… may have been hacked by online scammers. I’m pretty sure that none of the regulars in this forum would fall for the scams that are likely to result from this massive data breach, but it’s worthwhile to remain very vigilant.
While various scams could be the result, I think that the most likely one is something along the lines of… You have unpaid traffic tickets, and your license will be suspended today unless you click on this link in order to pay it with your credit card. Or, they might ask you to buy gift cards, and call a phone number that they provide, in order to read the serial numbers of those cards to them.
Last year i had some e mails saying i owed toll fees so i just ignored them and they went away. Not many tolls in minnesota. With all the people that have access to bits of your information, i think leaks are inevitable. We even got a letter that a lawyer we use got hacked. So i think the responsibility should be on people loaning money to make sure they know who they are dealing with.
Seriously though, I was getting those stupid “Toll” fees (as bing mentioned) ones, however the last I saw a toll booth was probably 25 years ago, maybe more, and that one’s I saw (all 3 on same road) were all closed and removed back in 2003… Last time I went through it you still had to throw the correct change in the big basket, if you only had paper money, then the booth operator made change for you and they threw the change in the same big basket…
9Meaning I have never even seen an electronic toll booth in my life, so absolutely NO way I could have a missed ticket from one (to date)…
I swear though, if these scammers put as much thought and time into some of these scams, they would be making 6 figures easily, having a legit job…
Unfortunately, because some people don’t watch/read any legitimate sources of information, those same people are easy to scam… for BIG bucks. A couple of months ago, a woman in a town near me got a scam text or a scam email telling her that her bank account had been compromised. She followed the scammers’ instructions precisely by doing the following:
She withdrew $10k from her account, put the cash into a shoebox, and handed it to a guy who she was directed to rendezvous with, in a parking lot. Obviously the scammers were very pleased with her ignorance/naivete, so they actually got her to do the same thing time and time again. When it got to the point where she had handed something north of $400k to them, in increasing increments, she finally started to wonder if she did the wrong thing, and at that point she finally contacted the cops. Clearly, it was too late for her to have any chance of recovering anything. Even if she was the only person who that guy scammed this year, he definitely wound-up with six figures–tax free.
In my town’s Police Blotter, a couple of weeks ago, they reported this incident: The victim was contacted (supposedly) by The US Treasury Department, and he was informed that ALL of his credit cards had been compromised. He was told that “the only way to protect your credit is to have us destroy those cards”, so he rendezvoused with a stranger, to whom he handed ALL of his credit cards. Of course, the BIG bogus charges began appearing w/in a few minutes.
Clearly, we do have some very gullible people out there.
