Imposter scams use new tech and techniques to steal retirees' life savings.
Posing as a customer service agent, he instructed her to drive to a store and buy an Apple gift card.
"I went down there, and I ended up taking a picture of the back of that card, which has the number on it, for $200 and sending it to him," Berg said. When the scammer called back and asked for $500 more to fix a new problem, she realized that it had all been a trick."Being able to remotely and maliciously access webcams is part of the toolkit of hackers who are looking to scam people," said Sandy Silverberg, president of the technology consulting firm TEConsult.
Silverberg was a consultant to FirstLight, a home care company in New York, when one of the company's clients was spied on through her webcam. The scammer had tried to use details about the interior of the client's home to convince her that he was her nephew. FirstLight owner David Martin knew his client didn't have a nephew and reached out to Silverberg."He actually told me now that they're spying on her and this is very common with the elderly," Martin said.
Scammers will then extort victims, saying,"I collected all your private data and I recorded you pleasuring yourself, or doing something terrible, or whatever it is, through your webcam," FBI Special Agent Mike Braconi said."And you pay the X amount of Bitcoin."For the authorities, it's like whack-a-mole trying to catch the criminals swindling billions from the nation's elderly.
"We're making a concerted effort to go after the networks to try to take down the networks, and not in a piecemeal approach," O'Neill said of the Secret Service's tactics."Because what we've found is if we just take one individual out, somebody else will fill in that role. We have seen a change in the bad actor operations knowing how we are targeting them, which is good, because it continues to make them uncomfortable.
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