I always like a good hack. And this story delivers. Basically, the New York City bikeshare program has a system to reward people who move bicycles from full stations to empty ones. By deliberately moving bikes to create artificial problems, and exploiting exactly how the system calculates rewards, some …
Enlarge (credit: Getty ) For years, Dell customers have been on the receiving end of scam calls from people claiming to be part of the computer maker’s support team. The scammers call from a valid Dell phone number, know the customer's name and address, and use information that should …
Scammers tricked a company into believing they were dealing with a BBC presenter. They faked her voice, and accepted money intended for her. [...]
Exclusive: £10m needed for regulator charged with developing tools to thwart financial crime and protect consumers Banks are under pressure to stump up millions of pounds in interim funding for the organisation that polices open banking, with regulators saying the new money is needed to prevent financial crime and …
First-person account of someone who fell for a scam, that started as a fake Amazon service rep and ended with a fake CIA agent, and lost $50,000 cash. And this is not a naive or stupid person. The details are fascinating. And if you think it couldn’t …
Sad story of Tokelau, and how its top-level domain “became the unwitting host to the dark underworld by providing a never-ending supply of domain names that could be weaponized against internet users. Scammers began using.tk websites to do everything from harvesting passwords and payment information to displaying pop-up …
Here’s an experiment being run by undergraduate computer science students everywhere: Ask ChatGPT to generate phishing emails, and test whether these are better at persuading victims to respond or click on the link than the usual spam. It’s an interesting experiment, and the results are likely to …
“Pig butchering” is the colorful name given to online cons that trick the victim into giving money to the scammer, thinking it is an investment opportunity. It’s a rapidly growing area of fraud, and getting more sophisticated. [...]
An enterprising individual made fake parking tickets with a QR code for easy payment. [...]
This is a story of one piece of what is probably a complex employment scam. Basically, real programmers are having their resumes copied and co-opted by scammers, who apply for jobs (or, I suppose, get recruited from various job sites), then hire other people with Western looks and language …
Some customers look to switch providers after puzzling responses and ‘less than helpful’ service Follow our Australia news live blog for the latest updates Get our free news app, morning email briefing or daily news podcast Optus customers say they are growing increasingly angry and frustrated at the poor …
Experts say while ‘there’s no need to panic’, there are steps you can take to ensure you’re not exposed to scams or identity theft Follow our Australia news live blog for the latest updates Get our free news app, morning email briefing or daily news podcast After …
Here’s a phishing campaign that uses a man-in-the-middle attack to defeat multi-factor authentication: Microsoft observed a campaign that inserted an attacker-controlled proxy site between the account users and the work server they attempted to log into. When the user entered a password into the proxy site, the proxy …
Scammers were able to convince YouTube that other peoples’ music was their own. They successfully stole $23 million before they were caught. No one knows how common this scam is, and how much money total is being stolen in this way. Presumably this is not an uncommon fraud. While …
Brian Krebs has a detailed post about hackers using fake police data requests to trick companies into handing over data. Virtually all major technology companies serving large numbers of users online have departments that routinely review and process such requests, which are typically granted as long as the proper …
Zelle is rife with fraud : Zelle’s immediacy has also made it a favorite of fraudsters. Other types of bank transfers or transactions involving payment cards typically take at least a day to clear. But once crooks scare or trick victims into handing over money via Zelle, they can …
This is a clever hack against those bike-rental kiosks: They’re stealing Citi Bikes by switching the QR scan codes on two bicycles near each other at a docking station, then waiting for an unsuspecting cyclist to try to unlock a bike with his or her smartphone app. The …
I received a flood of renewal demands and unsubscribing doesn’t work I cancelled my McAfee anti-virus subscription earlier this year when I discovered it had been double charging me. It refunded only the current year and led me on a wild goose chase to recover the previous two …
The FBI has issued a bulletin describing a bitcoin variant of a wire fraud scam : As the agency describes it, the scammer will contact their victim and somehow convince them that they need to send money, either with promises of love, further riches, or by impersonating an actual institution …
The Squid Game cryptocurrency was a complete scam : The SQUID cryptocurrency peaked at a price of $2,861 before plummeting to $0 around 5:40 a.m. ET., according to the website CoinMarketCap. This kind of theft, commonly called a “rug pull” by crypto investors, happens when the creators …
It turns out that it’s surprisingly easy to create a fake Harvard student and get a harvard.edu email account. Scammers are using that prestigious domain name to shill brands : Basically, it appears that anyone with $300 to spare can – or could, depending on whether Harvard successfully shuts …
Here’s a story of someone who, with three compatriots, rented textbooks from Amazon and then sold them instead of returning them. They used gift cards and prepaid credit cards to buy the books, so there was no available balance when Amazon tried to charge them the buyout price …
New scam spreads to Australia from Europe, targeting thousands of Android users Thousands of Australians have been hit by a new scam text message known as Flubot, which aims to install malware on their phones. Flubot is a type of malware targeting Android users, but iPhone users can also …
A newspaper in Malaysia is reporting on a cell phone cloning scam. The scammer convinces the victim to lend them their cell phone, and the scammer quickly clones it. What’s clever about this scam is that the victim is an Uber driver and the scammer is the passenger …
This is a longish video that describes a profitable computer banking scam that’s run out of call centers in places like India. There’s a lot of fluff about glitterbombs and the like, but the details are interesting. The scammers convince the victims to give them remote access …