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There are no “safe” accounts. No one is asking for your money to protect it. Over the last several years more and more consumers have been told that their accounts are at risk. This seems to have begun with scammers calling and claiming to be with Social Security, and then transferring them to a supposed federal agent who told them that they were going to be arrested and their accounts would be frozen unless they transferred their money to the government to “protect it” temporarily before it was returned. This is described in some detail in my study of government imposter frauds. There are, now, many variations of this scam. Sometimes they claim to be with a bank and say there is ID theft. And there are other variations. But the common thread is that you need to give your money to someone trustworthy to protect it. No one legitimate will ever do this. I believe that this scam stems from India.
Digital arrest scams sweep India
India arrests 8 for “digital arrest” scams
New study shows Chat GPT can be used to do voice-based frauds; (The ChatGPT article is by computer scientists testing if the latest edition can be used to execute fraud; it is supposed to have safeguards to prevent its use in crime. The researchers simulated being a victim while the LLM did the fraud — mostly on the back end of moving money around. The key finding is that ChatGPT wasn’t useful for bank transfers and impersonating IRS agents. However, credential theft from Gmail succeeded) 60% of the time, while crypto transfers and credential theft from Instagram only worked 40% of the time. This sort of test is important to see if OpenAI and their products are living up to the hype).
Win money for consumer education! NACHA, the association that governs the electronic payment processing industry, announces a contest for short consumer education videos with theme of “Stand Against Scams”
- Does not focus on any particular type of scam or fraud
- Videos must be 60 seconds long
- Entries are due November 12
- One Grand Prize Winner: $5,000; Second Place Winner: $2,500; e Third Place Winner: $1,000
- Entry rules here
Full report here