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Comment by thowaway959125 | Hacker News Reader

I fell for this, and I have never fallen for a computer scam in my life, nor even had so much as a virus in the last two decades.

However, it is very sophisticated. They somehow managed to actually get a fraudulent charge on my card. When I got the spoofed message from "my bank", the first thing I did was log onto my legitimate account. Sure enough, there was a charge I did not recognize.

The rest was just a series of unfortunate "rookie" mistakes on my part. But the person who called me was highly professional, easily could have been a real customer support representative and spoke English perfectly with no accent.

They took the max, $5,000. My bank thankfully refunded it.

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Sorry to hear about that.

It's given me an interesting idea.

If we know the bank will refund through insurance than there's a second level fraud where the victim is in on it for a cut of the profits.

Essentially the theatrics of fraud is done and then victim is refunded by the bank and then secretly compensated by the "fraudster" for their participation.

I may be convinced of that kind of scam. Everyone wants to feel like they're outsmarting the system. There's so many unknowns. Will I get the partial compensation? Will the bank reimburse me? I don't know, but I can see myself doing it. That's a problem

If you want more certainty, demand half of the money from the fraudster up front.

And then ghost so all you've done is scam a scammer.

If you're already looking at the website, why not just click "dispute" on the bad charge?

When I was with Bank of America in 2019, there was no dispute button. Any attempt to dispute went to their help center that said 'call the number'.

You can't dispute a charge until it's posted (at least with two of my banks) and it can take up to 2-3days before a charge is posted. A charge will almost always show up immediately on my bank's website as pending.

Can't dispute until posted, and the way the scam works is they get you on the phone as quickly as they can in order to continue to the scam.

Obviously, in hindsight the correct way to handle this is to call the bank yourself. The way the scam works is they spoof your bank's caller ID, and you get a standard "do you recognize this charge? Press YES if you recognize, NO if not".

When you type NO, you get a message stating "our fraud team will be reaching out to you momentarily to resolve this issue", followed immediately by a call from a very convincing "customer support" person, again coming in as a caller ID from your bank.

At this point, I made some "rookie" mistakes as I'd mentioned, but hindsight is 20/20 in these cases where they are trying to keep you on your toes.

Maybe this will become harder soon when phone companies are required to verify the call back number?

https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363399A1.pdf

(They still got the $5,000 and won't be arrested)

I always thought there was an underserved market if scammers are just filtering for gullible people. So, about time to see more sophisticated scammers casting a broader net.

But in order to pull it off, they had to ask you for a secret over the telephone at one point, which you gave them, correct?

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