT'S A SCAM.
2012/02/25
The Frictionless Scam
When we were much younger, Dylan and I would dream up things we could do to make money with as little effort as possible. The goal is what I call the "Frictionless Scam." That is, you want no contact with the client nor with the police. So it has to be legal and something that doesn't require the client in the room with you. You want to cash the check, hand over the product and everyone walks away happy.
A good example would be computer-generated astrology or biorythm charts. Feed some random or nearly random numbers into a program, print out the chart, mail it to client and cash the check.
Another silly idea I had while stuck in a traffic years back was auditing vehicles for possession by a ghost or extraterestrial or something. Which would involve a box with blinkenlights and dials. Then you create a certificat that guarantees the vehicle is ghost-free. Now given that ghost don't exist, you would be pretty safe from a legal stand-point. But the fact that you have to do a show and dance for the customer means this isn't a frictionless scam.
Neal Stephenson came up with a great Frictionless Scam: plug an Eliza-like chatterbox into voice synth and voice recognition software to build a phone sex service. "Is it because of your massively erect penis that you came to see me?" "Enough about me, what are you wearing?" "Do my large melons excite you?" "What does this tell you?" (If you haven't played with an Eliza, you might not get the previous joke.) Of course, neither voice synth nor voice recog are up to the point where we can do this and you still need a large server somewhere with an expensive T1 to pull it off. What's more, in 2012 it would have to be a 3d generated web cam stream.
Now it seems that Print On Demand and Amazon have created another near fricionlessscam. Take some Wikipedia articles, edit them into a book, sell book on Amazon. And thanks to PoD, you only have to print the book if/when you actually sell it. And given that Wikipedia has good markup, you can pretty much automate the conversion from Wiki to PDF that gets sent to the On Demand printer.
A good example would be computer-generated astrology or biorythm charts. Feed some random or nearly random numbers into a program, print out the chart, mail it to client and cash the check.
Another silly idea I had while stuck in a traffic years back was auditing vehicles for possession by a ghost or extraterestrial or something. Which would involve a box with blinkenlights and dials. Then you create a certificat that guarantees the vehicle is ghost-free. Now given that ghost don't exist, you would be pretty safe from a legal stand-point. But the fact that you have to do a show and dance for the customer means this isn't a frictionless scam.
Neal Stephenson came up with a great Frictionless Scam: plug an Eliza-like chatterbox into voice synth and voice recognition software to build a phone sex service. "Is it because of your massively erect penis that you came to see me?" "Enough about me, what are you wearing?" "Do my large melons excite you?" "What does this tell you?" (If you haven't played with an Eliza, you might not get the previous joke.) Of course, neither voice synth nor voice recog are up to the point where we can do this and you still need a large server somewhere with an expensive T1 to pull it off. What's more, in 2012 it would have to be a 3d generated web cam stream.
Now it seems that Print On Demand and Amazon have created another near fricionlessscam. Take some Wikipedia articles, edit them into a book, sell book on Amazon. And thanks to PoD, you only have to print the book if/when you actually sell it. And given that Wikipedia has good markup, you can pretty much automate the conversion from Wiki to PDF that gets sent to the On Demand printer.
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