October 30, 2019 • 50 mins
The Internet can be a great place but it's also the host for some pretty sneaky scams out there. In this episode, we look at some common schemes to take advantage of unsuspecting victims and how you can avoid becoming a victim yourself.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Me there and Welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works in My Heart Radio and I love
of all things tech, and today I wanted to talk
once again about scams and hoaxes and efforts to separate
(00:26):
you from your money and or personal information. So this
episode is related to episodes I've done about fishing, and
I'll likely tread some of the same ground, but I
feel it's an important topic and while I have touched
on it before, it always pays to go back and
re examined this and to remind ourselves of how unethical,
(00:49):
dishonest people might target us and how we might be
vulnerable to them. Being aware means we're more likely able
to avoid becoming a victim. And I say this is
someone who has fallen for some of these scams before.
It's not something I'm particularly proud of, but you know,
it was one of those valuable lessons I learned. And
(01:09):
fortunately it wasn't a super expensive lesson for me to learn,
but it could have been. And uh, I thought, maybe
to spare other people the same learning experience I had
through experience, we could talk about this, and so this
episode was prompted by something that I actually encountered while
I was on Facebook the morning of the day that
(01:30):
I'm recording this. So I'm actually one of those Facebook
users who once in a blue moon, I will click
through on an ad. Sometimes I see ads for stuff
that I find really interesting, so I'll go ahead and
investigate it, And sometimes it just turns out to be
a waste of time, Like I'll figure out the thing
that was being advertised and what's actually on the respective
(01:53):
site don't quite match up, for example, and I'll realize, oh, well,
this isn't for me. Or there was one case where
I was seeing a preview for a show and it
looked like a spectacular show, but I didn't recognize the
name of the theater, and I clicked through and discovered
that the theater is in Seattle, Washington. Well, I'm in Atlanta, Georgia,
(02:13):
and those two places are not close to each other.
They are on opposite sides of the United States, so
it's not likely that I'm going to get around to
seeing that show. So once in a while I'll click
through if it looks interesting, but I realized, oh, you know,
I kind of I could have saved myself some effort
if I had just realized up front that this doesn't
really you know, this isn't really relevant to me. So
(02:37):
eventually you can get into some territory where things get
a little questionable. Maybe it's not just this doesn't really
represent what I was looking at, but this is an
actual attempt to misdirect, to to capture, to trick someone.
And what really gets my dinner up are the more
brazen attempts to scan people or to pull a bait
(02:58):
and switch. So the example that prompted this episode was
for a silicone mask. Now, as I record this, Halloween
is coming up. I'm recording this on October six, two
thousand nineteen, so these scammers are jumping on that opportunity
to showcase what are truly incredible masks. I mean, these
are actual silicone masks that are really well made, and
(03:22):
supposedly these online stores that are advertising on Facebook have
these masks in stock on their sites. The mask I
first saw was Belile the Demon. It's a silicone mask
of a devilish looking creation, and the silicone allows the
mask to conform closely with the face of the person
(03:44):
who's wearing the mask, so the lips on the mask
fit right around the wearer's lips, and that means you
can actually open and close your mouth and the mask
will open and close its mouth. It conforms so well.
It looks very natural, and the mask looks and credibly lifelike.
And they're great. I mean this, this Belial one is
a great example of how a silicone mask can be
(04:07):
a really amazing work, and uh, I was immediately intrigued
by it. The ad had a video of a man
trying on the mask. It was an unboxing video, and
he had the mask on a mannequin head and he
pulls the mask off of it and then he puts
it onto himself and demonstrates how well it moves with
(04:29):
his facial features. It was a great demonstration of the
masks features and mobility. So I was curious. I clicked through.
I was thinking, how much is the store selling this
mask for? And what I saw immediately raised red flags
in my head. So the price for the mask on
this website was listed as thirty four dollars cents, marked
(04:52):
down from around fifty dollars, and I knew immediately that
could not possibly be legit. I've seen masks in Halloween
stores that cost more than that, and we're not nearly
as sophisticated as this particular mask was. So then I
did a Google search for the mask and found the
(05:13):
actual Bellal the Demon mask on several specialty mask and
costume shops, and those prices ranged from around six hundred
to eight hundred dollars, so thirty five bucks would be
quite a markdown. Moreover, I found the unboxing video and
the review video that was playing as part of this ad.
(05:33):
I found it on YouTube and it was completely independent
of the store. The guy who was doing the video
had no connection whatsoever to the online store that was
advertising this mask. In fact, the YouTuber had posted in
the comments section and penned the comment that the video
(05:55):
had been appropriated for these scam ads and said, don't
believe what you see on Facebook, because those ads are
four masks that look nothing like this one. They are
cheap knockoffs, or maybe not even knockoffs. They're just terrible masks, uh,
and you're getting a bait and switch. And it proved
there was no connection between the video that played as
(06:16):
part of this advertisement and the actual product that was
being sold. Uh. And it's I'm sure incredibly frustrating for
him to see a video he made being used in
this way because it it sort of implicates him in
this even though he has no connection to it. And
I know that as a content creator myself, if I
(06:37):
were to come across a piece of content where I
appear to be advertising for something marketing something and I
never agreed to that, I would feel really betrayed by that.
Then I went a step further. The shop that was
linked through this Facebook ad had a contact page, so
I clicked on the contact page. I wanted to see
(06:58):
what was there, and then was an email listed there,
which was already unusual that there was actually an email
address where you could send a question or a comment
or whatever. But the domain for the email address was
different from the domain in the stores you are l.
So the stores you are l was one thing, and
(07:20):
the email address was totally not connected to that, And
that's another red flag. You would expect a legitimate business
to use email addresses that reflect the stores you are l.
You would expect uniformity across that, or at least an
email address of a parent company for an outlet, but
none of that was the case here. So I did
(07:43):
a Google search for the email. I highlighted the email address,
and I did a Google search for that, and up
came another dozen online stores that also included that email
as the contact email. None of these stores appeared to
be connected to each other. They all had different names.
Some of the names were really weird, like there was
(08:03):
one that was about yoga, supposedly, not that the store
was about yoga, but that was what the name was.
But they none of them had any connection to each other,
and that was another big red flag. Then I decided
I wasn't finished yet. I decided to use a tool
called scam doc dot com. That's s C A M
(08:24):
D O C dot com. This is a tool that
analyzes website u r l s and email domains. And
just so you guys know, I have no connection to
that service. I'm recommending it as a user, but I
have no you know, I don't know those guys. I
don't have any other connection to it. I just used
that tool myself. The tool assigns a reliability score to
(08:49):
websites and emails, and the score is based off of
several criteria for example, how long has the site been around.
Younger sites are less trub worthy than older sites, And
in the case of every site I checked, each one
of those was younger than six months, so they hadn't
even been around for six months. That's a warning flag
(09:11):
right there. Also are the sites details such as where
in the world it was registered? Are those details publicly viewable?
Do you know who the registrar is? Do you know
you know where it was registered? If not, that's another
big warning flag there, and that contributes to the reliability score.
So in case you're curious, the score I got back
from this particular shop that prompted this entire episode was
(09:36):
a hearty one percent, meaning the analysis tool concluded the
site posed a serious risk of being a scam operation.
It concluded that the site hadn't been around long, the
details behind who registered it and where it was registered
weren't public, and based off similar sites, the tool predicted
that this particular shop wouldn't be around for very long.
(09:59):
It was sort of a fly by night thing, which
is not a good indication that you're dealing with someone
on the up and up. Now, I reported the ad
as misleading and a scam to Facebook there's a little tool.
If you ever see a Facebook ad and you're thinking, well,
this looks shifty and I want to report it. There
are these little three dots in the upper right corner.
If you click on that, one of the options there's
(10:20):
to report an ad, and then you have different options
on why you reported it. So I chose misleading and scam.
But here's the thing. Now, remember when I said that
searching that email address brought up numerous other websites, all
of them similar shops to the one I had just visited.
In fact, many of them were using the same web template,
although they had different names. Well that's just a tiny
(10:43):
sample of the bogus businesses that are all using this
exact same tactic on Facebook. While I had reported the
original ad that I saw, and while Facebook would then
block that ad from appearing in my feed, ever again,
Facebook couldn't block all the identical ads that were registered
to different stores. So I kept seeing the same or
(11:07):
similar ads for this mask or masks that were just
like this one, maybe of a slightly different design, but
they were also high quality silicone masks. I kept seeing
these sorts of ads, one after another, and I would
go through the process of blocking saying misleading or scam
and then scroll through it and yet another one would
(11:27):
pop up. So this doesn't stop me from reporting the
bogus ads because I don't want anyone to fall victim
to them if I can help it. But it's very discouraging.
It's telling me that there are several people, maybe several companies,
most likely in places like China, that are popping up
(11:48):
and using this same approach to cast as wide a
net as possible to catch as many suckers as possible.
So I likened it to squishing a bug in a
room that's teeming with thousands of bugs. Sure, there's one
fewer bug in the mix, but there's still thousands more
to deal with. Okay, So what's actually at stake here?
(12:12):
Why am I so head up about this? Well, some
of these sites actually do sell you something. It's not
likely to look like the image or the video that
was attached to the original ad, but it's something. It
might be the wrong product entirely. It's almost certainly a cheap,
poorly made product, and you might chalk it up as
(12:34):
just a learning experience like I did in the past,
and you might say, well, I won't let that happen
to me again, and you'll think, well, I'm out however
much money I spent. But that's as far as the
the damage is gonna go. But you're still out of
however much money the thing costs. And nobody wants to
just throw money away. Maybe it's not that much money.
