[00:00:00] An island in the middle of the Pacific, Nauru.
[00:00:05] A paradise rich with a raw material that wants the whole world and which it takes until nothing is left.
[00:00:14] The story of Nauru is one about the smoke and the crater afterwards.
[00:00:18] Not even bronze from gold to rust.
[00:00:23] This is Enden, Pleasant Island.
[00:00:25] A documentary podcast by Andan and the Futurium.
[00:00:29] Right now on Spotify.
[00:00:55] A few dollars get in the way of a good payday.
[00:00:58] Chattel Aiden Singapore said a woman received a phone call shortly after she applied for her student pass.
[00:01:05] The person claimed to be an officer from the immigration and checkpoints authority.
[00:01:09] The caller then provided a name, work ID number and encouraged her to verify his identity by visiting the immigration building.
[00:01:17] The caller also said the woman's phone number was linked to a fraud case.
[00:01:22] The caller said the woman should contact the Shanghai Public Security Bureau to work it out.
[00:01:27] The scammers' goal was to keep her on the line so she couldn't check the information.
[00:01:32] They talked for about a half an hour and that's when her prepaid phone card expired and the line went dead.
[00:01:38] We're sorry, you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service.
[00:01:43] If you feel you have reached this recording an hour, please check the number and try your call again.
[00:01:49] A few minutes later the phone rang.
[00:01:51] The scammer had reloaded the card and called back under a new number.
[00:01:56] Before the second call came in, the woman's roommate said the whole thing was a scam.
[00:02:00] The woman also got a text message from her telephone company indicating that her account had been topped up with $11.
[00:02:08] FIC calls from the immigration and checkpoints authority have generated 500 reports in Singapore between April and June of this year.
[00:02:16] That's a significant increase from the previous quarter.
[00:02:19] If you use Microsoft's OneDrive, you may be at risk of having your data stolen.
[00:02:24] It's called pastejacking and our AI presenter voice, John, reads from the hacker news story.
[00:02:32] The attack unfolds via an email containing an HTML file that when opened displays an image simulating a OneDrive page
[00:02:41] and includes the error message that says,
[00:02:45] failed to connect to the OneDrive cloud service.
[00:02:48] To fix the error you need to update the DNS cache manually.
[00:02:53] The message also comes with two options namely how to fix and details
[00:02:59] with the latter directing the email recipient to a legitimate Microsoft Learn page on troubleshooting DNS.
[00:03:07] However, clicking how to fix prompts the user to follow a series of steps
[00:03:12] which includes pressing Windows key plus X to open the quick link menu
[00:03:18] launching the PowerShell terminal and pasting a base 64 encoded command to supposedly fix the issue.
[00:03:26] The command first runs ipconfig slash flush DNS
[00:03:30] then creates a folder on the C drive named downloads.
[00:03:35] Subsequently, it downloads an archive file into this location, renames it,
[00:03:41] extracts its contents and executes a script.
[00:03:44] The campaign has been observed targeting users in the US, South Korea, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Norway and the UK.
[00:03:56] OneDrive is a service like Google Drive, Dropbox and others where files are stored in the cloud.
[00:04:02] It's a tough job but regulators in the United Kingdom have ordered telephone companies to identify spam calls that use fake UK phone numbers.
[00:04:11] In 2019, the Guardian newspaper explained how the process works.
[00:04:17] It said scammers can display any bank's customer service number on the mark's phone so the mark will think it's a friendly number.
[00:04:25] If the mark already has the bank's customer service number in their contacts list, all the better.
[00:04:31] Texts work the same way and will be grouped with other texts that may have been sent or received.
[00:04:36] One provider working voluntarily before the regulations kicked in blocked up to 1 million calls a day since July 2022.
[00:04:45] All phone companies must comply with the rules by January 2025.
[00:04:51] This is Scams and Cons News.
[00:04:58] What's worse than having a load of squirmy squiggly worms on your roof?
[00:05:03] How about a scammer who put them there and tries to sell you a service to get rid of them?
[00:05:08] CBS Colorado has reported on the scam earlier than other victims came forward to say they were taken too.
[00:05:15] The television station ran with debate and uncovered an international story.
[00:05:20] International because investigators determined Dean Morgan and John McNamara, Irish nationals,
[00:05:25] were trying to leave the country after their business appeared on CBS News Colorado and caught the attention of local investigators.
[00:05:32] Did you ever fathom that this scope of this fraud was to the extent it was?
[00:05:37] No, no. I think initially we thought it was pretty limited to a small area of the Denver metro area.
