Hello folks,
Today, I want to talk a little bit about something I don’t think we’ve ever covered on any blog or podcast. This is a term entitled catfishing spelled with an F as in the fish you eat. There is also catphishing which is defined with a PH as in the Phishing attempts we’re getting now trying to get information online.
According to Bad romance: catphishing explained they define both of these terms.
You’ve heard or read about some variant of this story before: Girl meets Boy on a dating website. Girl falls in love. Boy claims he does, too. Girl is
excited to meet Boy soon. But at the last minute, Girl finds out that Boy (1) had an accident and broke a hip; (2) has a very sick relative he needs to
look after; (3) is going away to a secluded place to “find himself”—you’re not the problem, he is, right?; or (4) (through a helpful and mournful friend)
is dead.
Suddenly suspect, Girl digs a little deeper. Girl finds out that Boy isn’t the dreamboat he portrays himself to be. Boy is, in fact, her female colleague’s
timid 13-year old son whom she met once at a work function.
Another version covers the PH aspect of catphishing.
Two months ago, Deloitte revealed that it was breached by hackers,
who most likely already had access to compromised servers since November 2016. Around the same time, a cybersecurity staffer at Deloitte was convinced to open a booby-trapped Excel file from a female friend he met on Facebook months before. Her name was “Mia Ash,” a London-based photographer. She was described as
lovely and disarming. She was also 100 percent fake.
Two other names were used in this Scheme, Robin Sage, and Emily Williams.
Something else we need to know which has happened to me. People have come to me on other social media such as Facebook or Twitter and asked for a boyfriend. They have asked me for information about what I do, how much I make, and the like. The most recent was someone who I thought I knew of in the disability community, according to the name.
I asked the person why we meeded to move to hangouts and explained that I’ve been potentially scammed before. They asked why and I explained. I didn’t think it was a big deal, but I knew that going from one platform to another without really knowing them first was a bad idea. Messenger allows for calls, so it wasn’t a big deal. What really tipped me off too was that they claimed to be using their sister’s phone, because their phone was broken.
As disabled people, it is important to talk to the person, not just type to someone, especially if we’re going to have a relationship.
What is catphishing?
Catfishing (spelled with an “f”) is a kind of online deception wherein a person creates a presence in social networks as a sock puppet or a fictional online persona for the purpose of luring someone into a relationship—usually a romantic one—in order to get money, gifts, or attention.
Catphishing (spelled with a “ph”) is similar, but with the intent of gaining rapport and (consequently) access to information and/or resources that the unknowing target has rights to.
The one with an F is to break your heart, the PH wants data
Malwarebytes Accessed May 19, 2020
I’ve talked about numerous instances, the one that sticks out is in podcast 289 where we have a person who started on Twitter and then moved to hangouts. They wanted me to set up a bank account, gbut yet asked for money. You can go to the the RSS feed of this podcast and search for that episode.
Catfishing media has been produced, often centering around victims who wish to identify their catfisher. Celebrities have been targeted,
which has brought media attention to catfishing practices.
catfishing (accessed May 19, 2020)
Why are you talking about this?
There is a very good reason that we’re bringing this up. Cyberscoop has an article that talks about this in light of today.
Gen. Paul Nakasone, the director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Command, is a busy man. He oversees vast, technical surveillance
efforts in the U.S. and abroad, while also commanding a military outfit charged with launching cyberattacks.Emailing random women from an outpost in Syria is probably not on his to-do list.
So when, Susan, a woman from the New York City area, started receiving correspondence from a “Paul Nakasone” this week, she wondered why the self-proclaimed
“head of U.S. Army Cyber Command” was trying to flirt with her.“I Googled this guy and I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Susan, who asked to be identified by only her first name, told CyberScoop. “And it was very flirtatious,
but I’m a married woman.”
The article goes on, and the long of the short of it, the actor is able to answer a question that was thrown at them by just “googling it” which “googling it” was termed before the turn of the century or shortly after it.
Meanwhile, Cindy was corresponding with a similar account, claiming to be Stephen Lyons. The emails were of a similar nature: flirtatious messages and
requests to download Google Hangouts.Susan alerted CyberScoop about the Nakasone email address after being unable to contact Facebook about the Lyons account.
There’s more to this facinating story, and I think people need to read the article that I read on cyberscoop which I’ve quoted some of. We all need to learn about this, and I’ve got experience with this. The article indicates that they’ll start small like gift cards and other items, and then ask for bigger items. The fact that none of these people ever called me, one threatened me with their attorney, and the other most recent dropped off after they said they’d go to their room and do as I said. It never happened folks, none of them. They don’t want to call, they want their money, and that’s the most important thing I can give you.
Someone is trying to catfish women by pretending to be Paul Nakasone was read on May 18, 2020 and portions quoted on May 19th for publication. Let me know what you think of this one. Has this happened to you?