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A comment on my last rant reminded me about this.. one of the most hilarious trends/pranks/scams.. the number of people who fell victim to this is quite more than what I thought it would be..
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Every time management says "were now using SaaS product X, and they're giving a webinar so we can learn how to use their solutions to take our business to the next level!" — I can't help but associate it with Nigerian Prince scams.
The longer I'm a developer, the more I think vertical integration and inventing your own shitty wheels isn't such a bad idea.
Their generalized, overpriced seat-per-month service always boils down to "vendor lock-in, nothing can be customized or exported, integrations are a pain in the ass, and within a few months the bills will explode because of some overage fee".10 -
When I left school I decided to apply for a junior dev role. I received a call back later that day and they tried to sell me access to some course with the promise of a job afterwords. They gave me a website to visit to find more information.
I Googled the company and found that it was as I suspected a scam and that they had been praying on the jobless for sometime.
So, I played around on the site they told me to visit for a while and found a rather simple SQLI. I managed to pull the admin email/password (which they stored as plain text) the email address belonged to a Gmail account.
I tried the password for the Gmail account turns out the account belongs to the person running the scam. I find an email from the hosting account and you guessed it the password was the same.
I pulled the site down and replaced it with a picture of the person running the scam along with his name and the words "I'm a dirty scammer".
Then I sent all the info to the police (he'd been running a few others scams too) not sure what that lead to I didn't hear anything back.1 -
So for context, I'm doing an Apprenticeship in IT and naturally I've been put on help desk.
I've recently been given a phone on my desk since I'm trusted enough and know enough about our software that there's no risk to me accepting calls.
I get the standard ones, a number from a different country, poorly pronouncing a co-workers name, asking if they can speak to them. I give my normal response, "I'll just check if they're in a meeting and I'll get back to you" (which they somehow always are) and ask if they would like to leave a message. They obviously don't since they're usually scams.
Since Tuesday I've started getting calls from "BT Technical Support". I don't use BT. My company doesn't use BT. So, it's clearly a scam.
Yesterday, the same guy calls me up, Thomas he says his name is. I go along with it for a while, agreeing that I've noticed our network has been slow until the point where he asks me to begin to install TeamViewer. I realise what he's going to do so I ask him what the problem with our network is.
I hear him start to respond but he stops. He's got no clue what to say, so I say to him, "Thomas mate. I think our biggest problem with our BT network is that we don't have BT."
He puts the phone down.
So I ask you for help, lovely people of devRant.
I have a Windows 10 VM ready to go. I have a couple notepad files labelled as "Passwords" and "Bank Details". What else can I throw on there to make this guy think he's hit the jackpot without really causing too much damage?
Any ideas would be appreciated. <36 -
Dev Community
On Facebook groups- most are scams.
On SFO - strict.
On Reddit - Somehow helpful
On Telegram - 'nobody cares about you'
On Wechat or CSDN - They curse you.
On Dev.to - incomplete.
On Gitter - 'no body cares'
On slack - boring.
On Naver blog - somewhat helpful.
On whatsapp - crypto referal links everywhere
On Twitter - 'JAVASCRIPT bla bla bla'
On Google GRoups - classic
On discord - friendly
So far what I experienced, what about you guys?10 -
#include <rant>
Using angry standard;
Int main()
{
cout << "So my mom recently started "exploring the web". I'm sure you already know where this is going; she ended up signing up for a free trail of some diet pills with her credit card on some sketchy website. The website never sent any product but attempted to charge her card over $300 multiple times. My mom's bank noticed and froze the account. She has now opened an investigation with the banks fraud department and is awaiting response. I took the liberty of running a whois look up and found the companies website is held by GoDaddy and is hiding behind Domains by Proxy (GoDaddy's sysadmin hider). I'm angry that she's in this situation but I have no idea of how to uncover the real company behind the diet pills site." << endl;
Return 0;
}3 -
Had someone call saying "they are going to help me with protecting against the hackers". I played around for awhile until he asked what operating system I had. When I said linux the gig was up. He knew I was messing with him....2
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Hey! Heard you like scams.
Seriously, what even is this? I heard about this, but didn't think it would happen to me.
Also based on what they want to be doing with another person's computer can also double as a botnet too.
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There should be a NGO for properly destroying scammers. And I'm not talking about documenting the scams. I'm talking about having the resources to deny them service, find their identities and report them to authorities. Even meddle with their computers using malware.
These people are preying on mostly elderly people and stealing their money.3 -
Each day DevRant seems to be closer to being overrun with ads, many to scammy crypto services.
