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  • Geebo 8:00 am on September 4, 2020 Permalink | Reply
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    Don’t ignore red flags in puppy scam 

    Don't ignore red flags in puppy scam

    As has been previously stated, puppy scams are on the rise due to the number of people looking for new companions during the current pandemic. Online puppy scammers will create legitimate-looking websites while posing as puppy breeders. The scammers will offer purebred puppies at well below market prices. After the victim pays the initial fee, the scammers will start asking for more money for things like shipping fees and specialized travel crates. Even if the victim pays for all of these supposed services, they never receive a puppy because the puppy never existed in the first place. While these may seem like reasonable charges on the surface, they are red flags indicating the scam. However, sometimes even the most obvious red flags can be ignored.

    Recently, in Louisiana, a woman was looking for a new Yorkie puppy. She found an online listing for Yorkies and was asked to send in payment for the puppy. She was asked to send the payment to somewhere in Africa. With all due respect to the countries of Africa, there are two African countries that are synonymous with scams. The most infamous one is Nigeria where a multitude of overseas scams take place. This is where the legendary Nigerian Prince scam or 419 scam comes from. The second and somewhat lesser-known country is Cameroon. In earlier days of the internet, the puppy scam was known as the Cameroon puppy scam due to the number of puppy scams originating from the country.

    Sending money overseas for a puppy is a huge red flag that you’re being scammed. If you want to avoid being scammed when looking for a new pet avoid using non-local breeders. Even if you find a local breeder online, do a reverse image search of their animals to make sure the images weren’t stolen from other websites. If you have your heart set on a purebred, you can’t cheap out. Pets listed at below market value online are usually either non-existent or it’s a ‘backyard breeder’ that is potentially selling dying animals.

    As always, we recommend adopting a pet from your local animal shelter. Some shelters even have waiting lists if you’re looking for a particular breed. If you’re not looking for a particular breed we still recommend visiting your local shelter. You never know which animal there will capture your heart.

     

  • Geebo 8:00 am on September 3, 2020 Permalink | Reply
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    Grandparent scammers victimize woman three times 

    Grandparent scammers victimize woman three times

    One of the many problems with being a scam victim is that often the scammers will try to victimize from you again. Usually, the scammers will try to fool you again with a different scam. For example, a scammer might have fooled you with a police impersonation scam. Then, the scammers may try to fleece you again using a Social Security scam. It’s rare to hear of a scammer using the same scam multiple times on the same victim but that’s exactly what happened to an elderly woman in upstate New York.

    In Amsterdam, New York, an 88-year-old woman was contacted by someone who claimed to be her grandson. The scammer said they had been arrested and needed $7,000 in cash for legal fees. The woman gathered the money and sent it to an address in New Jersey.

    A month and a half later, she received another call from the same ‘grandson’. This time they were asking for $10,000 in cash after the phony grandson claimed to be in a car accident.

    Later on, the victim was contacted again. Once again, the phony grandson was asking for another $10,000. This time, an employee at the shipping service she was using asked her about the package. When the woman told them it was cash for grandson the delivery employee believed she was being scammed and contacted the state police.

    Unfortunately, if you’ve fallen for a scam in the past, it’s likely that scammers will try to target you again. Like we said previously, it’s usually with a different scam but it’s not unheard of for scammers to use the same scam multiple times and the grandparent scam is the perfect scam to use that way. If a victim believes the scammer is their grandchild once, they may believe it again.

    As we always advise when it comes to the grandparent scam, if you receive one of these calls, hang up. Then call the actual person the scammers are claiming to be to make sure they’re not in any actual trouble. If it were a legitimate call from a grandchild, they’re not going to be in any more trouble if you stop to take the time to verify their story. You can also ask the caller a question that only they would know or set up a family password to indicate the call is legitimate.

    Again we ask that if you know an elderly person or couple who live alone and do not have access to the internet, please let them know about this scam.

     

  • Geebo 8:00 am on September 2, 2020 Permalink | Reply
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    Fake websites are scamming laptop shoppers 

    Fake websites are scamming laptop shoppers

    Back when pandemic panic was at its peak, scammers didn’t hesitate to start fleecing people when it came to the online sales of masks, gloves, and toilet paper. In several cases, scammers set up phony websites claiming to sell these items only to steal your money and send you nothing. Now, the scammers are back with the same tactic except for a different product.

    Laptop computers have been in short supply for some time. With new people now working from home the supply was already limited. Now, add to that the fact that many students either have started or will start school shortly. In many cases, these students will need laptops to take to and from class. Not every school can provide a laptop to students and not every family can afford a new laptop.