(12:57):
Maybe you decide you're going to eat the cost and
you'll just deal with it, but no one wants to
do that some. In fact, many of these sites that
are up there say they offer free refunds, but that
itself comes with a set of caveats. So I saw
one of these sites that listed uh product like this
(13:19):
and said refunds are free within the first thirty days
of purchase. But then and another part of the exact
same site, I saw a discussion that explained that all
refund requests must first go through a verification process, they
have to be reviewed by a team, and that you
have to submit your refund request within seven days of
(13:40):
having received the product. There's no indication of how long
that process is supposed to last either, So it may
be that, oh, yeah, you get a free refund within
thirty days, but if the review process lasts longer than
thirty days, then maybe the company argues, well, it doesn't
fall within that thirty day period, and so you're not
entitled to a refund. In addition, while the refund might
(14:01):
be free, return shipping is almost never uh an included benefit.
So in other words, if you want a refund, you're
gonna have to pay to ship the thing back to
where it came from. And because these items are mostly
being shipped from places like China, you know, primarily China,
you're looking at shipping costs that can be much higher
(14:24):
than what you paid for the product in the first place. So, yeah,
you can get a refund. You could send the stuff back,
but it's actually going to cost you more money to
send it back than it did for you to purchase it.
So you would be losing money on the refund. And
that's assuming the company actually refunds your money. So there's
no incentive to actually pursue a refund. It would cost
(14:44):
you more money than you would get. Moreover, since many
of these companies are overseas and again mostly in China,
there's not a lot you can do legally to go
after your money. You can't really hold the company accountable.
There's very little chance that the Chinese government's going to
jump in and say, oh, you're you're cheating people overseas
(15:06):
out of their money. Bad, that's probably not going to happen.
So the bogus businesses are protected and can generate revenue
by depending upon naive customers who take the bait, and
thanks to Facebook's algorithms for serving up ads, those ads
can reach a pretty big base of potential customers. So
even if you only get one bite out of a thousand,
(15:28):
if millions of people are seeing the ad, that still
adds up. And this brings me to another red flag. Though,
I think it's pretty safe to say we've established from
this example that I'm citing that it definitely was not
a legit business. When I visited the shop by clicking
through the ad, I decided I would also look at
(15:48):
their home page to get a look at the types
of stuff that the store sold. If all the stuff
on the store had been thematically linked, let's say that
they were all like Halloween or cost supplies, or maybe
even party supplies, I might have felt like it was
a more legitimate business that perhaps engaged in some bad
marketing decisions, primarily snagging someone else's video without their permission
(16:12):
to act as part of their ad. But instead I
saw an eclectic mix of products across all sorts of
different categories. They had wigs, not not costume wigs, but
fashion wigs. They had kitchen items, they had automotive items,
and more. There's stuff from you know, no rhyme or
reason to what was on there, the stuff from every
(16:33):
conceivable category, unless you happen to know how Facebook's algorithms work,
in which case you would see a rhyme and reason
to this approach. See Advertisers can tag their ads with keywords,
and this is important because Facebook can then use that
in order to serve the ads to the most receptive audiences,
(16:56):
in other words, to pair up ads to potential customers.
So your activity on Facebook and on the web at
large teaches Facebook what you like and what you don't like.
So if you've liked certain pages on Facebook or images
on Facebook, or you've engaged in conversations, or you've shared
certain posts, all of that activity is logged and analyzed
(17:17):
by Facebook, and Facebook starts to build a profile of you.
What are the things you're interested in, What are the
things you like? What are the things you tend to
ignore or or you seem not to like. That way,
Facebook can say, well, let's serve up the ads that
are most likely going to be relevant to this person,
and that way you get ads that most closely aligned
(17:38):
with your interests. So if you've liked a lot of
posts about cars, for example, you're more likely to see
ads related to car stuff. Similarly, if you've been browsing
the web for certain types of products, you're more likely
to see those types of products advertised to you as well,
due to web tracking tools that lots of advertisers and
web page administrators use. So if you're running a scam company,
(18:03):
one in which you send out cheap products for low prices,
but they're presented to look like incredible deals on high
quality items, it behooves you to have a wide selection
of crab to pedal. On Facebook, you can arrange for
ads on multiple categories of products. So some people will
get that Halloween mask ad I was talking about because
(18:24):
their interests happened to fall in that kind of category.
Some other people might get hair care products I rarely
see those for some reason. Or they might get automotive
accessories or computer peripherals or kitchen gadgets. One online store
might have dozens of ads running on Facebook, with each
(18:45):
ad served to a different segment of the population that
has been predisposed to shopping for those items, as indicated
by their online behaviors. Now, I want to be clear here,
I don't think the actual process of matching ads to
users is totally awful. I do think it tends to
be pretty invasive, But then I also think it's nice
(19:07):
to encounter ads that align with my interests as opposed
to seeing ads that have no real relevance to me.
I don't need to see ads for childcare products and services,
for example, because I don't have kids, But if you
serve me up ads for doggy toys, I'm all over it.
So that part I don't really object to that much,
(19:28):
though I recognize it gets pretty creepy when you realize
how well Facebook knows its users based on the massive
amounts of data we users provide every time we're online,
even if we're not currently using Facebook while we're online.
What I really object to is Facebook's failure to vet
advertising in any meaningful way. I think as users, we
(19:50):
each have a responsibility to use critical thinking and to
protect ourselves and I'll talk more about that later in
this episode. But I also think Facebook and other platforms
have a responsibility to be good stewards of their platforms
and to weed out scams that target users. I don't
subscribe to the philosophy that Facebook should be just a
(20:11):
passive platform that allows this to happen, because the company
is getting paid by these hoax shops to post ads.
Facebook is benefiting from this arrangement. It profits from the
whole process. To me, that makes them at least partly
responsible for the perpetuation of scams. I've got a little
(20:31):
more to say about Facebook's role in this, but first
let's take a quick break for you know, a real ad.
In the UK, Facebook was hit by a defamation lawsuit
by Martin Lewis, who is a financial expert who runs
(20:52):
a financial advice service. Lewis sued Facebook because there were
ads running on Facebook that feats Lewis's image or it
implied that he had endorsed various services with which he
had no connection. He successfully argued that these services were
profiting off of his reputation and his image without his permission,
(21:15):
and that Facebook was letting it happen. Moreover, after reporting
the issue, Facebook continued running the ads for some time.
Facebook responded by rolling out a tool that lets users
report ads for various reasons, including for being misleading or
a scam. That's similar to the tool I used when
I reported the ad, and I'm in the United States,
(21:37):
not in the UK. And yes, that is a positive step,
it's a good one, but it's also a reactive step, right.
It only works after people have either noticed something hinky
is going on, or they didn't notice it in time
and they were victimized, and then they respond to Facebook.
That's really too late, you know you you would prefer
(22:00):
to see an approach that prevents this stuff from ever
reaching an audience in the first place, as opposed to
reaching an audience. And now it's the audience's responsibility to say, hey,
this doesn't look right to me. So by the time
someone on Facebook actually takes that step, the ad has
already been served up to potentially millions of people. I
(22:21):
suggest that perhaps Facebook should develop some sort of process
to try and catch these things before the ads are
accepted to run on the site, to verify that the
party that's purchasing the ad is in fact what they
say they are and granted this is way more work
for Facebook, but it would go a long way to
(22:42):
improving the reputation of the company, which has been under
fire recently for multiple reasons, not just the dodgy ads
appearing on the site. Now, since I started writing up
these notes, Facebook has sent me a few notifications telling
me that their teams are reviewing the various ads I
have flagged as being misleading or a scam. Now, I
(23:03):
don't have a high level of confidence that this is
going to result in very much other than maybe Facebook
telling me to chill out. I'm fairly sure the review
teams won't take the steps I took to investigate those instances.
At the time I'm writing this, I must have reported
at least fifteen or twenty ads, all using similar video
(23:24):
many of them using the exact same video clips and
the same images, and all marketing items for far less
than what they go for elsewhere. And when I say
far less, I'm talking in the hundreds of dollars less
like the too good to be true level of a sale.
Facebook has posted some tips to help users avoid these scams,
(23:47):
and they include making sure that the posted ad or
corresponding product page includes clear details about the product, like
its dimensions or its weight, as well as its quality,
and that there should also be your photographs of the product. Now,
while fuzzy photos are pretty much a dead giveaway that
it's a fake, I also counter that it's very easy
(24:09):
these days to lift good images online and there's no
shortage of high res photographs of tons of different products,
particularly for stuff like the mask I was referring to earlier,
and so it doesn't take very much to steal those
images and then use them for another purpose on another site.
And you can always do a reverse image search as
(24:29):
a user to see if something you're looking at has
been nicked from somewhere else, but that's yet another step
that the user has to take. The onus falls on
you so that you aren't made into a victim. Another
tip that Facebook gives is that the seller should include
clear information about the amount of time it will take
to ship items to the customer, how long will it
(24:53):
take to get from door to door, and also whether
or not the seller offers up tracking information so that
users can track orders as they go through the shipping process.
