This came to me in an email. I'm sure it went to tens of thousands of other people, many of whom will not be sophisticated enough to recognize that some sleazeballs are basically asking for their credit card information. And the ones vulnerable to maneuvers like this are the ones least able to afford the consequences.
If you ever think something like this may be valid, just get out of email altogether and then go to your Prime account through the Amazon site. Or whatever website they are talking about. DO NOT click on buttons in an email message!
ReplyDeleteThere's a very good chance it came from Flower Mound Texas,
ReplyDeletexoxoxoBruce
There's a recent movie that depicts a just way of dealing with such scammers: The Beekeeper. It features Jason Stratham, so you can imagine how it turns out.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE0KFHYiQ4s
These forms of crime need to be prosecuted much more severe. It's not enough that occasionally a cryptocrook has to go to prison. So much money gets stolen, yet the police is more occupied with people smoking a joint.
In my fantasy, we find a way to convict these criminals to a life of poverty - all of them, from the lowest phone crook to the kingpin. We need to find a way to make them live welfare or less for a long time - just bleed them dry continuously. Let them experience what they're doing to the people they steal from. I'm starting to think that with some devious online monitoring this is starting to become possible.
Existing law will need to be changed significantly. We're seeing at the moment some prominent cases of people who laugh at crippling financial penalties through clever use of bankruptcy.
Yes a fine is only a penalty to those who can't afford it- penalties need to be income based to be truly effective at teaching a lesson.
DeleteNot defending the crime, but most of the people committing these crimes already live in crippling poverty. eg a lot of "pig butchering" scams originate from Myanmar, but the call centres are staffed with people trafficked from China and South East Asia, kept more or less as slaves. Frankly, kept as slaves.
DeleteI thought I was immune to email scams but I ALMOST fell for one about my UK TV license (that's a thing. About a hundred quid a year to have the right to watch TV. Finances the BBC, so I'm fine with it). Email looked good, return address was fine, even the "more help" links in the email went to the right websites. If I didn't know exactly when that charge is due I probably wouldn't have thought twice about it, but I did, so I went to the real website, directly, and confirmed I was good for four months more. I was so curious about where the link in the scam email would take me, but not so curious I would click it (I have a setting in my email client that shows exactly where a link will take me - I think MOST email clients do that now, but it was surprisingly rare even just five years ago).
Anyway, if someone in the US or any other Western nation is trying to commit email scams, they will get caught and it won't even be slow. Nobody smart enough to figure out the scams is staying in a country with ironclad extradition laws. Most of them are state-sponsored. It's a significant source of bribes in Russia and a significant source of GDP in North Korea. China has universities dedicated to hacking the West, though less for money and more for information.
I like to think that Amazon employees would spell 'sincerely' correctly
ReplyDeleteMaia, good catch.
ReplyDelete