This all started some time ago. It was September 7th 2021 when I wrote ‘As banks cut corners’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/09/07/as-banks-cut-corners/) In that article I wrote “They merely needed some time, a $2500 computer and a decent internet connection, the pay off would be a 7 figure number and with the speed they are tracked they would be living large in another country with nothing attached to them. That is the current reality and the level of checks and balances that are missing is just too unbelievable for words. Enjoy your bank account (for as long as you still have it)” and what do you know, ABC gives us less than 20 hours ago (at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-19/adelaide-man-prepares-legal-action-after-being-scammed/101452218) ‘Adelaide man enlists help from former South Australian senator Nick Xenophon after losing $36,000 to scammers’ there we see “Mr Xenophon, now working as a lawyer, is representing Adelaide car salesman Michael Edwards, who lost $36,000 to a sophisticated phone scam earlier this month.” It is one way of looking at it. I personally wonder when the stage of ‘a sophisticated phone scam’ is not met and it is simply the absence of proper checks and balances. The party line of “NAB says recovering money from scammers is often difficult” is a joke. And the setting of “after the call ended, he was still suspicious, and then spent hours on the phone waiting to talk to a real NAB fraud investigator.” Is largely a joke. It is not the man who needs to worry, it is the bank. In a full 5G network the damage will become twentyfold, and the banks need to set larger checks and balances, the fact that we see “I’m working for the NAB, I’ll send you something now on your mobile phone saying he was Mark Jacobs from the fraud department, NAB case number and all the rest of it” implies that the system, the bank system has failed. My first (and optionally incorrect) idea was that any bank has a Java-bean system that sets the stage that the person calling asks the person to start a bank application and goes towards the verification stage. Then the person can give three numbers that are encrypted and only the bank can see these three numbers and they can tell the person what these three numbers are, as such there is verification. Not the scammer gets the upper hand, but the person they try to scam and when that person does not CLEARLY state the three numbers, the person hangs up and presses the alert button. OK, this is old stuff but the stage of verification is underestimated and done away with by banks because of the customer unfriendly factor. So how friendly is losing $36,000 dollars? Things need to change and they need to change fast. When we see ““We’ve seen a significant increase in scams in recent years and its upsetting to see the devastating effects these can have on the impacted victims,” Chris Sheehan from NAB’s Investigations and Fraud group said in a statement” we see a clear setting that changes were essential years ago and soon the banks will not pay for that loss, as such they either improve the setting of security or they pay all losses, but that is merely my view on the matter and the fact that I saw this coming a year ago gives a much larger stage of reckless endangerment of bank accounts by banks. So as people like former South Australian senator Nick Xenophon know the banks have been dropping the ball, the problem is a lot larger. We the people need to realise that ‘simplicity’ of options have a risk. There is a reason why I do not allow for online banking. I have seen this flaw for close to a decade and now we see a case and it is not the first case as plenty of evidence shows. But now it will cost us money and as such the people need to change their habits and change their insufferably need for simplicity and easy access, criminals enjoy your easy access too and one person found that out by donating $36,000 to a scammer. He is not alone and a lot of criminals take a different road, they feel safer getting 50,000 pay outs of $10-$45 then one payout of $36,000. Where the banks stand? You ask them, I doubt you get a clear answer and this issue is playing all over the Commonwealth and the US. Australians lost over $2,000,000,000 last year alone. I have no clear image on how it hits the other nations but these scams are not just bank scams, so the picture is not completely clear, but something needs to be done and some message that 80 people are getting hired is not enough. But that might merely be me yammering on fictive issues. What do you think?
Tag Archives: Scam
When is a job not a job?
This is not a farce or a joke, it is a serious question. So at what point have you seen a customer service role, paid $400K a year with the following:
– You will receive an email with a link to start your self-paced, online job application.
– Our hiring platform will guide you through a series of online “screening” assessments to check for basic job fit, job-related skills, and finally a few real-world job-specific assignments.
– You will be paired up with one of our recruiting specialists who can answer questions you might have about the process, role, or company, and help you get to the final interview step.
This is my view of a really silly approach to data collecting!
We get more when we seek deeper quotes like “(name redacted) has turned down high profile tech roles in Europe, preferring to be near his family in Egypt. Crossover enables him to work remotely as a Senior Software Engineer for Trilogy – a role in which he gets to learn new things every day” and it is all possible via a place in Austin Texas (a big city in the USA).
So it took less than 2 minutes to find ‘This company is a scam. Become your own contractor’ This was one source, there were more, the larger stage is found (at https://www.glassdoor.com.au/Reviews/Employee-Review-Crossover-for-Work-RVW11216098.htm).
