Did you know that you can hack any ATM machine? You can! Or so those Nigerian scammers would have you think.
Half a dozen messages in today’s spam filter read as follows:
fraud
No place like phone for holiday fraud.
My pay-as-you-go flip phone regularly receives calls from numbers I don’t recognize. For a while I’d pick up any that began with 206 or 425; having lived in Seattle for eight years I figured it might be an old acquaintance or former classmate.
Each time, though, it was a robonotification about a great deal on a credit card, vacation or something else I didn’t need. Nowadays I don’t pick up, and guess what? Those unknown callers never leave messages!
I’m not alone in feeling pestered. Phone-spam victims received an average of 118 sales-pitchy or downright fraudulent calls this year, according to a new study from Hiya, a free caller ID/call-blocker app.
And there’s no place like your phone for holiday fraud. Seasonal scams are up by 113 percent over last year, the study notes.
Among them:
My credit card got hacked.
A credit card issuer e-mailed me to warn of potentially fraudulent activity. My immediate thought was that the company had simply forgotten that I was traveling, even though I’d notified them.
Nope. Somebody had gotten hold of my number and used it twice. Guess where.