Items tagged with scam
It is not often a snake-oil product comes up in the realm of technology, but it seems the “Freedom Phone” fits that bill. Featuring no reported specs, construction in China, and a 4x markup from Alibaba, all while touting itself as a “free speech and privacy first focused phone,” the Freedom Phone seems to be more of...
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The state of affairs with current-generation graphics cards is quite grim at the moment. Due to high consumer demand and fabs stretched to max when it comes to production, everything from "lowly" NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards to the flagship GeForce RTX 3090 is hard to find at retail stores (online and B&M)...
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Last week, cybersecurity researchers discovered an open Elasticsearch database that exposed an extensive fake Amazon reviews scam ring. The database contained millions of direct messages between Amazon vendors and upwards of 200,000 customers willing to provide fake reviews in exchange for free products. It is...
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Academic textbooks must be one of the biggest shams out there, as math and science do not change enough to warrant a new edition of a book multiple times under ten-year spans. With the advent of eBooks, creating new editions of books became even easier as they did not require printing. Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic...
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A 5G "blocking" device called 5GBioShield is being sold in Europe for £339, which is about $418 here in the United States. The device claims to block 5G signals that some people fear contribute to the spread of COVID-19, among other things. The bizarre device claims to use a "holographic nano-layer catalyzer" to block...
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Fraudsters are always looking for new ways to cheat someone out of money. A report claims that a company CEO was tricked by scammers who faked the voice of the parent company CEO to get the executive to transfer $243,000 to an external account. The story claims that in March, criminals used commercially available...
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Voice assistants can be great for looking up the weather, playing music, and answering inquiries. However, consumers should use caution before asking their voice assistant to call a business or customer service line. The Better Business Bureau (BBB) recently reported that voice assistants are accidentally dialing...
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Buyer beware, it has come to our attention that there are several websites advertised on Facebook that are scamming people into paying for merchandise that they will never receive. These scams appear to have started to show up about a month ago on Facebook, and there have been hundreds of comments from people...
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If you're well-seasoned internet user, surely you have seen scams over the years that revolved around a Nigerian prince who needs your help to move money out of the country. We all know that it is a scam, yet for a long time, people have fallen for it. That Nigerian Prince scam is now back and has a new twist while...
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Most of you reading this have probably at some point been contacted by someone claiming you are the beneficiary in a will of a Nigerian prince. As the scam goes, all you have to do is submit your personal information and Western Union some funds to process the necessary paperwork, and in return you will receive...
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Many have touted mobile payments and digital wallets like Apple Pay and Android Pay as being more secure and convenient than regular plastic credit cards. It turns out these mobile methods can be just as vulnerable to scams as more traditional payment methods. In fact, Samsung recently confirmed that Samsung Pay is...
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AT&T and the FCC are butting heads, but for once, it is not over net neutrality. AT&T has been fined $7.75 million USD for indirectly participating in a directory assistance billing scam. Affected customers are expected to receive $6.8 million of these funds while the remaining $950,000 is a fine that will go to the...
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It seems certain that we've all managed to wind up on a website at some point in time that had misleading elements, such as fake download buttons. While piracy is going to be the first thing that springs to many minds when this kind of sketchiness is brought up, it's hardly exclusive to that area. Some websites that...
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And now we cannot even trust critics and reviewers! Jay Gentile, a man based in California who is said to be the operator of a number of sites that sell 4-star and 5-star reviews to Amazon sellers (among them buyazonreviews.com and buyreviewsnow.com) is the target of a lawsuit filed by Amazon in an effort by the...
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There are few markets that are quite as loaded-up with snake oil products as audio / video. I am sure that by me simply saying that, you immediately thought of "Monster", one of the most infamous offenders. But believe it or not, there are some vendors that push the envelope so far that Monster's $100 HDMI cables look...
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Tech support scammers have been around for a long time and are familiar to just about all of our readers. But last month, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it had issued lawsuits against several culprits responsible for tech support scams. Now Microsoft has announced that it too is going after tech...
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Microsoft on Thrusday warned that scammers are now phoning home -- your home -- as one more way to get a fool to part with his money. The scam involves cybercriminals posing as security engineers calling people at home to tell them their PCs could be at risk for malware and offering free security checks, all while claiming to represent legitimate...
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Sweet Home, Oregon. Janella Spears, a registered nurse by trade, fell victim to one of the oldest tricks on the internet by responding to one of the millions of emails that have long since been outed as scams in the press, and on network television in expose' segments. Everyone with an email account by now has surely seen one of these emails...
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We've reported twice about the potential routing bottlenecks that the Internet might face in the near future, usually in the 2-3 years time frame. We're not the only ones who are worried about this as an Internet overload could have financial repercussions that would make the post-911 economic slump seem like a stroll in the park.Virtually...
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Todd Moeller of New Jersey was sentenced to 27 months for his part in sending 'spam' e-mails to more then 1.2 million AOL subscribers. Sadly it seems that the scheme actually made Moeller, and his partner Adam Vitale quite a fortune: almost $40,000 a month!Their spamming was done via traditional monkeying with open mail servers and header...
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InformationWeek is reporting that there's a new e-mail scam to look out for and the gist of it is quite frightening: Pay up or a reluctant assassin will kill you. "According to SecureWorks, the scammer tells the recipient that he has been hired to "terminate" them but for a fee, he is willing to not go through with it."I have being paid...
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