Things the guys who stole my phone have texted me to try to get me to unlock it - Gothamist
gothamist.com
This is a very entertaining and educational article, giving insights into the methods used by thiefs to try and get access to your phone data.
I don't like Apple but it's great that their security is so good when it comes to this.
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Often scammers don't want to make it less obvious. If it's obvious and the mark falls for it, it's a good indicator they're on the hook and will fall for more. It's to filter out the less gullible so the scammer doesn't waste their time. Probably not the case with this situation specifically, but it holds true in general with scams.
True. But also true is that a majority of scammers are simply not smart and/or English is not their native language. A phishing email/text that might look good to them, can look really bad to others.
But still, people still fall for the obvious phishing attacks. AI is going to make the phishing appear more legit.
Yeah :( High-value item already in hand, never a need to guide somebody which store to buy the giftcard at or what to say to the bank teller…
On a similar note, a reason why you shouldn’t respond to spam/scam texts because it basically verifies you as an active phone number. Why waste man/bot power texting numbers that may or may not exist when a majority of your texts will at least be seen by a human which will probably boost their chance
It’s why I tell my friends not to respond even tho some of their responses are really funny
Some smarter ones I see usually range between 2-7 lines of text usually written as a time sensitive question that will affect the totally real persons social or work like
One of my favorite ones was about 5 lines of text that was posed as a date
It was like “Hey Kayla it’s Mike, some short sob story about dating life, hope our first date goes well, then nonsense about dating with an address thrown in
However after the 5 lines it was in Arabic or some similar flowy characters and when I translated it continued “mikes” story about where he was from and how oh so sad his life was
Tldr totally fishing for a pity “sorry wrong number” to see if my phone number would be seen by human