Companies only list something like a dispatch time. That's another
warning flag. Also legitimate companies should have a clear way
to contact customer service. So in the pages I looked
(25:16):
at the morning and that I'm recording this, I saw
email addresses for some unnamed person who is supposedly the
customer service representative. But the email address didn't indicate that
in of itself right. The email address wasn't like customer
representative at store dot com. Instead, it would be something
seemingly random like l f U r Z three one
(25:38):
one at b E r Q dot shop, and it
has no connection to whatever the U r L for
the website is at all. That's not exactly a confidence booster.
In a couple of other cases, I saw an online
field into which you would type your email address, and
it would include a promise that a customer service rep
would get in touch with you, quote unquote soon. I
(25:58):
have no clue how honest that claim is. And in
a few cases there was no contact page at all,
so there's no obvious way for you to get in
contact with the company. That is another clear warning. While
these tips from Facebook are helpful, they still place the
responsibility of not getting scammed on the end user. There
(26:20):
doesn't seem to be much acknowledgement that Facebook shoulders at
least some of the blame here, and that the site
has to find a better way to evaluate businesses before
accepting ads from them. The company has stated that bad
shopping experiences hurt everyone, not just the user but also Facebook,
and that's true, so you would think the company would
(26:41):
have a pretty strong incentive to prevent these ads from
going onto the platform. But I guess that money all
spends the same, whether it's from a legitimate business or not.
And yes, I am bitter about this because I hate
when people get scammed out of their cash or their
personal information. Now there's an opinion and the Harvard Business
Review that I feel really gets to why this has
(27:04):
become such a troubling issue for Facebook users. The article
is titled Facebook's oversight board is not Enough, and it's
by Dipayan Gosh And I apologize for doing a terrible
job pronouncing that name. That's entirely due to my own ignorance,
So I apologize for that. But the article is really good.
It points out that Facebook's business model is such that
(27:26):
depends upon ads, and I'm going to quote a passage,
so here's the quote. The same model lies at the
center of the consumer Internet as a whole, and is
based on maximizing consumer engagement and injecting ads throughout our
digital experience. It relies on collecting personal data and on
sophisticated algorithms that curate social feeds and target those ads.
(27:51):
Because there is no earnest consideration of what consumers wish
to or should see in this equation, they are subjected
to whatever content the platform believes will maximize profits. These
practices in turn generate negative externalities, of which disinformation is
only one end quote. And in this case, the article
(28:12):
was more about fake news and propaganda and how Facebook
is incented to share that because it's part and parcel
with its business model. That wasn't Facebook's intent when they
built that business model. That's a reflection of how people
recognized how Facebook's business model works, and then they gamed
(28:33):
the system. By knowing how the system works, they took
advantage of it, and that's the issue. Now. I didn't
really go into other problems with Facebook ads, such as
it's shifting policies with regard to political ads, which is
a huge can of worms here in the United States
right now, But that's because it is really another kettle
(28:55):
of fish, I said, ken of worms, kettle of fish.
I'm gonna mix metaphors left and right, come at me.
Ultimately it gets wrapped in a bigger discussion about propaganda,
and frankly, I am exhausted over the concept of political
ads for the moment, probably for the next year and
a half. So I'm going to spare all of that
(29:15):
discussion for some future episode when I'm not as irritated
by it. Instead, let's talk about other common scam techniques. Well,
will slowly ease off Facebook here for a second. And
I've touched on this next topic in the past because
I remember getting really upset about it when I chatted
(29:39):
about the topic with my then co host Chris Pallette.
So this was an old, old episode of Tech Stuff,
and it's about hiring scams. So these scams target a
very vulnerable population, people who are looking for a job.
Maybe they are out of work and they're looking to
actually find job so they can make ends meet. Maybe
(30:01):
they're just looking for a better opportunity. They're in a
job already, but it's not a great one. They want
a better chance. Now, as I'm sure many of you know,
hunting for a job is exhausting, and it can get
pretty discouraging if it starts to take a while. And
I've been in that situation myself. I worked for a
company for seven years and that company then eliminated my position.
(30:25):
I wasn't fired, I just didn't have a job anymore.
That the the definition of that, and the difference between
being fired and not having a job was kind of
lost on me at the time. For three months, I
worked hard trying to land a gig that I really
wanted to do. I thought, this is my chance to
not just do something I can do, but do something
(30:47):
I really want to do. I had stars in my eyes.
Well that didn't pan out after three months, so then
I spent the following three months trying to land a
decent gig at all. I ended up working for a
company not that different from the one that let me
go in the first place. This was very rough on
(31:07):
me and my psyche, but I had been out of
work for nearly six months at that point. It was
really tough on me. Well, scammers know that people who
are looking for jobs are in that vulnerable space, and
by promising a little, the scammers can get what they're after.
They might be after the person's money, they might be
(31:28):
after their personal information, or they might be after their cooperation.
And one amounts to an illegal operation, and they're probably
not upfront about that. They're probably not telling the applicant, hey,
just so you know, what we're doing is illegal, So
the applicant becomes an unwilling participant of a crime. This
(31:48):
practice also gets me really angry. I hate seeing folks
who are trying to get a job be targeted like that.
Often these are people who can least afford the hardships
that could follow if they're tricked by the scammers. Meanwhile,
the scammers are profiting off people who are just trying
to improve their own lives. It is gross. So these
(32:09):
schemes tend to fall into a few broad categories, and
some of them fall into just outright theft. So a
common example of this is a payment representative scam. And
here's how the scam works. The fraudsters identify a mark.
This could be a totally cold call on their part.
You know, they're just pulling off email addresses and sending
(32:31):
out emails hoping to get a hit. Maybe they're using
some job hunting sites to have a more targeted approach
to their marks, or they might even post a job
on a site to see if they get any bites.
However they do this, it doesn't really matter whenever they
make that first contact. Here's how the supposed job pans out.
So let's assume you are the person who has been
(32:53):
targeted by these fraudsters. They claim that the company they
represent needs someone in your home country to handle some
financial transactions because for some reason, the company itself has
difficulty working within the financial institutions in your country. So
this is a company that exists outside your country and
(33:16):
needs to be able to process payments inside your country.
Your job is to accept payments from this company, typically
for really large sums of money. You're meant to deposit
those payments in the form of checks. Check comes to you,
you're supposed to deposit that check into your own personal account.
(33:36):
Then you're meant to send on a payment from the
amount that was given to you to some other entity,
and you deduct your representative fee from that amount. So
let's use an example because this gets confusing otherwise. All right,
So you have accepted the job of payment representative from
this company. The company tells you you get a ten
(33:58):
percent fee off of all the transactions you process. The
company sends you a check for fifteen thousand dollars, and
you deposit the check into your account, and the company says,
we need you to then send a payment to this
other entity. And you pay out thirteen thousand, five hundred
dollars because you deducted your ten percent your fifteen hundred dollars,
(34:22):
so fifteen hundred dollars of that fifteen thousand dollars is
yours to keep. You send out the other thirteen thousand,
five hundred and then the scam becomes apparent because the
fifteen thousand dollar check bounces. Meanwhile, you've already paid out thousand,
five hundred dollars from your own account to that person
(34:42):
that the company indicated. You're on the line for all
of that money. In the United States, the Internal Revenue
Service the i r S would want to talk to
you about that fifteen grand. The bank would expect you
to cover the amount of money you paid out, and
the fraud sters get away with your money and your
left holding the bag. It is a pretty awful scheme.
(35:02):
Another scheme is the re shipper scam. This scam seems
to ask a pretty simple favor of the employee. Your
job is to accept packages that are sent to you.
Then you either forward those packages onward to another address,
or you might even have to open up a package,
pull stuff out of the package, pack it into smaller boxes,
(35:27):
and then send those packages on their way. But this
raises a question, why would any company need a middleman
to do this? Why not just send the packages directly
to the customers. Well, the most common reason for this
is that the packages actually contain illegal or stolen materials. Typically,
it means the fraudsters have used stolen credit cards to
(35:49):
purchase items online and then they use your address as
the shipping address. You are then responsible for reshipping these
packages to some other destination, frequently to an overseas address,
where the goods will enter the black market and be
sold for a much higher markup price. By accepting the package,
(36:10):
you effectively become an accessory to the crime, and when
you forward it on those packages came from you, not
the original criminals. It's a way for the criminals to
get illegal goods to a destination while insulating themselves from prosecution,
and when the credit card gets reported as stolen, the
point of contact for those fraudulent charges is you because
(36:34):
you're the person that the fraudsters were using for the
shipping address. Yeah. I've got some more job hiring scams
to chat about in a second, but first let's take
another quick break. Okay, So the previous examples I gave
(36:57):
of job hiring scams that you'll typically find line are
all about involving you the mark in crimes that ultimately
rest on you while the real criminals continue their illegal activities.
But many job hiring scams are more about harvesting personal
information from people, often to do stuff like open up
credit cards in those those employees names, or to get
(37:20):
access to those employees bank accounts, or otherwise exploit them
in some way. And you might encounter these scams on
social media platforms like Facebook or linked In, or you
might get targeted by them in an email that's attempting
to phish the data out of you. The job postings
typically use a few common tactics in an effort to
get you to lower your guard and to respond quickly
(37:43):
without thinking too much. For example, there's often a sense
of urgency that goes along with these messages. That is,
if you don't respond quickly, the opportunity is going to
go away. Frequently, the job description will sound pretty simple
and yet could have of a really generous salary range
quoted as part of the gig. The message might also
(38:06):
state that there's no experience necessary, which, if you think
about it, undercuts the whole argument that you are the
ideal candidates, since if no experience is necessary, you'd figure
lots of people would qualify for the job. Another warning
sign is if there's no interview as part of the
whole process. Maybe the supposed recruiter says that the interactions
(38:27):
across something like instant messenger or email exchanges are enough
to forego the need to have an in person interview.
