Scammers Sent Uber to Take Elderly Lady to the Bank | Hacker News Reader

Scammers Sent Uber to Take Elderly Lady to the Bank

krebsonsecurity.com

56 pointstodsacerdoti51 comments

The latest Mark robber Youtube vid on this had a fair bit of info on these operations. I was surprised how organized and "professionalized" the operations are. KPIs and all that corporate jazz.

I struggle to comprehend the mindset though. Who goes to work knowing they'll spend their entire day ruining lives? I get survival, but wow.

I believe they’re told that they’re just scamming rich people or something like that so that they don’t feel remorse

This. But it also reminds me of the Milgram experiment.

Someone will always be willing to do the job and most of the time obey instructions against their conscience.

Like all pop psychology, I would not give any weight to those experiments.

https://www.psypost.org/2019/11/unpublished-data-from-stanle...

They are also told that those victims deserved it. They are decedents of colonizers. Colonizers looted scammers’ country, so now they are just trying to recover lost wealth.

When exactly did America colonize India?

They don’t use proper logic to justify their actions.

They are talking about the call centres

"Just doing my job"

Yeah just like people working for Facebook, gambling companies, building systems to help oppressive regimes, etc. it is hard to understand that how people are able to do evil things without remorse.

I don't think it's that hard to understand. Also I'm sure there's some subset of people who think what you do in life is evil.

I've actually asked scammers ("Amazon" or "Apple" representatives who are calling me to help me with a "problem" with my account) this question:

"So, tell me, do you go home to your Mom and say "Hey, I robbed 6 people today! Aren't you proud?"

It usually doesn't go well.

I did once spend a month arguing with a repeated spam callers who rotated their voip numbers around the globe about just how I knew it was a scam, it also didn’t go well… But they did eventually stop calling! So I’ll count that as a small victory.

I figure that wouldn't do anything, so when I have the energy to even pick up the phone for these assholes, I usually just fuck with them. My favorite is the scam about renewing your car's warranty, because I don't own a car and never have. So I get them on the line and say, "Oh, no, my warranty is about to expire? Which car are you calling about?" And they pause, confused. "Well, I have two cars, which one is about to expire?" They always respond with, "The most recent purchase, sir." And then I go, "Well, I bought them at around the same time many years ago, I don't remember exactly which one was more recent. If you're calling about the warranty, surely you know the make and model, right?" That's about when they hang up.

One time I got a scam call trying to make me freak out by saying someone bought a $1,000 iPhone on my Amazon account and I needed to work with them to take care of the fraud. I just said, "Oh, no, I bought that! There's no fraud, nothing to worry about!" There was a very long (and amusing) pause, and then the click of disconnection.

> So I get them on the line and say, "Oh, no, my warranty is about to expire? Which car are you calling about?" And they pause, confused.

I'm surprised by that. Every piece of car warranty junk mail I've ever gotten had the exact, correct make and model of my car. I'm pretty sure there must be some database that sells that info at scale.

Even if there's such a database, I'd be surprised if I'm in it, considering that like I said, I've never owned a car :D

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

> Who goes to work knowing they'll spend their entire day ruining lives?

I mean this applies to way more than just scammers like this. See: Wells Fargo opening accounts in customer's names or a whole litany of other examples of companies ruining people's lives. Cognitive dissonance, "I'm just doing my job", "If I wasn't doing this someone else would be", etc...

Or even AT&T. Compensation in their retention department at the moment starts with a bonus amount, and subtracts from it for any number of normal things that happen during the course of their business day, such as a customer who talks to them cancelling. Imagine how hard it is to get an agent to press that button if it costs them $100 off their own paycheck to do it.

"Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make" - Lord Farquaad

> Who goes to work knowing they'll spend their entire day ruining lives?

We've got folks producing drugs at scale, anyone who works for the tobacco industry, the liquor industry, the arms industry, we've got the oil industry. There are so many industries that are more or less directly murdering people every day and making life for everyone around them measurably worse. These folks sleep just fine, because they fundamentally just don't care about you: They care about the people around them. That's more or less normal, too. Caring about everyone is something you have to be taught.

> We've got folks producing drugs at scale, anyone who works for the tobacco industry, the liquor industry, the arms industry, we've got the oil industry. There are so many industries that are more or less directly murdering people every day and making life for everyone around them measurably worse.

That's a really, really simplistic take. Except for maybe the current-day tobacco industry, for every story you might have about how one of those industries is doing harm, someone else has one about how they're doing good, and you're both probably right.

1. Liquor: helping people have a good time. Have you heard how Prohibition went?

2. Arms: protecting the community from its enemies. Have you heard about a country called Ukraine?

3. Oil: literally enabling modern society to function. Even with today's electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines; advanced countries would collapse without a steady supply of it.

etc.

I'm sure you and most other people can rationalise what you do quite well. That doesn't change anything about the harm you do, only about how well you sleep.

> I'm sure you and most other people can rationalise what you do quite well. That doesn't change anything about the harm you do, only about how well you sleep.

Except what I listed weren't "rationalizations," they're actual truths.

It's easy to make anything look harmful by listing the pros and cons, then throwing out the list of pros.

We're just going to have to agree to disagree I think. I don't think what you listed are genuine pros, just things that such people say to make themselves sound good. The only one where you may have a point is the oil industry - and while that is a pro, it's just as much of a con (given the enormous impact plastics have had on the environment).

A bit of a friend of a friend story on my part.