    Scammers are aware of this and have started to set up fake websites that claim to sell laptops at bargain prices. A man from the Cincinnati area recently lost $125 to one of these legitimate-looking websites. The phony computer store gave an address of a Staples office supply store that has no connection with the scammers.

    If you’re in the market for a new laptop, stick to the well-known retailers such as Amazon or Best Buy just to name a few. However, you can also shop at the manufacturer’s website. Companies like Lenovo and Dell are constantly having sales and often have discounts for students. There are budget laptops you can buy for around $200 but keep in mind they may be slower than the average laptop and not have as much storage but for writing web browsing they would be just fine.

    If you decided to go the used laptop route there are plenty of options for you. eBay is a great place to find a laptop that may be a few years old but still delivers the performance a student may need. We recommend not buying a laptop made before 2011 but your experience may vary. You can also look to see if there is a computer recycling center in your area or check your local thrift shops. Your local computer repair store may also have a selection of used laptops for sale. You’ll probably want to avoid Craigslist considering how problematic their platform is.

     

  • Geebo 8:00 am on September 1, 2020 Permalink | Reply
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    Scammers tell renters to break the window if no one’s home 

    Scammers tell renters to break the window if no one's home

    Steamboat Springs in Colorado is a popular ski resort town. Any popular tourist hotspot will have its fair share of rental scammers and Steamboat Springs is no exception. An attorney was looking for a long term rental in Steamboat Springs and says that she encountered at least four scammers were trying to rent her a property that they didn’t actually own. One scammer is even said to have told the attorney that she could go look at the home herself and if the door was locked she could just break a window. That may just be the biggest red flag for a rental scam we’ve ever heard of.

    After that encounter, the attorney started doing research on the property she was hoping to rent and found out that the home was actually for sale and not for rent. Scammers had copied the ad from the legitimate realtor’s website and pasted the ad on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and Zillow. If the attorney had not done her due diligence she may have found herself out of thousands of dollars paid to phony landlords for phony deposits.

    The attorney also gave some good advice on how to help sniff out a rental scammer. She recommends asking questions that only locals may know like what school did they send their kids too or things like that. Often these rental scammers will be based overseas and know very little about the local area.

    Please remember that if a prospective landlord tells you that you can’t see the property or need to break the window to see it, you’re probably talking to a scammer. We always recommend doing a reverse image search to see how many ads the pictures of the home appear in. If most of the ads say that the home is for rent but one says it’s for sale then the rental ads are more than likely scams. Lastly, you can always check with the county assessor’s office or website to see who the actual owner of the property is before handing over any money.

    While this kind of research can be time-consuming it’s worth it to put in the effort in order to avoid being scammed.

     

  • Geebo 8:00 am on August 31, 2020 Permalink | Reply
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    Scammers are showing up at seniors’ doors 

    Scammers are showing up at seniors' doors

    If you’re not a senior citizen yourself, you may have an elderly relative. They may live alone and a great distance from you. Would you want strangers showing up to their door and taking thousands of dollars in your relative’s money? How upsetting to you would that be if it happened to someone in your family? Unfortunately, this is happening to many families around the country in this scary new twist on the grandparent scam.

    Just in case you’re unfamiliar with the grandparent scam it’s when a scammer calls a senior citizen and poses as one of their grandchildren or some other relative. The scammers will say that they’re in some kind of trouble. Usually, they’ll say that they’ve been arrested and need money for bail. Other times they’ll say that they’re in the hospital and need money for treatment. We’ve even seen some cases where they’ll say they’re overseas and they need money to get home.

    As you can see, the common goal of the scam is to get money from elderly victims. Scammers used to get money from their victims in this scam by having them buy gift cards and having the victims give the gift card numbers to the scammer over the phone. Just as an aside, we’d like to remind you that gift cards are commonly used in all sorts of scams, so please keep in mind that no legitimate company or agency will ask for payment over the phone in gift cards.

    Now, grandparent scammers have developed an increasingly worrying tactic. Instead of asking for gift cards over the phone, scammers are employing go-betweens who act as couriers to pick up the money personally. In at least one case in Ohio, a woman was scammed out of $15,000 when a scammer posed as her grandson in Florida claiming to need bail. The scammers had someone go to her home and physically collect the $15,000 in cash.

    While we haven’t heard of any of these scammers getting physical with their victims, the potential is always there.

    The best way to deal with these scams is to contact the person the scammers are claiming to be. Scammers may sound convincing due to the fact that they get a lot of their information from social media. However, even if the call is real no one is going to be sentenced to life in prison or thrown out of the hospital if you hang up on the phone call from the supposed grandchild.