That's often a way for the scammer to avoid the
pitfalls of you getting wise and asking some tricky questions.
They just sidestep that entirely, and they appeal to your vanity. Oh,
you're so amazing, we don't even need to have an interview.
(38:48):
You're hired. Well, it's a very flattering thing to hear.
Often these scammers will say they came across your resume
on a job recruiting site. Sometimes it will be a
site that you've never even visited, or heard of and yeah,
that's a warning sign. Or they might even claim that
you actively applied for the job, and they're counting on
the fact that maybe you you feel like you forgot
(39:10):
about it, maybe you were applying to a lot of
jobs and so I don't know, maybe I did, or
maybe you're just thinking, oh, shut up. They this is
an opportunity, don't question it a dead giveaway in these circumstances.
If it is. If there's an email contact for you
to reach out to and the domain on that email
contact doesn't match whatever the company is that's supposedly reaching
(39:31):
out to you. Some scammers like to use recognizable, real
companies when they reach out. They know that it will
get more hits than if they just make a company
out of whole cloth. Plus, if you rely on an
existing company as your cover, you can trade upon that
company's reputation as well as it's pre existing presence of
(39:53):
the company online. Right if I say that I am
coming from X y Z company and it's a real company,
there's already a website out there. I don't have to
create anything. If you make up a company, you need
to go through some extra trouble. It's pretty suspicious to
come across a company that's using the Internet to recruit
(40:13):
people when that same company doesn't have a web page.
So scammers typically have to make a choice. Do you
pose as someone from a reputable company that really exists,
or do you create a fake company complete with a
website to help lure in job hunters. Those posing as
representatives for an existing company are often found out when
(40:33):
their emails do not match that company in question. They
also run another risk. You could always reach out to
the real company to confirm that a message actually did
originate from within that company, and if you get a
negative response, if you say, hey, I got this job offer,
I want to make sure that it's legitimate, and the
response you get is this is the first we've ever
(40:56):
heard of it, you know it's most likely a scam
making up a company can get around that problem, right,
because now you're controlling the whole lie. It's not just well,
hopefully they don't reach out to the real company because
there is no real company to reach out to. So
in this case, if you are the one targeted, you
(41:18):
have no other authority to turn to in order to
confirm that a message is legitimate. But this also requires
a lot more work on the part of the scammers.
Several years ago, a friend of mine was job hunting
and got an offer that seemed too good to be true.
So that was a warning right there. So she asked
for my help to investigate to make sure it was
(41:39):
a legitimate offer and not just a scam. You know.
She thought that it sounded like a really promising job,
but she was a little worried. So she forwarded a
message that she received and she sent it to me,
and I did some digging, and it turned out her
suspicions were very well placed. The company was a supposed
architectural firm that was looking to hire someone in an
(42:00):
in the straight of position. And I can't even remember
what the name of this fake company was anymore. This
happened years ago, but I do remember the process. The
message referred my friend to the company website, and so
I visited the website and it was pretty slick. It
looked nice and had a decent design to it, and
it included photographs of supposed construction sites that this company
(42:21):
claimed were official projects. So they're saying, you know, we're
responsible for building this amazing building at the x y
Z address, but none of this looked legit to me.
For one thing, the website actually looked a little template ish,
as if the person who had made the site had
used a web hosting service that comes with templates for
(42:44):
web pages, and then they built out a few web pages,
but they didn't go too much trouble to customize it
beyond the generic template. I also looked at the address
for the supposed construction site and I plugged it into
Google Maps to take a look at it from there,
and that presented a very different image than what was
on their web page, and it was clearly not the
(43:05):
same location despite the claims. That's when I knew something
was up. Then I did something that proved to me
that this was a total scam. I found a paragraph
of text that I found to be a little odd.
The wording was just a little off and and unusual,
So I highlighted the text and I searched Google for
(43:26):
that text. Now, if this were a legit site for
a local business, maybe one where the web administrator doesn't
have the best way with words, but otherwise it's completely legitimate.
The only response I should have seen from Google would
have been that one web page, but instead I got
seven or eight different hits, two different web pages, all
(43:48):
with the exact same wording. Going to those links, I
found duplicates of the website that I had just visited.
The company name was different from site to site, but
all the content was exactly the same. They're all located
in different cities, and they even all had pictures of
that same construction site, but the address had been localized
(44:12):
to whatever site, you know, whatever place the company was
claiming to be in. So there was one for Atlanta, Georgia,
there was one for Phoenix, there was one for Helena, Montana.
They all mysteriously had the exact same content, same staff
working for the company, and exact same construction site, just
(44:36):
in different parts of the United States. I alerted my friend,
who was glad that I had caught the scam, but
she was obviously discouraged that what initially seemed to be
a real job offer had turned out to be a trap.
Now fortunately she found out before it went any further,
but was still a discouraging thing to happen when you're
in the middle of a job search. Now. I'm not
(44:56):
trying to pat myself on the back here about uncovered
ring this one. It was a pretty sloppy attempt when
all things are considered too. I was able to go
about this investigation because I could think critically about it.
I care for my friends, but I was not as
emotionally invested in this opportunity as she was. I had
(45:17):
fewer blinders up because I wasn't counting on this being
a real offer. If I had been hunting for a job,
if I had been in my friends position, I might
very well have totally bought that scam, hook line and sinker.
The investigation I did was pretty simple stuff. It didn't
require any advanced search techniques. Had just involved looking at
(45:38):
the information that was presented and then doing my best
to fact check it. When things didn't match up, I
figured I was onto a trick and that's it. And
the fact that there were several duplicate websites told me
I had hit upon some sort of scheme. There's one
other type of job scam I should mention. This one
is harder to spot, but it's also a crappy thing
(45:59):
to do to people. And this is the old bait
and switch. This is when a company advertises a particular
position in order to get applicants, but then when someone
actually does apply and perhaps comes in for an interview.
The company reveals that the position that the applicant is
interested in isn't actually available, maybe it doesn't even exist,
(46:21):
maybe it was never available. Instead, they're offering a different
job that is available. Most likely it's a job that's
not nearly as desirable as the one that was advertised.
It might be grunt work for low pay. It's the
type of job that could be difficult to fill on
its own if you were to list it, so they
might not get any applicants if they had listed the
(46:42):
real job, or maybe they would only get people that
the company isn't keen on hiring in the first place,
So the bait and switch might bring in, you know,
a better class of applicant. And all it takes is
being dishonest to trick someone into coming in for an interview.
Companies that do this know that people who are looking
for a job might be tempted to say yes to
(47:04):
a less desirable position because it's still represents an opportunity,
even if it's for a job that they wouldn't normally
apply for if they just saw it online by itself.
Don't fall for this one, either, folks. If you wouldn't
apply for the job if you saw it listed online.
Don't take it just because it's offered to you. No
(47:25):
one will end up being happy with that decision in
the long run, and you don't ever want to work
for a company that depends on tricks to get people
to work for them. Now, I don't think I can
really go into stuff like multi level marketing businesses or
pyramid schemes, which are not necessarily the same thing, but
frequently an MLM can turn into a pyramid scheme. The
(47:47):
two can share a lot of qualities. I think that
is better left as a subject for a different podcast,
because it's not as dependent upon technology as the variations
I've been speaking about today. Once again, I gotta put
forth the argument for critical thinking. It's all about asking
important questions and looking for the most truthful answers. It's
(48:08):
about not taking things at face value and digging a
little deeper. This is particularly important when you've got a
strong motivation to believe the story being told to you.
If you have a predisposition to believe, you really got
to employ that critical thinking. If you're a person looking
for a new job, or you're someone who's really hunting
(48:30):
for a bargain, You're more liable to believe the lie
because lie is telling you what you want to hear,
So you've got to really use that critical thinking. The
motivation for believing is what these con artists are counting on.
Your motivation is doing the work for these con artists,
whether it's an ad on social media, a job listing,
(48:52):
or a crowdfunding campaign for a seemingly incredible idea. It's
always good to check your expectations and do some research first.
You may find that everything is totally legit and then
you're good to go, or you might save yourself some
money or your credit score, your bank account, or other
(49:13):
things that are equally important. So it pays to be
a critical thinker. And that wraps up this episode. Totally
inspired by my Facebook experience this morning. It's something I
really am very passionate about. I do not want people
to be taken advantage of. I want a world where
(49:34):
con artists don't get any opportunities and they realize that
they need to spend their efforts doing something else rather
than tricking people and making their lives more difficult. So
let's make it hard for those jerks, shall we. If
you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff,
send me an email. The addresses tex stuff at how
(49:56):
stuff works dot com. If you want you learn more
about the show, go to our website that's tech stuff
podcast dot com. We've got a list of every single
episode that has ever published. We have links to our
online store, where every purchase you make goes to help
the show. We greatly appreciate it, and we have links
to where we are on social media. You can reach
(50:17):
out to me on Facebook or Twitter and I will
talk to you again really soon. Y text Stuff is
a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For
more podcasts from i heeart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Me there and Welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works in My Heart Radio and I love
of all things tech, and today I wanted to talk
once again about scams and hoaxes and efforts to separate
(00:26):
you from your money and or personal information. So this
episode is related to episodes I've done about fishing, and
I'll likely tread some of the same ground, but I
feel it's an important topic and while I have touched
on it before, it always pays to go back and
re examined this and to remind ourselves of how unethical,
(00:49):
dishonest people might target us and how we might be
vulnerable to them. Being aware means we're more likely able
to avoid becoming a victim. And I say this is
someone who has fallen for some of these scams before.
