Some people should get a real job ...

[Guiseppe]

At 08:57 this morning from+61438305952:

xnoxk Voicemail message received. Visit before it is automatically deleted.

At 10:07 from +61411425947:

g8qokby Voicemail message received. Visit before it is automatically deleted.

[wotnot]

This is why I got out of netsec ~ eventually you get really sick & tired of your inner spidy senses going off, all of the damn time...it's like that Zappa line from Billy the Mountain....(and they) 'danced with depraved abandonment around a 6 foot high pile of transistor radios, each one tuned to a different station' =^)

@Uncle Fester ...recall just recently, when I was recounting what I found on my little sortie into why postimages.org/postimg.cc were being weird for you, and I mentioned they were being hosted by a data center firm in Iceland, and I said something was 'in process' (still ongoing), and I speculated that hosting company may have lost control, and my personal affectation was my spidy senses were a bit skittish about the hosting service website () just because the sight of too many big special deals rings warning bells in my head....remember all this? 'Course you do...

Out of the blue, Guiseppe posts this above, and I say to myself ..."what are the odds here?"....strip back the above links to FQDN (new.goshennyfd.org & phoenixprojectco.com) and do a dig/whois, and waddayaknow, reg'd thru namecheap.com as well.

M'kay, it's piqued my interest, how do the mobilephones fit in with this...grindgrind....this heads back to datingfree1portal.xyz ...and that flips to an account on localmatchbook.com...lol...which has since been deleted for breaching their usage T&Cs..

I think they have got themselves a job here, this is a rather systematic type of attack, and it's being disruptive ...to some. Oh No...NOOOOooooo! It's that middle aged russian women dating site again, and they're all STILL NAKED...the horror, alt-f4, alt-f4 ...man alive, I gotta stop giving into my curiosity and turning ublock/pihole off to investigate ; it's not so much what I'm seeing, it's getting around the concept in you head, that someone would *try* selling that as pr0n...that's depraved, from both sides of the camera's lense.

/me re-enables ublock & pihole

[Uncle Fester]

Yes wotnot, the Internet can be a scary place

[wotnot]

Yes wotnot, the Internet can be a scary place

Nah, doesn't 'scare' me as such....annoying at times, yes =)

[wotnot]

Phone rings yesterday evening - I look at the incoming number, don't know it, but do a double-take because the first 9 digits on the incoming number are the same as my number....as usual I ignore it.

30 seconds later, my phone chimes that I have voice mail, so I dial up message banks for a listen - I'm met with the grumpy voice of an angry old man, saying "your phone is being used for a scam, I've reported your number to the police and authorities"....and click, he's hung-up. I do the normal thing, and select 3 to delete the message =)

Give it a few minutes, and I start to thinking ~ he actually sounded legit ..cranky, but legit...perhaps there's the chance my phone number has been spoofed, and is being used for some scam?

I realize that if my number has been spoofed, he probably can't block me real number/IMEI paring, so I send an SMS letting whoever know they're accusing a disability pensioner of being a scammer, and I look forward to the police getting here to report this.

I get an SMS back straight away apologizing, and he explains he's been getting 3 scam calls a day and it's driving him crazy.

What do you do? I sent him back the text "Stop being the victim! Don't answer calls from numbers you don't know" ; hopefully he heeds the advice.

[Uncle Fester]

- I look at the incoming number, don't know it, but do a double-take because the first 9 digits on the incoming number are the same as my number....as usual I ignore it.
...I start to thinking ~ he actually sounded legit ..cranky, but legit...

Getting a legit call from somebody with 9 digits the same as yours? Isn't that a harder probability to winning a million in lotto?

[wotnot]

Getting a legit call from somebody with 9 digits the same as yours? Isn't that a harder probability to winning a million in lotto?

I know, what are the odds? It was why I was taken aback - for a fleeting moment the brain thought the call was self-originating...until seeing the last digit, and going "Hmm"

I did actually contact my provider (amaysim) to give them a heads-up that apparently my number had been misused to hoist a scam, and they basically said there was bugger all they could do about that, except change my number.

Oh btw, my number was being used to proffer the 'a warrant has been issued for your arrest, due to unpaid taxes' scam shizzle fwiw.

[enf]

"Stop being the victim! Don't answer calls from numbers you don't know"

Exactly.....

