Post by musicalneptunian on May 16, 2021 0:28:31 GMT
These are the scams that have been doing the rounds here in Australia over the last 2-3 years. This is not exhaustive.
1. Business registration scams. Every business has a public ABN [Australian Business Number] that shows when a business started and makes it easy to work out when the periodic re-registration is required. That is a free process. But scammers send in the mail an envelope that looks like it comes from the ATO [Australian Tax Office] and a re-registration form asking for a fee. This fee does not exist; it's a scam.
2. Fake charity scams. Every time there's any event/disaster that needs donations scammers set up a fake charity website for it asking for money. For instance a bushfire. They have no morals; if it's a family whose kid has been murdered the scammers will set up a fake charity website for it before the day's out.
3. Scams against farmers. Fake websites that look extremely convincing that sell tractors and farm equipment. Farmers have been scammed out of enormous amounts of money. Sometimes close to half a million.
4. Man in the middle email scams. The hacker gets into an email server and changes the chain of emails so that the money goes to the scammer. The real estate industry has been hit heavily by this. This is a scam where it's almost impossible to tell and money lost doesn't come back.
5. Mobile phone hacking to produce a phishing email. A hacker will get all the business contacts in a mobile phone, and then send the company's business forms to the list of contacts, just changing the form slightly to send it to a fake site form phishing. I got one of these last year. It convinced me. Until I went to the site and it had a weird GST set up [goods services tax like UK's VAT] and it was clearly a scam. So I stopped there. But this is a very convincing scam.
6. Voicemail spam saying that I am under arrest by the ATO [Oz Tax Office] if I don't pay X dollars. It's usually a posh British voice with weird grammar. The last time this happened I saved the voicemail scam. The numbers in it are long since defunct. If anyone were interested I could upload the scam voicemail.
7. Fake people walking around and knocking on doors pretending to be power company representatives, complete with fake badge, saying that if you don't pay a fee your power will be disconnected. This scam came and went a few years ago but might make a comeback.
8. The romance scam that becomes a drug mule scam. The scammer massages someone's interest for months. They usually target older people who live alone. This would be bad enough. But their project is even worse. They say at a certain point that the victim has won a free holiday. Then they give the holiday to the victim plus asking them to carry an "important package/suitcase" etc that unknown to the victim contains drugs. In my opinion this is one of the most evil scams on the planet. There have been people fooled by this who have got caught with the drugs to face extremely serious charges. The Australian legal policy has been to give people suspended sentences. But if your 70 year old grandma had the package opened up in Singapore that's a dreadful outcome. Places like that would have no sympathy that she was caught in a scam.