It's not something I'm particularly proud of, but you know,
it was one of those valuable lessons I learned. And
(01:09):
fortunately it wasn't a super expensive lesson for me to learn,
but it could have been. And uh, I thought, maybe
to spare other people the same learning experience I had
through experience, we could talk about this, and so this
episode was prompted by something that I actually encountered while
I was on Facebook the morning of the day that
(01:30):
I'm recording this. So I'm actually one of those Facebook
users who once in a blue moon, I will click
through on an ad. Sometimes I see ads for stuff
that I find really interesting, so I'll go ahead and
investigate it, And sometimes it just turns out to be
a waste of time, Like I'll figure out the thing
that was being advertised and what's actually on the respective
(01:53):
site don't quite match up, for example, and I'll realize, oh, well,
this isn't for me. Or there was one case where
I was seeing a preview for a show and it
looked like a spectacular show, but I didn't recognize the
name of the theater, and I clicked through and discovered
that the theater is in Seattle, Washington. Well, I'm in Atlanta, Georgia,
(02:13):
and those two places are not close to each other.
They are on opposite sides of the United States, so
it's not likely that I'm going to get around to
seeing that show. So once in a while I'll click
through if it looks interesting, but I realized, oh, you know,
I kind of I could have saved myself some effort
if I had just realized up front that this doesn't
really you know, this isn't really relevant to me. So
(02:37):
eventually you can get into some territory where things get
a little questionable. Maybe it's not just this doesn't really
represent what I was looking at, but this is an
actual attempt to misdirect, to to capture, to trick someone.
And what really gets my dinner up are the more
brazen attempts to scan people or to pull a bait
(02:58):
and switch. So the example that prompted this episode was
for a silicone mask. Now, as I record this, Halloween
is coming up. I'm recording this on October six, two
thousand nineteen, so these scammers are jumping on that opportunity
to showcase what are truly incredible masks. I mean, these
are actual silicone masks that are really well made, and
(03:22):
supposedly these online stores that are advertising on Facebook have
these masks in stock on their sites. The mask I
first saw was Belile the Demon. It's a silicone mask
of a devilish looking creation, and the silicone allows the
mask to conform closely with the face of the person
(03:44):
who's wearing the mask, so the lips on the mask
fit right around the wearer's lips, and that means you
can actually open and close your mouth and the mask
will open and close its mouth. It conforms so well.
It looks very natural, and the mask looks and credibly lifelike.
And they're great. I mean this, this Belial one is
a great example of how a silicone mask can be
(04:07):
a really amazing work, and uh, I was immediately intrigued
by it. The ad had a video of a man
trying on the mask. It was an unboxing video, and
he had the mask on a mannequin head and he
pulls the mask off of it and then he puts
it onto himself and demonstrates how well it moves with
(04:29):
his facial features. It was a great demonstration of the
masks features and mobility. So I was curious. I clicked through.
I was thinking, how much is the store selling this
mask for? And what I saw immediately raised red flags
in my head. So the price for the mask on
this website was listed as thirty four dollars cents, marked
(04:52):
down from around fifty dollars, and I knew immediately that
could not possibly be legit. I've seen masks in Halloween
stores that cost more than that, and we're not nearly
as sophisticated as this particular mask was. So then I
did a Google search for the mask and found the
(05:13):
actual Bellal the Demon mask on several specialty mask and
costume shops, and those prices ranged from around six hundred
to eight hundred dollars, so thirty five bucks would be
quite a markdown. Moreover, I found the unboxing video and
the review video that was playing as part of this ad.
(05:33):
I found it on YouTube and it was completely independent
of the store. The guy who was doing the video
had no connection whatsoever to the online store that was
advertising this mask. In fact, the YouTuber had posted in
the comments section and penned the comment that the video
(05:55):
had been appropriated for these scam ads and said, don't
believe what you see on Facebook, because those ads are
four masks that look nothing like this one. They are
cheap knockoffs, or maybe not even knockoffs. They're just terrible masks, uh,
and you're getting a bait and switch. And it proved
there was no connection between the video that played as
(06:16):
part of this advertisement and the actual product that was
being sold. Uh. And it's I'm sure incredibly frustrating for
him to see a video he made being used in
this way because it it sort of implicates him in
this even though he has no connection to it. And
I know that as a content creator myself, if I
(06:37):
were to come across a piece of content where I
appear to be advertising for something marketing something and I
never agreed to that, I would feel really betrayed by that.
Then I went a step further. The shop that was
linked through this Facebook ad had a contact page, so
I clicked on the contact page. I wanted to see
(06:58):
what was there, and then was an email listed there,
which was already unusual that there was actually an email
address where you could send a question or a comment
or whatever. But the domain for the email address was
different from the domain in the stores you are l.
So the stores you are l was one thing, and
(07:20):
the email address was totally not connected to that, And
that's another red flag. You would expect a legitimate business
to use email addresses that reflect the stores you are l.
You would expect uniformity across that, or at least an
email address of a parent company for an outlet, but
none of that was the case here. So I did
(07:43):
a Google search for the email. I highlighted the email address,
and I did a Google search for that, and up
came another dozen online stores that also included that email
as the contact email. None of these stores appeared to
be connected to each other. They all had different names.
Some of the names were really weird, like there was
(08:03):
one that was about yoga, supposedly, not that the store
was about yoga, but that was what the name was.
But they none of them had any connection to each other,
and that was another big red flag. Then I decided
I wasn't finished yet. I decided to use a tool
called scam doc dot com. That's s C A M
(08:24):
D O C dot com. This is a tool that
analyzes website u r l s and email domains. And
just so you guys know, I have no connection to
that service. I'm recommending it as a user, but I
have no you know, I don't know those guys. I
don't have any other connection to it. I just used
that tool myself. The tool assigns a reliability score to
(08:49):
websites and emails, and the score is based off of
several criteria for example, how long has the site been around.
Younger sites are less trub worthy than older sites, And
in the case of every site I checked, each one
of those was younger than six months, so they hadn't
even been around for six months. That's a warning flag
(09:11):
right there. Also are the sites details such as where
in the world it was registered? Are those details publicly viewable?
Do you know who the registrar is? Do you know
you know where it was registered? If not, that's another
big warning flag there, and that contributes to the reliability score.
So in case you're curious, the score I got back
from this particular shop that prompted this entire episode was
(09:36):
a hearty one percent, meaning the analysis tool concluded the
site posed a serious risk of being a scam operation.
It concluded that the site hadn't been around long, the
details behind who registered it and where it was registered
weren't public, and based off similar sites, the tool predicted
that this particular shop wouldn't be around for very long.
(09:59):
It was sort of a fly by night thing, which
is not a good indication that you're dealing with someone
on the up and up. Now, I reported the ad
as misleading and a scam to Facebook there's a little tool.
If you ever see a Facebook ad and you're thinking, well,
this looks shifty and I want to report it. There
are these little three dots in the upper right corner.
If you click on that, one of the options there's
(10:20):
to report an ad, and then you have different options
on why you reported it. So I chose misleading and scam.
But here's the thing. Now, remember when I said that
searching that email address brought up numerous other websites, all
of them similar shops to the one I had just visited.
In fact, many of them were using the same web template,
although they had different names. Well that's just a tiny
(10:43):
sample of the bogus businesses that are all using this
exact same tactic on Facebook. While I had reported the
original ad that I saw, and while Facebook would then
block that ad from appearing in my feed, ever again,
Facebook couldn't block all the identical ads that were registered
to different stores. So I kept seeing the same or
(11:07):
similar ads for this mask or masks that were just
like this one, maybe of a slightly different design, but
they were also high quality silicone masks. I kept seeing
these sorts of ads, one after another, and I would
go through the process of blocking saying misleading or scam
and then scroll through it and yet another one would
(11:27):
pop up. So this doesn't stop me from reporting the
bogus ads because I don't want anyone to fall victim
to them if I can help it. But it's very discouraging.
It's telling me that there are several people, maybe several companies,
most likely in places like China, that are popping up
(11:48):
and using this same approach to cast as wide a
net as possible to catch as many suckers as possible.
So I likened it to squishing a bug in a
room that's teeming with thousands of bugs. Sure, there's one
fewer bug in the mix, but there's still thousands more
to deal with. Okay, So what's actually at stake here?
(12:12):
Why am I so head up about this? Well, some
of these sites actually do sell you something. It's not
likely to look like the image or the video that
was attached to the original ad, but it's something. It
might be the wrong product entirely. It's almost certainly a cheap,
poorly made product, and you might chalk it up as
(12:34):
just a learning experience like I did in the past,
and you might say, well, I won't let that happen
to me again, and you'll think, well, I'm out however
much money I spent. But that's as far as the
the damage is gonna go. But you're still out of
however much money the thing costs. And nobody wants to
just throw money away. Maybe it's not that much money.
