In my personal use of 0365, I get somewhere between 50-200 personal emails a day. On average, I still have 1 to 3 phishing emails getting to me each day. Not only are they still arriving, but their sophistication and targeting are up. I still get phishing attempts from banks and other companies I don’t do business with, but it seems the phishing attempts that seem to have advanced knowledge of the companies and services I do do business with seem to be increasing. I’ve just assumed they are getting clues from my social media postings and other information leaks.
.. For example, people buying houses now have to be aware of compromised mortgage agents who’s email has been taken over by a phisher, who then sends a bogus request for the closing payment to the buyer to wire the money to another bank. The house buyers were expecting the wire transfer request, and it appears from the email account of the person they were told to expect the wire transfer request from. It appears legitimate in every way, including the amount of the money they were told to expect to have to bring to closing, with the only changed details being the bank they are wiring the money to. If the unsuspecting home buyer wires the money to the wrong bank, they are often permanently out of the money (if not the house they were wanting to buy unless they can and want to pay the closing costs again).
.. Like mortgage closing payment fraud, all spear phishing is increasing in sophistication. It is coming from people and businesses you trust. Regardless of what any vendor tells you, their anti-phishing miss rate will never be zero. I’ve been in the computer security business for over three decades. And each year, I hear from some vendor how they finally have phishing beat. And each year, it seems to get worse. Despite every vendor’s best effort, it seems more phishes are hitting my inbox than ever before
.. Even if a vendor solved the email phishing problem at work, it doesn’t stop email phishes from getting to your employees. Most employees have personal email accounts, and if that service has a non-zero phishing rate, then you and your company still need to educate those employees with security awareness training. Just because you solve the problem at work doesn’t mean the problem is gone.
Catphishing or Emotional Terrorism or Both: You Decide
Because of embarrassment, victims rarely admit they were scammed. Most victims are women over fifty years old, single, and looking for a relationship, as reported CBS news’ Meg Oliver explained.
Reed had fallen for a catphish she met on Facebook. He called himself “Scott Humpal,” and he evidently asked Reed for money to pay medical bills. Despite never having met him, she sent this stranger more than $50,000 over several months. Reed’s family reported the scam after she ran out of money and showed signs of plotting to kill her 88-year-old mother for the life insurance. Reed has been charged with fraud and conspiracy to commit murder.
There is in fact a real Scott Humpal, although he wasn’t the one in touch with Reed. Effectively a victim of stolen identity, he lives in Corpus Christi, Texas. Humpal’s wife had died in a plane crash, and shortly after the tragedy, he began receiving suspicious Facebook messages. Humpal didn’t know the people sending him messages. He responded only to be told that the people who’d contacted him had been conversing with someone claiming to be him on an Internet dating platform. Humpal discovered that scammers had created multiple profiles using his name, and that “hundreds” of women had fallen for the fake Humpal.
Adam Levin, founder of Cyber-Scout, calls catphishers “emotional terrorists, not caring whom they destroy or how they destroy them. All they are after is money.” Levin said Humpal was the ideal victim of identity theft for catphishing: he’s a handsome and well-to-do widower.
Hiya protects you from spam callers and phishing scams
Everybody hates spam calls. Beyond those annoying “you won a cruise” messages that interrupt your day and clog your voicemail, scammers can use your phone number in phishing schemes and even trick you into giving up precious personal information. Luckily, when it comes to blocking spam and flagging unwanted numbers, you’ve got options.
We like the app Hiya | Android | iOS | because it serves numbers with a side of context. Hiya gives bit more information about numbers outside of your contact list, flagging them as likely spam, a colleague from work or an important call from the doctor’s office. Hiya also lets you control and update a personalized block list and report nuisance callers.
Hiya aggregates spam lists from their carrier partners to offer comprehensive protection against annoying and phishy calls and texts. It’s ad-free and easy to use. Grab the app and start protecting yourself today.
Nobel Prize Economists Say Free Market Competition Rewards Deception and Manipulation
.. our free-market system tends to spawn manipulation and deception. The problem is not that there are a lot of evil people. Most people play by the rules and are just trying to make a good living. But, inevitably, the competitive pressures for businessmen to practice deception and manipulation in free markets lead us to buy, and to pay too much for, products that we do not need; to work at jobs that give us little sense of purpose; and to wonder why our lives have gone amiss.
.. (In Navada) the average adult spends 4 percent of income on gambling, nine times the US national average
.. It is about getting people to do things that are in the interest of the phisherman, but not in the interest of the target. It is about angling, about dropping an artificial lure into the water and sitting and waiting as wary fish swim by, make an error, and get caught.
.. However, unregulated free markets rarely reward a different kind of heroism, of those who restrain themselves from taking advantage of customers’ psychological or informational weaknesses. Because of competitive pressures, managers who restrain themselves in this way tend to be replaced by others with fewer moral qualms.
.. For others, it occurs at rites of passage: such as weddings (where the wedding mags assure brides that the “average wedding” costs almost one half of annual per capita GDP)
.. In some 30 percent of home sales to new buyers, total— buyer plus seller— transaction costs, remarkably, are more than half of the down payment that the buyer puts into the deal.
.. Phishing for phools in financial markets is the leading cause of the financial crises that lead to the deepest recessions.
.. The average four-year gain was 3.35 pounds (translating into a twenty-year gain of 16.75 pounds). Statistical analysis associates the 3.35-pound gain with 1.69 pounds for potato chips, 1.28 pounds for potatoes (mainly French fries), and 1 pound for sugar-sweetened beverages.
.. As a result of this censure and self-censure, the fraction of smokers in the United States has fallen by more than half since the bad old days when people who should have known better were arguing that smoking really was good for your health: it helped you lose weight.