The question that won't rest, though, is this:
In THIS social network is anyone so naive or just plain stupid enough to fall for ANY of those scams? Or actually buy any of the crappy services?!?5 -
(pseudorant)
Any ideas on how to end with computer scams (fake Microsoft support calls, money flips and the other gazillion)?
I'm really tired of this. A$$#les abusing unsuspecting people, abusing our elders, shielded behind a remote control session.
I know that this is very I.T. I'm just appealing to the extremely powerful distributed knowledge of all SUPERB people in devRant.
Thanks and hope that this was not tl;dr2 -
Anytime I see someone put "future" and "AI" in the same sentence, all I can think of is spambots advertising crypto scams, or scams promising to recover the money you as an idiot lost to a crypto scam, or a betrayed lover who utilized our premium haxor services to confirm that their spouse did in fact suck off the entire Wu Tang clan.
To which I conclude: what future? It's even worse than regular advertising and much more expensive, a regression in nearly every way.4 -
My org (of which i'm basically CTO) has this administrative tool that a team uses to combat spam and scams, which is quite the problem for us.. the tool was written like 9 years ago, by my predecessor, very quick & dirty and unaesthetic and without input from those who would use it as far as interface or UX... it got modded a little a few years later by a kind of amateur coder who was at the time on the spam control team, and now there's this new maybe slightly less amateur coder guy on the team who has written this amateur tool that scrapes data off our site and massages it and stores it on his own server and then provides a better interface, or so they say.... this is all because for a couple of years people didnt want to "bother me" with a request to improve our internal tool, they thought I was "too busy" doing other things... so instead this outsider has built this stupid thing that lives on his own personal server and so now we have these problems to do with performance, security, privacy for user info, etc etc... someone please shoot me....1
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NFTs and cryptocurrency is a scam and it annoys the fuck out of me that big names keep pushing them... Especially people in software development that really should be able to see through the bullshit.24
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No, that Nigerian prince is not real and it is a scam, and no, I am not jealous and I don't envy you, you know what, it is totally legit ... I was lying ...
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So it's 5 am and a random Snapchat adds me. Of course I know it's a bot. I tend to answer these because i'm curious of how clever the ai has become in these scams. Still hasn't improved in like 5 years. Here I am telling this ai how shitty it is at it's job and telling it how it could be better by using deep learning to copy the way others talk and actually be convincing and then I think to myself, "well damn, why don't I just build a better ai." Seriously thinking about it. Ended up leaving the chat after telling the ai to inform it's lizard overlords I am for hire if they want a better trap.
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Just got another email from servíce@intl-paypal.com <zlvx... (noticed that “í”? Me neither) that says “[N3YywM] <https://amazon.co.uk... ” and it goes on and on...
wow, service? Seems important! I guess I should open it and click on every link!!! 🙄7 -
SMH at parents who fall for online scams, and won't listen to me, their computer science educated son, that it is indeed a scam and do not pay them $400 to fix a pop-up.
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Found this in one of the group's I'm in on Facebook. When everyone called him out on scamming people into helping him mine Etherium, he responded with so much word salad about entrepreneurship and blockchain he could open up a vegetarian eatery.
Very professional. I'm sure someone is gonna land a dream job on this one.
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!rant Just random thoughts
Funny things aside, our job is very important when it comes to influence people through ads, well presented "studies", quizzes and polls that contribute on people's decisions. I think we all have some kind of story that we can more or less relate to what is described in the article below.
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the...
It would be wise to think twice not only about algorithms, UX and implementation details but also about ethics. We should not have as our primary goal to make the browsing experience more pleasing but safer and easier to avoid scams and traps.
Your thoughts on the topic? -
March's Khyber Weather was out of ordinary
Phishing and CEO-scams continued in March with even more activity.
SUPO told in their annual letter that focused attacks are day-to-day deal against Finland and Finnish companies. Positive things being that functionality of communicational services was better than average and there were new guidelines published about IoT-products' minimal requirements in the Great Britain.
Source:
Finnish Communication Regulatory Authority
https://viestintavirasto.fi/kybertu...
Translation by:
@joas1 -
Use a product that is not the greatest, but does its job fairly well in the human capital management market. Anyhow this POS can't communicate very well with Azure extended end points via rest. FML. Now I'm building workarounds and I know this bs is gonna bite me in the ass.
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Even mac app store is not safe from fake deceptive apps by scammy devs!!
http://howtogeek.com/281849/... -
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