(12:57):
Maybe you decide you're going to eat the cost and
you'll just deal with it, but no one wants to
do that some. In fact, many of these sites that
are up there say they offer free refunds, but that
itself comes with a set of caveats. So I saw
one of these sites that listed uh product like this
(13:19):
and said refunds are free within the first thirty days
of purchase. But then and another part of the exact
same site, I saw a discussion that explained that all
refund requests must first go through a verification process, they
have to be reviewed by a team, and that you
have to submit your refund request within seven days of
(13:40):
having received the product. There's no indication of how long
that process is supposed to last either, So it may
be that, oh, yeah, you get a free refund within
thirty days, but if the review process lasts longer than
thirty days, then maybe the company argues, well, it doesn't
fall within that thirty day period, and so you're not
entitled to a refund. In addition, while the refund might
(14:01):
be free, return shipping is almost never uh an included benefit.
So in other words, if you want a refund, you're
gonna have to pay to ship the thing back to
where it came from. And because these items are mostly
being shipped from places like China, you know, primarily China,
you're looking at shipping costs that can be much higher
(14:24):
than what you paid for the product in the first place. So, yeah,
you can get a refund. You could send the stuff back,
but it's actually going to cost you more money to
send it back than it did for you to purchase it.
So you would be losing money on the refund. And
that's assuming the company actually refunds your money. So there's
no incentive to actually pursue a refund. It would cost
(14:44):
you more money than you would get. Moreover, since many
of these companies are overseas and again mostly in China,
there's not a lot you can do legally to go
after your money. You can't really hold the company accountable.
There's very little chance that the Chinese government's going to
jump in and say, oh, you're you're cheating people overseas
(15:06):
out of their money. Bad, that's probably not going to happen.
So the bogus businesses are protected and can generate revenue
by depending upon naive customers who take the bait, and
thanks to Facebook's algorithms for serving up ads, those ads
can reach a pretty big base of potential customers. So
even if you only get one bite out of a thousand,
(15:28):
if millions of people are seeing the ad, that still
adds up. And this brings me to another red flag. Though,
I think it's pretty safe to say we've established from
this example that I'm citing that it definitely was not
a legit business. When I visited the shop by clicking
through the ad, I decided I would also look at
(15:48):
their home page to get a look at the types
of stuff that the store sold. If all the stuff
on the store had been thematically linked, let's say that
they were all like Halloween or cost supplies, or maybe
even party supplies, I might have felt like it was
a more legitimate business that perhaps engaged in some bad
marketing decisions, primarily snagging someone else's video without their permission
(16:12):
to act as part of their ad. But instead I
saw an eclectic mix of products across all sorts of
different categories. They had wigs, not not costume wigs, but
fashion wigs. They had kitchen items, they had automotive items,
and more. There's stuff from you know, no rhyme or
reason to what was on there, the stuff from every
(16:33):
conceivable category, unless you happen to know how Facebook's algorithms work,
in which case you would see a rhyme and reason
to this approach. See Advertisers can tag their ads with keywords,
and this is important because Facebook can then use that
in order to serve the ads to the most receptive audiences,
(16:56):
in other words, to pair up ads to potential customers.
So your activity on Facebook and on the web at
large teaches Facebook what you like and what you don't like.
So if you've liked certain pages on Facebook or images
on Facebook, or you've engaged in conversations, or you've shared
certain posts, all of that activity is logged and analyzed
(17:17):
by Facebook, and Facebook starts to build a profile of you.
What are the things you're interested in, What are the
things you like? What are the things you tend to
ignore or or you seem not to like. That way,
Facebook can say, well, let's serve up the ads that
are most likely going to be relevant to this person,
and that way you get ads that most closely aligned
(17:38):
with your interests. So if you've liked a lot of
posts about cars, for example, you're more likely to see
ads related to car stuff. Similarly, if you've been browsing
the web for certain types of products, you're more likely
to see those types of products advertised to you as well,
due to web tracking tools that lots of advertisers and
web page administrators use. So if you're running a scam company,
(18:03):
one in which you send out cheap products for low prices,
but they're presented to look like incredible deals on high
quality items, it behooves you to have a wide selection
of crab to pedal. On Facebook, you can arrange for
ads on multiple categories of products. So some people will
get that Halloween mask ad I was talking about because
(18:24):
their interests happened to fall in that kind of category.
Some other people might get hair care products I rarely
see those for some reason. Or they might get automotive
accessories or computer peripherals or kitchen gadgets. One online store
might have dozens of ads running on Facebook, with each
(18:45):
ad served to a different segment of the population that
has been predisposed to shopping for those items, as indicated
by their online behaviors. Now, I want to be clear here,
I don't think the actual process of matching ads to
users is totally awful. I do think it tends to
be pretty invasive, But then I also think it's nice
(19:07):
to encounter ads that align with my interests as opposed
to seeing ads that have no real relevance to me.
I don't need to see ads for childcare products and services,
for example, because I don't have kids, But if you
serve me up ads for doggy toys, I'm all over it.
So that part I don't really object to that much,
(19:28):
though I recognize it gets pretty creepy when you realize
how well Facebook knows its users based on the massive
amounts of data we users provide every time we're online,
even if we're not currently using Facebook while we're online.
What I really object to is Facebook's failure to vet
advertising in any meaningful way. I think as users, we
(19:50):
each have a responsibility to use critical thinking and to
protect ourselves and I'll talk more about that later in
this episode. But I also think Facebook and other platforms
have a responsibility to be good stewards of their platforms
and to weed out scams that target users. I don't
subscribe to the philosophy that Facebook should be just a
(20:11):
passive platform that allows this to happen, because the company
is getting paid by these hoax shops to post ads.
Facebook is benefiting from this arrangement. It profits from the
whole process. To me, that makes them at least partly
responsible for the perpetuation of scams. I've got a little
(20:31):
more to say about Facebook's role in this, but first
let's take a quick break for you know, a real ad.
In the UK, Facebook was hit by a defamation lawsuit
by Martin Lewis, who is a financial expert who runs
(20:52):
a financial advice service. Lewis sued Facebook because there were
ads running on Facebook that feats Lewis's image or it
implied that he had endorsed various services with which he
had no connection. He successfully argued that these services were
profiting off of his reputation and his image without his permission,
(21:15):
and that Facebook was letting it happen. Moreover, after reporting
the issue, Facebook continued running the ads for some time.
Facebook responded by rolling out a tool that lets users
report ads for various reasons, including for being misleading or
a scam. That's similar to the tool I used when
I reported the ad, and I'm in the United States,
(21:37):
not in the UK. And yes, that is a positive step,
it's a good one, but it's also a reactive step, right.
It only works after people have either noticed something hinky
is going on, or they didn't notice it in time
and they were victimized, and then they respond to Facebook.
That's really too late, you know you you would prefer
(22:00):
to see an approach that prevents this stuff from ever
reaching an audience in the first place, as opposed to
reaching an audience. And now it's the audience's responsibility to say, hey,
this doesn't look right to me. So by the time
someone on Facebook actually takes that step, the ad has
already been served up to potentially millions of people. I
(22:21):
suggest that perhaps Facebook should develop some sort of process
to try and catch these things before the ads are
accepted to run on the site, to verify that the
party that's purchasing the ad is in fact what they
say they are and granted this is way more work
for Facebook, but it would go a long way to
(22:42):
improving the reputation of the company, which has been under
fire recently for multiple reasons, not just the dodgy ads
appearing on the site. Now, since I started writing up
these notes, Facebook has sent me a few notifications telling
me that their teams are reviewing the various ads I
have flagged as being misleading or a scam. Now, I
(23:03):
don't have a high level of confidence that this is
going to result in very much other than maybe Facebook
telling me to chill out. I'm fairly sure the review
teams won't take the steps I took to investigate those instances.
At the time I'm writing this, I must have reported
at least fifteen or twenty ads, all using similar video
(23:24):
many of them using the exact same video clips and
the same images, and all marketing items for far less
than what they go for elsewhere. And when I say
far less, I'm talking in the hundreds of dollars less
like the too good to be true level of a sale.
Facebook has posted some tips to help users avoid these scams,
(23:47):
and they include making sure that the posted ad or
corresponding product page includes clear details about the product, like
its dimensions or its weight, as well as its quality,
and that there should also be your photographs of the product. Now,
while fuzzy photos are pretty much a dead giveaway that
it's a fake, I also counter that it's very easy
(24:09):
these days to lift good images online and there's no
shortage of high res photographs of tons of different products,
particularly for stuff like the mask I was referring to earlier,
and so it doesn't take very much to steal those
images and then use them for another purpose on another site.
And you can always do a reverse image search as
(24:29):
a user to see if something you're looking at has
been nicked from somewhere else, but that's yet another step
that the user has to take. The onus falls on
you so that you aren't made into a victim. Another
tip that Facebook gives is that the seller should include
clear information about the amount of time it will take
to ship items to the customer, how long will it
(24:53):
take to get from door to door, and also whether
or not the seller offers up tracking information so that
users can track orders as they go through the shipping process.