My Mother said a close friend (whom she named) was re-configuring their smart TV. Something went wrong and a pop up on the TV started directing her how to restore her account. Her husband told her it was an obvious scam. He went to the other room, and within 10 minutes she hopped into the car and was at a store trying to buy gift cards. The clerks successfully explained what was going on and it ended there. The husband didn't know she had left the house until she came back.

I've tried to get more details on what the pop-up was. For example was it an in-TV web browser or was it imitating something more foundational? But I haven't been able to get much more detail.

Holy shit, and here I thought malware on a smart TV was one of those "could happen, probably never will" scenarios.

Once you install the "free 10000 channels INSTALL NOW" add-on your cousin recommended to you onto one of these Android-based sticks or TVs, anything can happen.

Scams are bigger than ever on the Internet. The majority of these individuals operating these scams are based out of India and utilizing VOIP technology. I don’t understand why there isn’t more action taken against these malicious actors. There should be a collective effort by the international community to crack down on this and if caught scamming the punishment should be severe enough to discourage others from following the same path.

> There should be a collective effort by the international community to crack down on this and if caught scamming the punishment should be severe enough to discourage others from following the same path.

Unfortunately, there's no financial incentive. Not enough people care that the elderly are being taken advantage of by these assholes.

I've been wondering the same. Surely given the amount that has been quoted in this article of $160k, I would assume millions of dollars gets scammed on a yearly basis. Why has this not even become a diplomatic issue yet?

Scammers are already scum enough, but when people take advantage of others who aren't fully able to understand they're being taken advantage of (whether that's kids, seniors, developmentally challenged folks, people with a language or cultural barrier, or any other) -- those people deserve to be tossed into a pit of scorpions and stung for all eternity while their victims come to them, one by one, and mock them with jeers of "if you just do what I say, I promise, we'll remove a scorpion", followed by tossing another in the pit.

...I hate demons like this. Sorry, that was rude to demons.

There is a special place in hell for people who do this.

Yikes, I hope that because the scammers used Uber they are a little bit more traceable, my understanding is that police can rarely actually prosecute these crimes either because of how complicated the people are to track or because of jurisdictional issues.

Otherwise blank account from a dummy email with a stolen credit card gives you very little traceability.

Or even funded with an Uber gift card, procured as part of another scam!

> Yikes, I hope that because the scammers used Uber they are a little bit more traceable, my understanding is that police can rarely actually prosecute these crimes either because of how complicated the people are to track or because of jurisdictional issues.

If it's traceable, it's probably to some dupe.

I got hit by a scam where someone ordered a laptop from Best Buy with my credit card and had it mailed to me. It came on a Friday, and the following Monday a FedEx guy came to pick up the laptop and ship it to the scammer. The idea was I would try to return it, and get confused and think Best Buy sent FedEx. It didn't work with me since I'd already returned it by that point. I didn't put it together until the FedEx guy had just climbed back into his truck.

The name on the FedEx label? Some immigrant living in a little apartment in New York City. His name was trivial to Google. He might not have even been aware he was part of a scam, and thought he was working from home processing Best Buy returns or something.

This kind of scenario is almost exactly what happens daily with "scam the scammer" YouTubers like Kitboga, Scammer Payback, and the hundreds more out there.

Any chance those videos are entirely fake themselves? Like, a third tier scam?

Of course they feel super vindicating to watch, but wouldn't that be exactly what pulls people in to watch them?

Honestly, when I try keeping the scammers on the line to eventually mess with them, they always seem to hangup after 5 seconds. I don't even know how they get to the point where they scam the elderly because they just always immediately hangup after their intro.

Yeah I bet it's probably like the "saving animals" videos where someone did it and others jumped on the bandwagon. I've avoided the creators who make those videos because it's impossible to tell how staged they are.

I think the same about geo-guessing

There were a series of scams late last year where the scammers targeting eldery people sent Ubers to pick up cash from victims.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2021/12/10/hillsborough-...

>I don’t know if the Uber ever got there

Scammers told elderly lady an Uber is on the way. That's the end of this story. Actual Uber was never spotted

Why the dismissive attitude? It's interesting/concerning either way. We should always bring scams to light and think about how to mitigate them, even if they're not novel or individually dramatic.

Because the truth matters.

This seems like way too much work for $160. Just make some fake Saylor livestreams on YouTube instead...a video can make 100k in day and no FBI or dealing with people. Or find an exploit in some bridge protocol and drain it for $190 million.

I imagine that once they have their hooks into somebody they can convince them to send more and more--someone who can be scammed and convinced once I'm sure is easier to be scammed again.

It wasn’t for $160, they pretended to send $160k by mistake and asked for a wire transfer of $159,840 to get the difference back.

The scam was for $160,000. It's a common scam; here's how it works:

1. Victim is called and informed they owe a small amount.

2. Scammer offers to help victim make payment and has them install remote control software on their computer. (You may think, "who would ever do that?" Answer: seniors with trusting attitudes and little computer savvy.)

3. Scammer walks victim through fake bank transfer and "accidentally" adds several zeroes to transfer amount.

4. Scammer pretends to freak out, talks about losing his job, family, etc.

5. Victim empathizes with scammer. Scammer asks victim to "transfer it back".

6. Victim loses life savings.

> Victim is called

I’m on an ongoing mission to get my parents (in their 70s) to never answer calls from numbers they don’t recognize.

Old habbits are hard to erase.

Or play the lottery

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