Celebrities and Microsoft will never call you. Checks from your great uncle, the king of Mozambique, will never clear your back account. Ed McMahon most likely will not show up at your doorstep with a giant check for $2,000,000.00 dollars. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Scams are all around us, most of them engineered to prey on our vulnerabilities in hopes one of them will tug on our heartstrings enough to make us pull out our wallet. Most of the scams I hear about involve money in some way and when they don’t it makes me more intrigued. Technology and scams go hand-in-hand due to the anonymity offered by miles of copper wire.
Years ago I signed up for an online dating site and almost instantly met a beautiful woman who seemed to have a lot in common with me. All of our interactions followed the online dating protocol of the day and I thought she was perfect until she asked me for money. When I first met her she Googled my name and unearthed a ton of details of my life, including me being a business owner.
“Jeromy, this is going to sound crazy,” a customer started a story about being conned last week. Apparently she was contacted by a famous singer who she follows on Facebook. The two of them exchanged phone numbers and have been text messaging regularly since. I asked her why she thought this famous guy would contact her and we both concluded he wasn’t the famous guy.
I’ve talked about being contacted by Microsoft, HP and other major companies in prior articles. Overseas swindling activities still prevail because the prey are suckers and continue to give them money. This con begins as soon as you say yes to letting them take control of your computer. If anyone calls you out of the blue to inform you that your computer is running poorly simply hang up the phone.
Publishers House (not Publishers Clearing House) is a current phone scam I heard about a few months back. This one starts by talking about all the money and prizes you’re entitled after you pay the entry fee which was lost due to a computer malfunction. Of course the name is close enough to the real sweepstakes company which makes the hoax seem all the more legitimate.
That rusty old Volvo you posted on Craigslist for $400.00 isn’t worth the $4,000.00 your great, great uncle, the prince of Mozambique, is going to pay. All you need to do is deposit the check and mail the difference between the sale price and shipping back to Mozambique. I’ve seen the checks and they look phony, do yourself a favor and use these checks to start your next fire.
Cons continue to happen because people let them happen. Callers from fake-Microsoft use qualified numbers that have been scammed before. Deep down my customer knew she wasn’t really being contacted by a famous star, but wanted to believe bad enough to let the charade continue. Everyone likes the fantasy of someone sending a bunch of money for a small investment, but c’mon!
Internet and phone scams are faceless crimes that anyone can mastermind and because of technology’s inscrutability it makes them too easy to fall victim. Use your brains and not your hearts to make decisions about where to spend your time and money. If you believe you’ve been contacted by one of these swindlers it’s alright to hang up or not reply.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can call him at (978) 919-8059 or visit www.LocalComputerWiz.com.)