Companies only list something like a dispatch time. That's another
warning flag. Also legitimate companies should have a clear way
to contact customer service. So in the pages I looked
(25:16):
at the morning and that I'm recording this, I saw
email addresses for some unnamed person who is supposedly the
customer service representative. But the email address didn't indicate that
in of itself right. The email address wasn't like customer
representative at store dot com. Instead, it would be something
seemingly random like l f U r Z three one
(25:38):
one at b E r Q dot shop, and it
has no connection to whatever the U r L for
the website is at all. That's not exactly a confidence booster.
In a couple of other cases, I saw an online
field into which you would type your email address, and
it would include a promise that a customer service rep
would get in touch with you, quote unquote soon. I
(25:58):
have no clue how honest that claim is. And in
a few cases there was no contact page at all,
so there's no obvious way for you to get in
contact with the company. That is another clear warning. While
these tips from Facebook are helpful, they still place the
responsibility of not getting scammed on the end user. There
(26:20):
doesn't seem to be much acknowledgement that Facebook shoulders at
least some of the blame here, and that the site
has to find a better way to evaluate businesses before
accepting ads from them. The company has stated that bad
shopping experiences hurt everyone, not just the user but also Facebook,
and that's true, so you would think the company would
(26:41):
have a pretty strong incentive to prevent these ads from
going onto the platform. But I guess that money all
spends the same, whether it's from a legitimate business or not.
And yes, I am bitter about this because I hate
when people get scammed out of their cash or their
personal information. Now there's an opinion and the Harvard Business
Review that I feel really gets to why this has
(27:04):
become such a troubling issue for Facebook users. The article
is titled Facebook's oversight board is not Enough, and it's
by Dipayan Gosh And I apologize for doing a terrible
job pronouncing that name. That's entirely due to my own ignorance,
So I apologize for that. But the article is really good.
It points out that Facebook's business model is such that
(27:26):
depends upon ads, and I'm going to quote a passage,
so here's the quote. The same model lies at the
center of the consumer Internet as a whole, and is
based on maximizing consumer engagement and injecting ads throughout our
digital experience. It relies on collecting personal data and on
sophisticated algorithms that curate social feeds and target those ads.
(27:51):
Because there is no earnest consideration of what consumers wish
to or should see in this equation, they are subjected
to whatever content the platform believes will maximize profits. These
practices in turn generate negative externalities, of which disinformation is
only one end quote. And in this case, the article
(28:12):
was more about fake news and propaganda and how Facebook
is incented to share that because it's part and parcel
with its business model. That wasn't Facebook's intent when they
built that business model. That's a reflection of how people
recognized how Facebook's business model works, and then they gamed
(28:33):
the system. By knowing how the system works, they took
advantage of it, and that's the issue. Now. I didn't
really go into other problems with Facebook ads, such as
it's shifting policies with regard to political ads, which is
a huge can of worms here in the United States
right now, But that's because it is really another kettle
(28:55):
of fish, I said, ken of worms, kettle of fish.
I'm gonna mix metaphors left and right, come at me.
Ultimately it gets wrapped in a bigger discussion about propaganda,
and frankly, I am exhausted over the concept of political
ads for the moment, probably for the next year and
a half. So I'm going to spare all of that
(29:15):
discussion for some future episode when I'm not as irritated
by it. Instead, let's talk about other common scam techniques. Well,
will slowly ease off Facebook here for a second. And
I've touched on this next topic in the past because
I remember getting really upset about it when I chatted
(29:39):
about the topic with my then co host Chris Pallette.
So this was an old, old episode of Tech Stuff,
and it's about hiring scams. So these scams target a
very vulnerable population, people who are looking for a job.
Maybe they are out of work and they're looking to
actually find job so they can make ends meet. Maybe
(30:01):
they're just looking for a better opportunity. They're in a
job already, but it's not a great one. They want
a better chance. Now, as I'm sure many of you know,
hunting for a job is exhausting, and it can get
pretty discouraging if it starts to take a while. And
I've been in that situation myself. I worked for a
company for seven years and that company then eliminated my position.
(30:25):
I wasn't fired, I just didn't have a job anymore.
That the the definition of that, and the difference between
being fired and not having a job was kind of
lost on me at the time. For three months, I
worked hard trying to land a gig that I really
wanted to do. I thought, this is my chance to
not just do something I can do, but do something
(30:47):
I really want to do. I had stars in my eyes.
Well that didn't pan out after three months, so then
I spent the following three months trying to land a
decent gig at all. I ended up working for a
company not that different from the one that let me
go in the first place. This was very rough on
(31:07):
me and my psyche, but I had been out of
work for nearly six months at that point. It was
really tough on me. Well, scammers know that people who
are looking for jobs are in that vulnerable space, and
by promising a little, the scammers can get what they're after.
They might be after the person's money, they might be
(31:28):
after their personal information, or they might be after their cooperation.
And one amounts to an illegal operation, and they're probably
not upfront about that. They're probably not telling the applicant, hey,
just so you know, what we're doing is illegal, So
the applicant becomes an unwilling participant of a crime. This
(31:48):
practice also gets me really angry. I hate seeing folks
who are trying to get a job be targeted like that.
Often these are people who can least afford the hardships
that could follow if they're tricked by the scammers. Meanwhile,
the scammers are profiting off people who are just trying
to improve their own lives. It is gross. So these
(32:09):
schemes tend to fall into a few broad categories, and
some of them fall into just outright theft. So a
common example of this is a payment representative scam. And
here's how the scam works. The fraudsters identify a mark.
This could be a totally cold call on their part.
You know, they're just pulling off email addresses and sending
(32:31):
out emails hoping to get a hit. Maybe they're using
some job hunting sites to have a more targeted approach
to their marks, or they might even post a job
on a site to see if they get any bites.
However they do this, it doesn't really matter whenever they
make that first contact. Here's how the supposed job pans out.
So let's assume you are the person who has been
(32:53):
targeted by these fraudsters. They claim that the company they
represent needs someone in your home country to handle some
financial transactions because for some reason, the company itself has
difficulty working within the financial institutions in your country. So
this is a company that exists outside your country and
(33:16):
needs to be able to process payments inside your country.
Your job is to accept payments from this company, typically
for really large sums of money. You're meant to deposit
those payments in the form of checks. Check comes to you,
you're supposed to deposit that check into your own personal account.
(33:36):
Then you're meant to send on a payment from the
amount that was given to you to some other entity,
and you deduct your representative fee from that amount. So
let's use an example because this gets confusing otherwise. All right,
So you have accepted the job of payment representative from
this company. The company tells you you get a ten
(33:58):
percent fee off of all the transactions you process. The
company sends you a check for fifteen thousand dollars, and
you deposit the check into your account, and the company says,
we need you to then send a payment to this
other entity. And you pay out thirteen thousand, five hundred
dollars because you deducted your ten percent your fifteen hundred dollars,
(34:22):
so fifteen hundred dollars of that fifteen thousand dollars is
yours to keep. You send out the other thirteen thousand,
five hundred and then the scam becomes apparent because the
fifteen thousand dollar check bounces. Meanwhile, you've already paid out thousand,
five hundred dollars from your own account to that person
(34:42):
that the company indicated. You're on the line for all
of that money. In the United States, the Internal Revenue
Service the i r S would want to talk to
you about that fifteen grand. The bank would expect you
to cover the amount of money you paid out, and
the fraud sters get away with your money and your
left holding the bag. It is a pretty awful scheme.
(35:02):
Another scheme is the re shipper scam. This scam seems
to ask a pretty simple favor of the employee. Your
job is to accept packages that are sent to you.
Then you either forward those packages onward to another address,
or you might even have to open up a package,
pull stuff out of the package, pack it into smaller boxes,
(35:27):
and then send those packages on their way. But this
raises a question, why would any company need a middleman
to do this? Why not just send the packages directly
to the customers. Well, the most common reason for this
is that the packages actually contain illegal or stolen materials. Typically,
it means the fraudsters have used stolen credit cards to
(35:49):
purchase items online and then they use your address as
the shipping address. You are then responsible for reshipping these
packages to some other destination, frequently to an overseas address,
where the goods will enter the black market and be
sold for a much higher markup price. By accepting the package,
(36:10):
you effectively become an accessory to the crime, and when
you forward it on those packages came from you, not
the original criminals. It's a way for the criminals to
get illegal goods to a destination while insulating themselves from prosecution,
and when the credit card gets reported as stolen, the
point of contact for those fraudulent charges is you because
(36:34):
you're the person that the fraudsters were using for the
shipping address. Yeah. I've got some more job hiring scams
to chat about in a second, but first let's take
another quick break. Okay, So the previous examples I gave
(36:57):
of job hiring scams that you'll typically find line are
all about involving you the mark in crimes that ultimately
rest on you while the real criminals continue their illegal activities.
But many job hiring scams are more about harvesting personal
information from people, often to do stuff like open up
credit cards in those those employees names, or to get
(37:20):
access to those employees bank accounts, or otherwise exploit them
in some way. And you might encounter these scams on
social media platforms like Facebook or linked In, or you
might get targeted by them in an email that's attempting
to phish the data out of you. The job postings
typically use a few common tactics in an effort to
get you to lower your guard and to respond quickly
(37:43):
without thinking too much. For example, there's often a sense
of urgency that goes along with these messages. That is,
if you don't respond quickly, the opportunity is going to
go away. Frequently, the job description will sound pretty simple
and yet could have of a really generous salary range
quoted as part of the gig. The message might also
(38:06):
state that there's no experience necessary, which, if you think
about it, undercuts the whole argument that you are the
ideal candidates, since if no experience is necessary, you'd figure
lots of people would qualify for the job. Another warning
sign is if there's no interview as part of the
whole process. Maybe the supposed recruiter says that the interactions
(38:27):
across something like instant messenger or email exchanges are enough
to forego the need to have an in person interview.
