i forgot you had some too, yeah they’ve been doing some BTC adjacent stuff that has driven up the value the past few weeks.
I always knew monkeys will save us
Sorry if this is ignorant, but how much was the gas?
Investors predictably flocking to safe havens like btc during these uncertain periods
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https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/ct-bitcoin-atm-scam-state-police-17825279.php
Around the time Joe Samuels deposited the last of his life-savings into the Bitcoin ATM in a Hartford convenience store, he began to wonder if he’d made a mistake.
Samuels, an 84-year-old artist and Hartford resident, had found more than $20,000 in his checking account and been told to return it to its rightful owner through a strange kiosk. He hadn’t realized that the money had actually come out of his savings account and that the people telling him to deposit the cash were scammers taking advantage of the untraceable and unregulated world of cryptocurrency.
It wasn’t until Samuels called his son and explained what he’d been doing that the truth began to register.
“My son said, ‘Are you crazy?’” Samuels recalls. “And it clicked in my head, ‘Could this be a scam?’”
If not these guys, I think someone was gonna get that $20k at some point.
This week, three executives from Bitcoin of America, the company that owned the ATM Samuels used, were indicted in Ohio on charges of conspiracy, money laundering, receiving stolen property and more, after police found they operated more than 50 unlicensed kiosks. Still, Samuels hasn’t been able to get his savings back.
When Joe Samuels called Jason, his son, and explained what had happened, Jason immediately alerted the local police, who opened the machine and seized the money. Before long, however, they told Samuels that there wasn’t much they could do. The cash legally belonged to Bitcoin of America. (The Hartford Police detective who worked on the case said in an email that he would not be able to comment publicly until the case was formally closed.)
FFS
The olds really are susceptible to this stuff. My Dad is the most paranoid internet user I know. He refuses to open up an online banking account or buy anything online. Still when my Mom’s email got hacked and everyone on her address list got this very obviously scam email:
Do you order stuffs online or have an account with Amazon?
-(the long version of my mom’s first name that she would never use with me or my Dad)
He was about to purchase Amazon gift cards for her.
Wow, thanks for the tip about [my mom] getting her e-mail hacked! Because yesterday I received a generalized inquiry, seemingly from her, as to whether I ever ordered anything on-line or through Amazon. So I replied yes. And this morning I just read a response–again apparently from her!–asking if I would help her out by purchasing a $200 gift certificate, which she would eventually reimburse! And of course I was about to tell her I would! So you saved me at least $200–and who knows what else! I hope my initial response hasn’t exposed me to them hacking my e-mail account!
Sigh. The word “stuffs”, the long version of her name, she almost never emails him, and why the hell would she need help with him buying an Amazon gift certificate? None of those ever crossed his mind. Not even enough to ask her something only she would know. And he’s the most paranoid person about anything online I know.
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I’m surprised bitcoin atms were shady. They ask for like all your information if you try to use it for $600
if you aren’t in regular contact with your parents or other olds, you may not realize the sheer amount of scams that target them.
i normally get maybe 1 scam or something a month(?) i swear my mother gets 1 text/email scam every other day. i can’t even imagine adding in a crypto component to that for the olds that aren’t quite passed the technology interest.
both sides of my family have a history of dementia, so both my father and maternal grandmother fell victim to scams early on in their loss of mental acuity. luckily only for around 1k each.
On the opposite end of the spectrum my Dad doesn’t pay some of his legit bills as he thinks they’re scams.
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I missed a package sent to me by my company because the texts from the courier looked like scams and I didn’t know a package was coming.
I work in IT and years ago we started doing email phish testing - I’m sure lots of you get the tests through your work. It is insane how many people just click on emails. I think our first test like 30% of all employees failed, and these are people that work on computers for a living, it was insane. And allegedly 30% initial failure isn’t bad!
With some training and threats, we’re down to a 3% failure rate - some weeks it’s even 0%! The fails are still so very dumb - like someone will get a warning about their Spotify account and click on it. Whoever follows up will ask, “Do you even have a Spotify account, old person?”
“No.”
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I worked at a company where IT would send us phishing emails, and if we clicked on the link, it automatically enrolled us in a mandatory information security webinar
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Yeah - we do that, they go on a Clickers list, and they get mandatory training and phishing emails more often. We have to hunt, but some of the training is OK, lots of it is dumb. It’s probably the same tool - KnowBe4. It’s pretty cheap. There are some free tools within Microsoft 365 that do some similar stuff.
We’ve been running it for years now, at least 5, and only one person in the entire company of a couple hundred people (other than IT staff) hasn’t been caught - and we do some tricky stuff like design our own templates. I’m so proud of her, I called her out at a company meeting once, she was embarrassed. She’s a super heavy email user, too, close to retirement age and not a computer super user.
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our company makes it very obvious - like senders email is hunan.resorces@companyname.com - and a ton of people still fail it.
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What’s insane is how many legitimate emails look like phishing scams. My Amazon credit card changes banks every few years, and the emails they send out look shady as hell - links like myawesomapaymentco.tz
And for some of them, like class-action lawsuits, it’s not even obvious that if you go straight to the site it will be legit.
Don’t click on links! Unless they’re legit. How will you know? Do your research.
The university I work for does that. Sometimes they send out legitimate links to our retirement program or something, then have to send out a follow up email letting us know the first email wasn’t a scam.
I’ve actually called my credit union to verify emails.