• Hacking into your friends

    Posted on October 8, 2022 at 18:37 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    The email came from someone I know. I could tell from how it was worded that it wasn’t truly from him, that someone was pretending to email from his account. But I played along anyway just to see what the scam was all about.

    The email asked….

    Hi please do you shop from Amazon?

    Thanks,

    Interested to see what the scam was about I answered, “Yes”.

    Back came the email….

    Good To hear from you I’ve been trying to purchase a $200 AMAZON E-Gift card in $100 denomination by email , but it says they are having issues charging my card. I contacted my bank and they told me it would take a couple of days to get it sorted. I intend to buy it for my niece whose birthday is today. Can you purchase it from your end for me? I’ll refund it to you once my bank sorts the issue out. Let me know so I can send you her email.
    Thanks

    Gift card scams are not new.

    In a FTC news release last year they said “In the first nine months of 2021 alone, nearly 40,000 people reported $148 million stolen using gift cards. And because the vast majority of frauds are not reported to the government, this reflects only a fraction of the harm these scams cause”

    So how did my friend get hacked? More than likely he has either reused his password on the email account or he got tricked (phished) into entering it on a web site. From there the attacker can log in and pretend to be him and email people in his contact list.  The scammer can then redirect any inbound email so when someone responds, like I did, to his email, the scammers then send back a responding email.

    I contacted a nephew of my friend to alert him that he needs to reset his email password and review is account and computer for issues.

    Sometimes they are out to get you. And during October’s cyber security month, it seems like even more so.

    Security
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