Sick of the unending stream of email and phone calls you receive from scammers claiming to represent your bank? Amazon? Microsoft? The tax office? The police?
We sympathise – we’re sick of them too, especially landline calls that could be a loved one calling for help or advice, and thus need to be answered…
…but that rarely, if ever, turn out to have a familiar voice at the other end.
Perhaps you’re one of the 40,000,000 or so viewers of famous science-and-engineering YouTuber Mark Rober’s video entitled Pranks Destroy Scam Callers – GlitterBomb Payback?
Rober makes some alarming but entirely believable claims of just how much money [a] a top call-centre scammer can make if they hit their on-target earnings and [b] just how much a typical call centre of this sort turns over each day.
If you haven’t seen it, the video starts with the words, “I have 100 cockroaches here, and I placed them in this James Bond-style contraption,” so you can probably imagine how things end.
Despite the not-very-threatening outcome when Rober later releases the insects inside a scam call centre where he has access to footage from the CCTV feed, the video gives a good visual indication of just how industriously and unrelentingly these scammers operate. (When not driven from their work pods by roaches, that is.)
Fake refund scams
The scammers in Rober’s video seem to go in mainly for what are known as “fake refund” tricks, which go something like this:
- Scammers “refund” you an impressive but believable amount, say $2000, for an “over-billing” for a product or service you actually use.
- They then “help” you login to your bank account to ensure that the transaction went through.
- They sneakily edit the HTML in your browser so the page shows a transaction for ten times the amount originally mentioned.
- They cry out in alarm, claiming they themselves must have typed in an extra zero and that they’ve accidentally refunded too much.
- Then they burst into tears, or turn on the emotional blackmail, claiming they (or you!) will be liable for the massive difference, so please, oh! please! won’t you help?
Their goal is to lure, browbeat, wheedle, threaten, cajole, beg and convince you to refund the “extra” money out of your own account.
After all, you can see the giant refund is there… except that it isn’t, because the item on the page is fake, with the HTML modified in memory to show a huge deposit and a vastly increased balance.
You’re scammed into thinking that they’ve made a mistake that will definitely get them in trouble, and could get you into trouble, too.
The crooks therefore hope to persuade you to help them “cover up” their mistake by withdrawing the “excess” from your own account and paying the non-existent “difference” back to them via some other channel.
While you might be sure that no criminal would ever catch you out with an apparently obvious trick like this, you’ll probably admit that, like most things, this sort of scam is only truly obvious the second time you see it or hear about it.
