Be informed!
Updated March 2, 2024:
Link to 2nd Edition March 1, 2018 in multiple languages of your choice:
https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/competition-bureau-canada/en/little-black-book-scams-2nd-edition
Hmmm? "Rob Peter to pay Paul'...that's been around for a long time..nothing new here.Investors, meanwhile, were in the dark. “We never had an annual meeting. We never got a financial statement,” Town says. As long as the dividends kept coming—Concrete paid out just under $5 million to investors between 2005 and 2008—nobody fussed. Inside the company, though, things were worse than investors could have imagined. “They were basically running everything out of just one bank account.…They figured they’d just keep raising money and paying back the ones with the money they’d been using,” Steven Butt, president of brokerage and property management firm Avenue Commercial, which sold a building to Concrete and continued to manage it under contract. The only difference between this and a Ponzi scheme was Concrete Equities had some assets. But perhaps not for long.
So the moral of this story is folks..if you smell it's a scam from the start..DON'T LEAD THEM ON pretending youAn Ottawa couple have spent three days leading on scammers who are trying to manipulate the couple into paying thousands of dollars to receive a lottery prize.
"[They were] so persistent, it's unbelievable," said the wife.
This kind of scam is called an advance fee fraud, in which victims are conned into paying taxes on millions of dollars they've supposedly won before they can receive the prize money.
On Tuesday night, Paul and Carole <name withheld) received a phone call telling them they'd won $2.5 million and a 2014 Mercedes Benz. The scammers told the couple they qualified for the lottery prize just by using their credit and debit cards.
"We immediately were skeptical of it, but I had time on my hands so I thought, OK, I'll just see what the scam is," the husband said.
"It was kind of fun for a while."
The couple were emailed a raft of official-looking documents, pictures of supposed former winners, pictures of the car and an invoice for $5,000 dollars in taxes and fees, the amount they'd have to fork over before getting the payoff.
The scammers also kept phoning back, telling the couple not to let anyone else know about the transaction and win, including their own bank teller.
When the couple finally told them they were onto the scam, other people called the <namewithheld> claiming to be lawyers, wondering why they didn't want the prize.
"I contacted the police and they have so many calls of this type that they just can't address them," said the husband.
Ottawa police say no legitimate lottery will ask for money up front.
"So if you ever get a call saying you've won something but have to send them money, that should be a red flag right there," said the Ottawa Police Staff Sgt.
... +101%!This story falls under the title: There IS NO FREE LUNCH!..people.
So the moral of this story is folks..if you smell it's a scam from the start..DON'T LEAD THEM ON pretending you
may be interested. They will continue to bother you with all kinds of nuisance phone calls.
JUST HANG UP IMMEDIATELY ON THEM.
... Online warnings about 1-800 number
It turns out that ITD 1-800-533-5964 has a lot of people concerned....
One that I concocted, but haven't yet used, is "I was afraid it was another one of those collection agencies calling"."Will welfare pay for that".
At first <M.C.> declined <R's> offer but eventually he relented, promising to repay the money she advanced. Rosanna wired $7,000 via Western Union. It wasn’t until weeks later that she found out that it was all a con – her money had vanished along with Marc Campbell
Of course she was brainwashed..she ended up transferring her ENTIRE LIFE SAVINGS (around 1 million dollars Cdn) to these fraudsters.At first the amounts were small. But money transfer documents provided to W5, eventually showed hundreds of thousands of dollars being sent to Singapore, England, Spain and, eventually, Nigeria. In hindsight, Ellen says she doesn’t understand how she was conned into sending so much money. She believes that she may have been brainwashed.
... and I agree with this as it constantly needs to be kept "fresh" ... how about you send this request at the Site Feedback section below? And what do you think about changing the title to read as "** Scams Alert!!! Station** ?" Only if the cmfAdmin is willing - pretty, please :tiger:Adminlease move this thread so it is more visible to be updated periodically.
Why don't you send in the request Beav? I am only the messenger.Beaver101;509569 ... and I agree with this as it constantly needs to be kept "fresh" ... how about you send this request at the Site Feedback section below? And what do you think about changing the title to read as "[B said:** Scams Alert!!! Station** [/B]?" Only if the cmfAdmin is willing - pretty, please :tiger:
... I almost fell - actually I did for that email phishing as it did looked very legitimate asking me to update my profile, hence, provide passwords, etc. ... until I realized it wasn't the real thing as compared to another email announcemount (missing a key) in which case I quickly re-changed my password ... hopefully, I didn't get hacked. How do you see the IP addresses of your incoming emails - is there a special email setting for that? Or is it the browser?The emails are really good. For me, they show up in my junk folder automagically. I never cease to me amazed by their ability to look legitimate. I can see their IP address but I wonder about all the people that get all that hidden from them.
What happens when we have octogenarians that are on email every day!
Q: I received an email/phone call from MasterCard about my account but it appears to be a scam or a phishing email. What do I do?
A: MasterCard will never solicit personal or account information from a cardholder and we suspect that the information you received is fraudulent. Consumers should always safeguard their personal information and refrain from responding to suspicious email/phone scams.
If you suspect fraud on your account, please contact your issuing bank immediately to report it. We would appreciate if you could forward the original email to stopit@mastercard.com so that we may investigate.
Anyway; IF you are on GMAIL and if you can understand all the goobly-**** in the message header, here's what you do:Finally, the popular Internet-based email services differ greatly in their use of IP addresses in email headers. Use these tips to identify IP addresses in such mails.
Google's Gmail service omits the sender IP address information from all headers. Instead, only the IP address of Gmail's mail server is shown in Received: from. This means it is impossible to find a sender's true IP address in a received Gmail.
According to Microsoft, every year more than 2.8 million Canadians get a tech scam call. Of those, more than 200,000 people lose money.