    If you know an elderly person or couple who live alone and do not have access to the internet, please let them know about this scam. Also, consider setting up a family password for just such emergencies so you can verify the person calling is who they say they are.

     

    • Dave Smith 8:45 pm on August 31, 2020 Permalink

      They sound convincing, one called me and sounded just like my grandson from of out state.
      When I ask him what his mother’s name was, what was my name, what was his father’s name he started acting like the phone connection was bad, I told him until he could answer my questions I wasnt sending him anything. He hung up the phone. They are very convincing,
      If I hadn’t worked in Security I would have believed the story. DO NOT DO ANY BUSINESS ON THE PHONE!

  • Geebo 8:00 am on August 28, 2020 Permalink | Reply
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    New twist on unemployment debit card scam 

    New twist on unemployment debit card scam

    As you may know, every state in the country has been assailed by overseas scammers looking to cash in on unemployment benefits. Due to the record amount of Americans who are currently unemployed, the scammers are overwhelming state unemployment systems by applying for benefits in other people’s names in hopes of making off with that money. To that extent, scammers will also apply for benefits in the names of people who are currently employed. The scam is far from perfect and many people have caught the scam being perpetrated on them before the scammers could get the money. Usually, the scammers would keep their scam within one state at a time. That now seems to be changing.

    A report out of the State of Washington says that a couple there received two unemployment debit cards in the mail. Not only are the couple employed but the cards were issued from the state of Colorado. Neither of them had ever worked or lived in Colorado. The belief here is that since the cards are from out of state, a scammer could call them pretending to be from that state’s unemployment department and then ask for the cards back. The scammer could instruct them to send the cards to an address where the scammers could claim the cards and use the benefits themselves.

    However, some states are already fighting back against the scammers. As we mentioned previously, West Virginia has a system in place to try to prevent fraud. Now, the Colorado cards that were sent to the Washington couple had instructions to follow if they received the cards but did not apply for unemployment.

    If you receive a card like this and you have not filed for unemployment or they’re from a state that you never lived or worked, try contacting the issuing bank to see what they would like to have you do.

     

  • Geebo 8:00 am on August 27, 2020 Permalink | Reply
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    Package delivery update text is a scam 

    Package delivery update text is a scam

    We first discussed the delivery update scam back in January of this year. Now, with even more people receiving deliveries at home, the scam seems to have returned with a vengeance. Various law enforcement agencies and consumer protection groups from all over the country have issued warnings about this scam recently.

    The way the scam works is that you’ll receive an unsolicited text message like the one above. It may claim to be from a delivery service like FedEx, DHL, or UPS. Other times they’ll claim to be from Amazon directly but they’ll all tell you t6he same thing. The messages state that you have an undelivered package that needs your preferred delivery option. Then at the very end of the message, a link will be provided for you to click on.

    As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, you should not click on the link. Doing so will take you to a page that is designed to look like it’s an Amazon page. The fake Amazon page will then ask you to fill out a customer service survey in order to claim a prize. After you win the prize, you’ll be asked to pay for shipping by providing your financial information. From there, the scammers can do pretty much what they want with your financial information. In some instances, victims have been signed up for subscription services related to their ‘prize’ that ended up costing them $100 a month.

    While delivery services do have text messaging services that notify you about the arrival of your package, you need to sign up with these services first before the delivery company will text you. So, if you have not signed up for this service and receive one of these text messages, there are a couple of things you can do. The first is to just ignore it and delete it. The other thing you can do is copy the text of the message, paste it into a new text message, and text it to the Federal Trade Commission at 7726 (SPAM).

    Whatever you do, don’t click on the link or respond to the text. Even if you respond, scammers will know that your number is a working one which will just invite more scams.

     

  • Geebo 8:01 am on August 26, 2020 Permalink | Reply
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    One website is slow to remove rental scam ads 

    One website is slow to remove rental scam ads

    In the Cleveland, Ohio area, owners of vacation homes have seen a recent increase in scams targeting their rental properties. This is hardly a new scam as it’s origins can be traced back to the early days of the commercial internet. This scam can also affect any property, not just vacation rentals.

    Several vacation rental owners have reported coming into contact with people who had been scammed into paying phony deposits to scammers posing as the landlords. Scammers had copied the ads from legitimate vacation rental websites and pasted the ad onto an unmoderated classifieds site almost word for word. The only thing the scammers changed was the contact information. Of course, the website in question is Craigslist.

    One of the vacation rental owners tried to get the ads taken down by Craigslist but they allegedly never received any feedback from Craigslist. It wasn’t until a local news channel got involved that the ads were finally pulled. When the station asked Craigslist why it took so long to remove the ads, they received no response.