Now, normally I do not give a fig, I really do not care who they entangle and how they go about it, but in today’s market to find these so called ‘scams’ going on in places like LikedIn is a larger concern. And to make matters worse, they now have over 2.8 MILLION followers. When places like LinkedIn and Indeed cannot keep their offer database clean, the actual people desperately looking for a job will not ever succeed. Places like Australia have to deal with age discrimination for too much, getting data clowns thrown in the mix does not help and the pot of where to find decent and real jobs is getting slimmer. You see, there are all these people that claim that SEEK is the real deal, but consider that they have (today) 9,761 technical support jobs and 484 UNIX jobs in ONE metropolitan area, do you think that adds up? I can give you a guarantee that it does not, I used SEEK in 2012-2014 and I got ZERO returns, not one job was real, they were all recruiters gathering resumes, a fail rate of 100%, pretty impressive is it not?
As I see it, when these ‘providers’, who came in from nothing and offer a decent service, they need to make sure that their service is clean, if not their value goes straight into the basement and it has larger repercussions. So when I see messages that they cannot find people with Digital experience and some people have been applying for years, I merely giggle. One is not looking in the right place (the one who cannot find applicants), they all claim to be in a global economy and they see “Today’s top 1000+ And Digital jobs in Saffron Walden, England, United Kingdom” someone is clearly losing the plot and it is not me, it really is not. For me that part lighted up as my great grandfather came from Saffron Walden and for the viewers, see the image below. Do you really think that place has 1000 jobs to offer?
So when is a job offer not a job offer? As I see it when it is a ruse, a scam or mere data (CV) collection. That is my view on the matter.
What makes us fall?
We are feeling all kinds of weird at times, we fall for someone, for something, and we also trip at times. These things happen and more often than not we have ourselves to blame, but is that the case all the time? In this I refer to a BBC article 3 days ago called ‘Victim of ‘Elon Musk’ Bitcoin scam loses home deposit’, first of all, the scam used the name ‘Elon Musk’ the man himself has no dealings here. But it was part of the article that woke me up. It is “Ms Bushnell, an investor in cryptocurrency, spotted an item on a website that appeared to use BBC News branding, claiming Mr Musk, the billionaire boss of the Tesla car firm, would pay back double the sum of any Bitcoin deposit”, now in my case the part where I see ‘pay back double the sum’ would raise all the red flags, but it is “an item on a website”, not merely “appeared to use BBC News branding” that got my eyes.
There are two elements here, the first is that more and more advertisements (and scams) rely way too heavily on ‘deceptive conduct’ and the law has been dragging its heels here for 2-3 years on drowning that issue. Stronger laws against deceptive conduct needs to be there, not some political loon relying on some complaints department, but laws that give power to the law to chastise the advertisement agency that allowed for this with fines in excess of £1,000,000. I reckon that these people will clean up their acts when the fine equals a quarter of their revenue. Do you think it is overreaching? I myself thwarted 5 attempts to get scammed last week, and I believe it is getting worse, with Indian developers learning that for a mere investment of $250 they could reap $250,000 matters are getting worse and it needs to be halted, or at least diminished by a hell of a lot. In this I am willing to point the finger at Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and optionally Amazon as well. Some advertisements should not be allowed to continue.
Even when we see the Guardian giving us (some time ago) “investigation shows apparent ease of promoting fraudulent services online”, we see the lack of actions by all. They made these AI claims, so use your AI (actually AI does not yet exist), but there needs to be a much larger level of checks and even as the BBC watered down the stage towards “spotted an item on a website”, which due to a lack of presentable evidence makes sense, the setting is not all towards the victim. Yet in that light, If I had a real option to double your money, do you think I would go open, or go to my best friends? If I had an option that there was a 100% chance of a 100% gain, do you think I would give this to strangers, or to close friends? Consider that question when you go out and spend (read: donate) your money on something that is without evidence and without verification.
And there is a reason to blame big tech in this instance, it is seen in “The fake site is still currently online”, this implies that there was advertisement, there is a trail and I reckon there is a need for action and an option for action. You do not need a big degree in IT (I do have one) and we do know that there are ways to mask one’s digital identity, but wonder should those with a masked digital identity be allowed to advertise?
The article gives more questions than answers, but that is not a bad thing. Getting the questions out into the open optionally raises the bar or perception and if we get that bar high enough, my peers in the House of Lords will wake up and demand action, which gets us at least part of the way there.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 