A friend recently fended off the Emergency Scam, where a hacker hijacks an email or IM account and poses as the account owner. The hacker asks the account’s contacts for money, claiming to be in trouble in a foreign country.
A variant is the Grandparent Scam, in which the con artists calls the elderly, claiming to be a grandchild in distress. The Grandparent Scam is huge in in Japan, with its wealthy elderly population.
These scams depend on the victim believing that a total stranger is actually a close friend or relative worthy of financial assistance. This enormous lie can be unveiled by just thinking up and asking a few simple trivia questions. [click to continue…]
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