My 23 yr old son’s text to me yesterday: “is this a scam?” With picture of piece of mail from a private company telling him he had 5 days to respond to extending warranty on his car or he may be subject to huge repair bills. I told him I get these all the time and while not necessarily a scam also not a good way to spend his money. But I was glad to know he thought to consult me as a scam detector when he’s unsure.
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For WA residents and visitors! Good To Go is a toll collector here in WA state and you a will get a bill by snail mail (and be charged extra for that) if you don’t have a pass in the car or an account. They don’t send texts or emails with links to websites other than their own!
Got a text like that yesterday. Pure scam!
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Thanks, @BunsenBurner . I just alerted my WA State kid.
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ICYMI:
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oh….that is so sad!
The NYT reported recently that some auto makers report driving info to insurers while never clearly disclosing to consumers they were doing this. People have had rate increases or been dropped due to this.
Now it turns out some apps on phones are doing this as well.
Information about driving habits is also being collected by apps that are only tangentially related to automobiles. You may already have one installed on your phone. Examples include Life360, MyRadar, and GasBuddy. They all have opt-in driving analysis features. Many of these apps partner with a company called Arity, a data broker founded by Allstate. Arity uses the data it collects to create driving scores and then sells them to auto insurance companies. Arity claims it has over 40 million “active connections” to US drivers
These apps track your driving habits and sell that information to insurance companies | TechSpot
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The toll pass charge scam is hitting the FL toll company (SunPass) too. They are also sending those SunPass texts to phones in my state , but we don’t call it SunPass here!
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AI Is Helping Scammers Outsmart You—and Your Bank
https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/ai-is-helping-scammers-outsmart-youand-your-bank-23bbbced
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Yesterday, I received a fairly convincing scam text but it purported to be from a credit union that I don’t belong to for a credit card I don’t have about a charge I definitely didn’t make. H wanted to call them and I said nope, no interest on giving them our phone number.
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I don’t think this is necessarily a scam, but do you ever receive mail/packages in a similar, but not your name nor is it the name of any previous owner?
Last week I got a magazine from Boston University. My first name. A completely different middle name. And then added a long second syllable to my single syllable last name, making it a long compound word. We have no affiliation with BU at all, and my kids are far removed from the college app process.
Last year I kept getting baby formula samples in the mail. My last name but a completely different first name.
Not particularly worried about it, but it’s weird.
I almost fell for this one, because it came as Punchbowl invitation from a friend’s email. I clicked on the invitation, but it asked me to enter my email login and password to open, and I became suspicious. I forwarded it to punchbowl, and they told me all of their legitimate invitations came from mail@mail.punchbowl.com. My friend later confirmed that she had not sent the email, and her email had been compromised. I googled, and found this on twitter:
Hey guys, BEWARE - a new scam going around as an email invitation from someone you know, from a company called PunchBowl. If you tap to open it a window pops up and you have to sign in to email to open it. If you do, it still won’t open and now they have your password! Stay safe!
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I posted about this one awhile back. Ugh.
Not a scam, but worth posting here. Burglars are using portable cameras to spy on people’s patterns of coming and going to plan burglaries.
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Overlapping this and the “You know you’re getting old” thread - I recently sat around with relatives from their 60s (like me) into their 80s and a major topic of conversation was scams people had tried to get them to fall for and people they knew who had fallen for scams. I’m glad that awareness seems to be growing.
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O.M.G. My father, a PhD who is in the National Academy of Engineering as well as one of the first American inductees in the Russian Academy of Engineering, just told me the FBI contacted him. When I asked why, he said he had lost $17,000!!! to a company that had said they could get him out of his timeshare. They said his family could be on the hook forever if he didn’t do it. Now he knows it was a scam and he’s quite embarrassed. He said he should have talked to my sister and me first. I told him that my husband and I have agreed we will NEVER act on anything like that before talking to the other. Ugh. TBH, that’s just a drop in the bucket for him, but it shows you how skillful these scammers are.
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oh no! did he loose the money?
Yes.
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My husband ordered a cheap lawnmower online. “It was a great price!” It didn’t come and the “company” ghosted him. Their website also disappeared! He contested it with our credit card company, but it may be a couple of months before we are credited with the amount. Ugh.
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Every time I read this I see more and more in the CC community getting scammed. Thanks for this thread @MaineLonghorn and thanks all for sharing these stories.
I stupidly used my email address for a receipt from Tractor Supply. My excuse is that I was rushing and it was right there, so I popped in for a few minutes. Anyway, ever since then, I have received so many phishing emails from all kinds of companies, including scammy ones allegedly from Tractor Supply, including this one today. If this is real, fire the advertising company.
I’m never shopping there again because they have some new policies I do not approve of, but I’m annoyed that they are selling my email.
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For years I used my real email address and so now I must get 5-10 spam mails per day. These days I use a DuckDuckGo onetime email address whenever I have to supply an email for a new online purchase or to sign up for an email list. It is generated thru a browser extension you install. The beauty is that if you start getting spam you just delete that email address. Info on how to set this up is online at sites such as How (and Why) to Use DuckDuckGo's @Duck.com Email Protection Unfortunately this doesn’t help with the spammers that already have my email address.
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