That's often a way for the scammer to avoid the
pitfalls of you getting wise and asking some tricky questions.
They just sidestep that entirely, and they appeal to your vanity. Oh,
you're so amazing, we don't even need to have an interview.
(38:48):
You're hired. Well, it's a very flattering thing to hear.
Often these scammers will say they came across your resume
on a job recruiting site. Sometimes it will be a
site that you've never even visited, or heard of and yeah,
that's a warning sign. Or they might even claim that
you actively applied for the job, and they're counting on
the fact that maybe you you feel like you forgot
(39:10):
about it, maybe you were applying to a lot of
jobs and so I don't know, maybe I did, or
maybe you're just thinking, oh, shut up. They this is
an opportunity, don't question it a dead giveaway in these circumstances.
If it is. If there's an email contact for you
to reach out to and the domain on that email
contact doesn't match whatever the company is that's supposedly reaching
(39:31):
out to you. Some scammers like to use recognizable, real
companies when they reach out. They know that it will
get more hits than if they just make a company
out of whole cloth. Plus, if you rely on an
existing company as your cover, you can trade upon that
company's reputation as well as it's pre existing presence of
(39:53):
the company online. Right if I say that I am
coming from X y Z company and it's a real company,
there's already a website out there. I don't have to
create anything. If you make up a company, you need
to go through some extra trouble. It's pretty suspicious to
come across a company that's using the Internet to recruit
(40:13):
people when that same company doesn't have a web page.
So scammers typically have to make a choice. Do you
pose as someone from a reputable company that really exists,
or do you create a fake company complete with a
website to help lure in job hunters. Those posing as
representatives for an existing company are often found out when
(40:33):
their emails do not match that company in question. They
also run another risk. You could always reach out to
the real company to confirm that a message actually did
originate from within that company, and if you get a
negative response, if you say, hey, I got this job offer,
I want to make sure that it's legitimate, and the
response you get is this is the first we've ever
(40:56):
heard of it, you know it's most likely a scam
making up a company can get around that problem, right,
because now you're controlling the whole lie. It's not just well,
hopefully they don't reach out to the real company because
there is no real company to reach out to. So
in this case, if you are the one targeted, you
(41:18):
have no other authority to turn to in order to
confirm that a message is legitimate. But this also requires
a lot more work on the part of the scammers.
Several years ago, a friend of mine was job hunting
and got an offer that seemed too good to be true.
So that was a warning right there. So she asked
for my help to investigate to make sure it was
(41:39):
a legitimate offer and not just a scam. You know.
She thought that it sounded like a really promising job,
but she was a little worried. So she forwarded a
message that she received and she sent it to me,
and I did some digging, and it turned out her
suspicions were very well placed. The company was a supposed
architectural firm that was looking to hire someone in an
(42:00):
in the straight of position. And I can't even remember
what the name of this fake company was anymore. This
happened years ago, but I do remember the process. The
message referred my friend to the company website, and so
I visited the website and it was pretty slick. It
looked nice and had a decent design to it, and
it included photographs of supposed construction sites that this company
(42:21):
claimed were official projects. So they're saying, you know, we're
responsible for building this amazing building at the x y
Z address, but none of this looked legit to me.
For one thing, the website actually looked a little template ish,
as if the person who had made the site had
used a web hosting service that comes with templates for
(42:44):
web pages, and then they built out a few web pages,
but they didn't go too much trouble to customize it
beyond the generic template. I also looked at the address
for the supposed construction site and I plugged it into
Google Maps to take a look at it from there,
and that presented a very different image than what was
on their web page, and it was clearly not the
(43:05):
same location despite the claims. That's when I knew something
was up. Then I did something that proved to me
that this was a total scam. I found a paragraph
of text that I found to be a little odd.
The wording was just a little off and and unusual,
So I highlighted the text and I searched Google for
(43:26):
that text. Now, if this were a legit site for
a local business, maybe one where the web administrator doesn't
have the best way with words, but otherwise it's completely legitimate.
The only response I should have seen from Google would
have been that one web page, but instead I got
seven or eight different hits, two different web pages, all
(43:48):
with the exact same wording. Going to those links, I
found duplicates of the website that I had just visited.
The company name was different from site to site, but
all the content was exactly the same. They're all located
in different cities, and they even all had pictures of
that same construction site, but the address had been localized
(44:12):
to whatever site, you know, whatever place the company was
claiming to be in. So there was one for Atlanta, Georgia,
there was one for Phoenix, there was one for Helena, Montana.
They all mysteriously had the exact same content, same staff
working for the company, and exact same construction site, just
(44:36):
in different parts of the United States. I alerted my friend,
who was glad that I had caught the scam, but
she was obviously discouraged that what initially seemed to be
a real job offer had turned out to be a trap.
Now fortunately she found out before it went any further,
but was still a discouraging thing to happen when you're
in the middle of a job search. Now. I'm not
(44:56):
trying to pat myself on the back here about uncovered
ring this one. It was a pretty sloppy attempt when
all things are considered too. I was able to go
about this investigation because I could think critically about it.
I care for my friends, but I was not as
emotionally invested in this opportunity as she was. I had
(45:17):
fewer blinders up because I wasn't counting on this being
a real offer. If I had been hunting for a job,
if I had been in my friends position, I might
very well have totally bought that scam, hook line and sinker.
The investigation I did was pretty simple stuff. It didn't
require any advanced search techniques. Had just involved looking at
(45:38):
the information that was presented and then doing my best
to fact check it. When things didn't match up, I
figured I was onto a trick and that's it. And
the fact that there were several duplicate websites told me
I had hit upon some sort of scheme. There's one
other type of job scam I should mention. This one
is harder to spot, but it's also a crappy thing
(45:59):
to do to people. And this is the old bait
and switch. This is when a company advertises a particular
position in order to get applicants, but then when someone
actually does apply and perhaps comes in for an interview.
The company reveals that the position that the applicant is
interested in isn't actually available, maybe it doesn't even exist,
(46:21):
maybe it was never available. Instead, they're offering a different
job that is available. Most likely it's a job that's
not nearly as desirable as the one that was advertised.
It might be grunt work for low pay. It's the
type of job that could be difficult to fill on
its own if you were to list it, so they
might not get any applicants if they had listed the
(46:42):
real job, or maybe they would only get people that
the company isn't keen on hiring in the first place,
So the bait and switch might bring in, you know,
a better class of applicant. And all it takes is
being dishonest to trick someone into coming in for an interview.
Companies that do this know that people who are looking
for a job might be tempted to say yes to
(47:04):
a less desirable position because it's still represents an opportunity,
even if it's for a job that they wouldn't normally
apply for if they just saw it online by itself.
Don't fall for this one, either, folks. If you wouldn't
apply for the job if you saw it listed online.
Don't take it just because it's offered to you. No
(47:25):
one will end up being happy with that decision in
the long run, and you don't ever want to work
for a company that depends on tricks to get people
to work for them. Now, I don't think I can
really go into stuff like multi level marketing businesses or
pyramid schemes, which are not necessarily the same thing, but
frequently an MLM can turn into a pyramid scheme. The
(47:47):
two can share a lot of qualities. I think that
is better left as a subject for a different podcast,
because it's not as dependent upon technology as the variations
I've been speaking about today. Once again, I gotta put
forth the argument for critical thinking. It's all about asking
important questions and looking for the most truthful answers. It's
(48:08):
about not taking things at face value and digging a
little deeper. This is particularly important when you've got a
strong motivation to believe the story being told to you.
If you have a predisposition to believe, you really got
to employ that critical thinking. If you're a person looking
for a new job, or you're someone who's really hunting
(48:30):
for a bargain, You're more liable to believe the lie
because lie is telling you what you want to hear,
So you've got to really use that critical thinking. The
motivation for believing is what these con artists are counting on.
Your motivation is doing the work for these con artists,
whether it's an ad on social media, a job listing,
(48:52):
or a crowdfunding campaign for a seemingly incredible idea. It's
always good to check your expectations and do some research first.
You may find that everything is totally legit and then
you're good to go, or you might save yourself some
money or your credit score, your bank account, or other
(49:13):
things that are equally important. So it pays to be
a critical thinker. And that wraps up this episode. Totally
inspired by my Facebook experience this morning. It's something I
really am very passionate about. I do not want people
to be taken advantage of. I want a world where
(49:34):
con artists don't get any opportunities and they realize that
they need to spend their efforts doing something else rather
than tricking people and making their lives more difficult. So
let's make it hard for those jerks, shall we. If
you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff,
send me an email. The addresses tex stuff at how
(49:56):
stuff works dot com. If you want you learn more
about the show, go to our website that's tech stuff
podcast dot com. We've got a list of every single
episode that has ever published. We have links to our
online store, where every purchase you make goes to help
the show. We greatly appreciate it, and we have links
to where we are on social media. You can reach
(50:17):
out to me on Facebook or Twitter and I will
talk to you again really soon. Y text Stuff is
a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For
more podcasts from i heeart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
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TechStuff News
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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