Scammerama

Unusual to find a scam on LinkedIn, but I've seen a few of these lately.   Harry is an orthopedic surgeon. Do orthopedic surgeons wear yellow hi viz jackets instead of scrubs? So why is he working for the United Nations in Germany? And why does someone with ten years of experience have only four connections?   Where did he go to medical school? And if he is into orthopedics, why is he talking about being a neurosurgeon?   I'm pretty sure that Harry is a love Scammer, seeking to prey on wealthy women. That sort of thing isn't uncommon on Facebook. I get inundated with beautiful models who want to be my friend. LinkedIn isn't the obvious place for it though   I've reported him to LinkedIn as "Not representing a real individual" - we'll see what happens

Amazon offer a premium service called Prime.  From what I can gather, for $7.99 a month, you get free delivery, music, and movies.  Not something I want, but hey ho  However, enterprising scumbags in India want to persuade me to unsubscribe from it.  The phone rings, and it's Amazon Prime telling me that I am signed up, and if I want to unsubscribe I should press 1 An Indian girl answers, seemingly surprised to hear from me - I expect that most people simply hang up.  She introduces herself as Jennifer.  She tells me that scammers have signed me up for Amazon Prime for $39.99 a month and do I want to unsubscribe?  Yes please. She transfers me to "Simon", who speaks much better English.  He tries to talk me through the process of unsubscribing.  This involves giving him control of my laptop.  I don't think so, Simon In the bottom left hand corner of my keyboard, he tells me, is the Ctrl key.  Unfortunately I can't see it.  After...

Hundreds of thousands of people fall victim to scams in the UK every year. Many are run from criminal call centres abroad, where teams of fraudsters operate around the clock. One man in the UK, who goes by the name "Jim Browning", decided to do something about it. He hacked into a call centre in India from where scammers target their victims. Jim gained access to the recorded scam phone calls as well as CCTV footage exposing the scammers at work. What Jim did was illegal - but he says he wants to stop the fraudsters, and he passed his footage on to BBC Panorama. Watch here

So why are these guys getting in touch?   I say guys in the sense of young male people.  It's almost never an actual female.                               In Ghana the average.monthly wage for an agricultural labourer is $15.  So what rich westerners like me spend on a cup of coffee would feed a family for a week.  You might feel a bit guilty about that - I urge you, if you do, to donate the price of a cup of coffee to a legitimate charity like Oxfam - there's probably a shop on your High Street. The scammers will happily take any amount of money - I've had requests from $20 up to $11,500.  The usual request is $200 though - a year's wages.  So you can see their motive.  How do they get in touch?  In my case I am pretty sure that it's because I am active on social media.  They join a discussion group and lurk.  When someone pops their head above a parapet...

Okay, so if you are a teenage lad from Kumasi, Ghana, where are yo u going to get photos of some gorgeous babe with which to scam money out of some FOBM (Fat Old Bald Man) on the internet? Well, the Internet, obviously.  There's no shortage of pretty girls on the Internet.  If you are interested, you can do a search on their chosen photo using Google Image, and it will pro bably take you to some porn site.  I don't usually bother - because who cares where they get the pics from? Madly, some of them use their regular profile, and just stick a couple of pretty girl pics at the top.  Scammers, if you are reading this, just don't bother - it's a huge red flag. Others set up a brand new profile, blank except for a couple of pretty girl pics.  It's another red flag, I'm afraid, Mr Scammer. Haha!  Was chatting with a scammer and she sent me a nude photo, as they do.  But forgot to crop the Janessa Brazil dot com link from the corner!  Obviousl...

Well, another day, another beautiful model girl Engi Neer Feranmi Amos (Joy Russ Norwood) - I suspect that Amos meant to set up a profile in Joy's name, and screwed up, but didn't bother to start again.  Perhaps he didn't realise his mistake. Anyway, Amos is from New York, attending a modelling seminar in Turkey.  Do models attend seminars?  Perhaps they do, I don't know a lot about being a model.   She obviously has plenty of time to talk, or maybe she is just naturally loquacious: i know you will think what is a pretty lady like me doing on here. Yes the reason I came on to the Internet to find the special person who deserves all the love and passion that makes up my heart and soul is because I do not have the time to meet others out in a public setting, and the fact I feel you can learn so much about someone through letters, as a person has to take there time and think about the words they want to express,so it allows you to gain a better understanding...

I get a friend request from a friend on Facebook.  Hi, she says, have you heard the good news?  It seems that she has been awarded $100,000 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Sometimes from some unspecified Federal agency that is giving out large sums of money to random people for no obvious reason (because hey, that's how the federal government works, isn't it).  And guess what?  I'm on the recipient list too! All I have to do to get my money  is send an email to some guy to register my claim.  She gives me the email address of some guy.  The deal is, I've won $$$$  and I send $ to register my claim It's a bit odd, because I'm already friends with my friend - how come she is sending me a friend request?  And when I look at her profile, it's all new.   So I check - and lo and behold, my friend is wholly unaware of having sent me a friend request today.  We report it to Facebook, and after a few hours the ...