[Jma]

Probably about a year or so ago I had a string of annoying calls from several similar numbers, decided one day to ring one back to tell them exactly what I thought of their concern for me, and ended up getting a legit business in Melbourne.
The bloke I spoke to said he'd had many calls over the last few days from people annoyed by the same scammer scum who was spoofing their businesses phone number.
Being stuffed around continuously at the time when trying to report it, it seemed trying unsuccessfully to block access to torrent sites was more important than stopping these types of scammers.
Hopefully nowdays that's starting to change.

[trash]

Yep, this shit is getting tiring.

I was thinking of starting a go fund me campaign to have scammers whacked.
They'll soon stop the scams if they start falling down stairs in mysterious circumstances.
I should just set up a fake site that you can "report" scammers and then post fake pictures of people who have met unfortunate ends with the claim they were hit by "the fund".

I'm surprised that somebody hasn't made an app to take care of the incoming scam calls and messages.
The app sees and incoming call, and checks it on a database. If the number is not in the database, it lets it through.
The receiver will answer it and if it is a scam call they can hung up. The app activates on any call less than 30 seconds and asks for feedback.
"Was this a scam call?" If yes, it sends that information to the online database. If the database gets more than 3 rejects against a number, then it blocks it automatically on all phones running the app.

The scammers can of course rotate numbers but the app will keep up. So once the app knows the number, it's blocked and no other user will ever know it was blocked.
I might think it could be done for the SMS scams too. They could bulk send SMS's which gives them a much greater spread before any app shuts them down. If the app could automatically delete received messages flagged as scams, it would slow them right down.

Telstra, Vodafail and Optus could make a neat little sum if they marketed it to the oldies for something like $1 per month.

I suspect the latest round of SMS scammers is a move away from the scam automated phone calls because they are getting shut down faster than they can hit a mark.
I do know Telstra has been hitting them on key phrases but the scammers have been trying to get past the AI with poor spelling and weird text.

The scam callers, I found a tactic which seems to work really well. When I get a call from a number I do not recognise I answer the phone but I say nothing.
Stay as quiet as I can. A lot of the time the caller hangs up. Some of the automated messages still play but I let them roll until the middle of the message about 10 seconds and then hang up. This is typical of a voicemail record time.

It's actually now a bit of fun, because I get a few legit calls from unknown numbers and the pregnant pause is fun. If somebody finally says, "Hello?"
"Yes, I've changed the human protocol for voice calls, the caller has to say hello first. "

[wotnot]

Probably about a year or so ago I had a string of annoying calls from several similar numbers, decided one day to ring one back to tell them exactly what I thought of their concern for me, and ended up getting a legit business in Melbourne.
The bloke I spoke to said he'd had many calls over the last few days from people annoyed by the same scammer scum who was spoofing their businesses phone number.
Being stuffed around continuously at the time when trying to report it, it seemed trying unsuccessfully to block access to torrent sites was more important than stopping these types of scammers.
Hopefully nowdays that's starting to change.

At a guess, most of us don't consider that our own phone number might be used like this ~ I know I did think about it, but it's always been hard to prove (to myself) until now ; I did actually thank the guy for reaching out - better I know than not sort of thing.

If someone I don't know ends up redirected to message bank, they've gotta deal with my OGM ...which is the opening chorus/refrain from The Banana Splits Show ...tralala, la lala la, tra la la lala lala lah...."beep" -- tends to weed out the riffraff, all of the time =)

The official ACMA blurb on this is (makes for a good light read) ->> ; after you read that, consider what nationality/where most of these scammers (sound like they) are, and just how many aussie & other business use overseas call centers, and where those call centers are ....m'kay?

Why my number?...who knows, random number generator spat out my number to tag on a scam call's CID perhaps, *maybe* a recurring cold call hit message bank too many times, and took umbrage and passed my number on to CID sellers just based on the fact I've displayed a history of not answering calls from numbers I don't know. Is it not remarkable that I wouldn't have thought of that angle, before the advent of AI chips and technologies =)

Oh, for any younger readers who haven't a clue what I'm referring to ->

[Jma]

......If someone I don't know ends up redirected to message bank, they've gotta deal with my OGM ...which is the opening chorus/refrain from The Banana Splits Show ...tralala, la lala la, tral la la lala lah...."beep" -- tends to weed out the riffraff, all of the time =)......

LOL, nice!
Been a long time since I heard that.

[wotnot]

LOL, nice!
Been a long time since I heard that.

Finding out Drooper was a woman, really shocked me.

Uh oh... Chongo!