    Craigslist still relies on what they call ‘community policing’. This means that they might pull an ad if enough users flag the ad. While some scam ads are obvious just by looking at them, that’s not the case with rental ads. In most cases, no one will know that a rental ad is a scam until victims start losing money to the scammers.

    There are many different ways you can protect yourself from falling prey to these scammers. One is using Geebo.com where our listings are reviewed for potential scams. You should also be wary of any landlord who can’t tell you anything about the property but is anxious to collect a deposit. If a landlord says they can’t show you the property even for COVID-19 reasons it’s probably a scam. If they ask for payment in untraceable ways like gift cards or wallet apps like Venmo and Cash App it’s more than likely a scam. You can also do a reverse image search to see if the pictures in the ad are being used somewhere else. You can even copy a snippet of the text and use that as a web search to help detect duplicate ads. Lastly, if you see duplicate ads on a rental website and Craigslist, it’s almost a sure bet that the ad on Craigslist is the fake.

     

  • Geebo 8:00 am on August 25, 2020 Permalink | Reply
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    Blessing Loom pyramid scheme is back 

    Blessing Loom pyramid scheme is back

    The last time we heard about the Blessing Loom pyramid scheme, scammers were trying to take advantage of people who had just received their economic impact payments. Now, we’re seeing reports of the pyramid scheme returning to social media if it ever left at all. With so many Americans having financial difficulty during the current crisis, the Blessing Loom could be finding new victims.

    While a Blessing Loom may be shaped like a circle, it’s essentially just window dressing for a pyramid scheme. In a Blessing Loom, someone will promise their victims that they can exponentially increase their initial ‘investment’ if they just recruit new people into the ‘loom’. In theory, once the outer circle of the loom is filled the person in the middle gets all the investments from that circle. Once you move to the center is when you’re supposed to get your big payout. Except, the only people who truly make money through these are the people who set it up in the first place. Once they receive the investment money through apps like Venmo or Cash App, your money is gone and you just made someone else richer for doing almost nothing.

    These pyramid schemes often go by other names as well with all of them designed to lull you into a false sense of security. Using such names as ‘Money Board’ or ‘Gifting Circle’, scammers will try to make these schemes appear as friendly as possible to try to recruit as many people as possible into their scheme.

    The other drawback to Blessing Looms besides losing your money is that they’re illegal. If you try to recruit someone into one of these circles, you could be held criminally responsible even if you’re not the initial organizer.

    As we’ve said before, you wouldn’t give a stranger on the street your money if they told you they’ll give you $500 if you give them $50, so why would you give it to someone on social media?

     

  • Geebo 8:00 am on August 24, 2020 Permalink | Reply
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    Victim taken twice in Cash App scam 

    Victim taken twice in Cash App scam

    Cash App is a wallet app made by the company Square, who developed a popular system that allowed anyone to accept credit card payments on their smartphones. The Cash App allows users to make or receive online payments. With just about anything that involves money and the internet, Cash App has been used in a number of scams.

    One of the most common scams is called ‘money flipping’. Scammers will go on social media promising their victims a large amount of money if the victim just sends the scammer a small payment. For example, a scammer might promise $500 if you send them $50. As you might expect, the scammer just makes off with the small payment. However, that’s not the scam we’ll be discussing today.

    A woman in Pennsylvania received a request on Cash App from who she thought was her husband for $250. The person making the request appeared to have the same first name as her husband so she sent the money. It wasn’t until she got home and spoke to her husband that he told her he didn’t send the request. So now, the woman was out $250.

    To be fair, this could have just been a coincidence that the person making the request had her husband’s first name and made an erroneous request from the woman in Pennsylvania. However, we wouldn’t put it past scammers to either request money from random Cash App users, or stalk their victims on social media and pretend to be their spouses. The woman who lost the $250 did request a refund from the person who made the initial request but her refund request was denied meaning it could have been a scammer.

    Then the woman wanted to contact Cash App’s customer support and did a web search for their support phone number. She called the number that came up and was instructed to download another app called Quick Support and they would be able to get her money back. Cash App doesn’t have a customer support number, they can only be reached online. Instead of getting her refund, the customer support scammers were able to drain her account of over $4000.

    If you use any kind of wallet apps like Zelle, Venmo, or Cash App, use them judiciously as many of them are vulnerable to scammers. Always double-check that the person making a request for payment is actually someone you know.

    Also, never do a Google search for a company’s customer service number. Too many scammers take out ads on Google posing as legitimate customer service departments. Instead, go to the company’s website and look for a section that says ‘contact us’. It can be difficult to find sometimes and may be at the bottom of the website.

     

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