Even the Best can be Scammed, check this article out

Cory Doctorow had this toot boosted. Brian Krebs boosted it. It says:

BrianKrebs: Boosting Cory Doctorow (pluralistic): I wuz robbed.

More specifically, I was tricked by a phone-phisher pretending to be from my bank, and he convinced me to hand over my credit-card number, then did $8,000+ worth of fraud with it before I figured out what happened. And *then* he tried to do it again, a week later!

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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

Pluralistic: How I got scammed (05 Feb 2024)

1/
image: A credit card. Its background is a ‘code waterfall’ effect from the credit-sequences of the Wachowskis’ ‘Matrix’ movies. On the right side is a cliche’d ‘hacker in a hoodie’ image whose face is replaced by the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ Across the top of the card is ‘Li’l Federal Credit Union.’ The cardholder’s name is ‘I.M. Sucker.’

Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Here’s the thing. Even during our TSB discussions, I’ve never said that I, Jared, could never get scammed. It happened to me twice, with one credit card being changed with info and another a small charge.

I’m not going to say that Cory didn’t have any type of alerts turned on for his account because he may not even have that option. And, I’m sure that he looks at things on whatever schedule he looks at things.

But in the article, he does make a point. If someone were to phone you, telling you that this is the deal, and you’ve had experience dealing with something outsourced, you just might believe them. If I were him, I would ask if the bank had a way for him to get alerts so he could verify things, even if he got scammed. This story here proves that we’re all human and we are vulnerable if caught at the right moment.

How I got scammed ( is the formatted article. You don’t need to read the rest on that page if you don’t want, the article is the main thing.

Let’s be as safe as possible, and be aware. I’ll let the story tell the rest of the story.