[00:05:45] The duo was arrested at JFK Airport in New York attempting to board a flight to Dublin.
[00:05:51] Both suspects in this case now face charges of racketeering and theft
[00:05:55] and prosecutors say they believe this scam was taking place not just here in Colorado but in California as well.
[00:06:02] We were able to put the victims in this case, some of them, in contact with a roofing company
[00:06:08] that was willing to do the work for them completely for free to repair their roofs
[00:06:11] and the Colorado Roofing Association also reached out to us and said they were willing to do what it takes as well
[00:06:16] to make sure that everyone realizes it's not all of the industry that does things just like this.
[00:06:21] Gold is shiny and beautiful. It's not the rarest of metals but it's expensive to find and extract.
[00:06:28] It is vital in industries that need something highly corrosion resistant and transmits electricity easily.
[00:06:36] Plus it looks nice as jewelry.
[00:06:38] With gold more readily available, scammers have been conning people into buying gold bars to hand over.
[00:06:45] Gold is also untraceable. Scammers have been busy in the Washington DC area as Fox 5 reports.
[00:06:51] Back in April, an 82-year-old woman got a pop-up ad on her computer telling her she'd been hacked and to call a number.
[00:06:59] When she called the person on the line told her she needed to wire over more than $40,000 to get software to protect her from Russian hackers.
[00:07:06] Then they kept targeting her posing as government officials and telling her that she needed to convert all her money
[00:07:12] and her assets into gold bars and give them to these people for safekeeping.
[00:07:16] This went on for weeks. She handed over $900,000 in gold before she realized something was off, something was wrong.
[00:07:22] She called police. Montgomery County detectives set up a sting.
[00:07:25] They stepped in before she handed over another $2.5 million that she had converted into gold using an online website.
[00:07:33] The man who came to pick it up, 19-year-old Zeng Yong Wang out of New York.
[00:07:37] There have been at least 19 victims in one county alone and their losses total hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[00:07:45] It's been hot in much of the U.S. this summer, so who wouldn't want to have a pool party?
[00:07:51] A family of five were having a great time when the pool's owner came home and asked them what the hell they were doing,
[00:07:57] although probably not in those words.
[00:07:59] The family rented the pool unswimply, a mobile app that allows people to lease private pools by the hour.
[00:08:06] They paid around $35 to take a dip in the suburban Montreal pool,
[00:08:10] but the homeowner hadn't put the listing on the market.
[00:08:14] The thought is that a former tenant posted the listing because it had photos of the pool and surrounding area.
[00:08:20] Since the family didn't have criminal intent, the police said there was nothing they could do.
[00:08:26] The homeowners noted it could have been serious if they treated the pool with strong chemicals that day.
[00:08:32] Officials say this wasn't the first time pool squatters have used swimply to rent out properties that didn't belong to them.
[00:08:38] In May, a California couple found a stranger who rented their backyard pool just one week after they put their home on the market.
[00:08:46] And finally in the scams and cons, what were you thinking, Department?
[00:08:50] A scammer pretending to be a representative of her bank convinced a woman to get naked and spin in front of her computer's camera.
[00:08:58] The caller said it was necessary so the bank could confirm her identity.
[00:09:03] Yeah, really.
[00:09:04] And she gave them $6,000 first.
[00:09:06] The caller said there was a fraudulent charge on her account.
[00:09:10] And if she didn't move the money to a different account, it would be stolen.
[00:09:14] The man then gave her the numbers to a Chase Bank debit card and told her to add it to her Apple wallet.
[00:09:20] Cheryl Harris with the Cuyahoga County Scam Squad says it's a very common tactic.
[00:09:25] When we're panic, we're not able to focus on that part of our brain that gives us real information or helps us think rationally.
[00:09:32] The woman stayed on the phone with the crook and went to the Huntington Bank in Mayfield Heights and withdrew $6,000 in cash.
[00:09:41] Then she went to this Chase Bank on Som Center Road.
[00:09:44] Then the caller told her to tap the debit card in her Apple wallet at this ATM, transferring nearly $6,000 into an unknown checking account.
[00:09:54] It's almost like money laundering in a weird way, but it's like they want you to take your cash from the bank and then they want you to put it in this
[00:10:01] and then they want you to transfer it to that or take cash and put it into a crypto ATM.
[00:10:05] It gets real convoluted.
[00:10:07] When she got home, the same man called her on FaceTime.
[00:10:10] He told her they needed to do a full body scan to verify her identity.
[00:10:15] The woman told police she undressed and spun in circles on FaceTime.
[00:10:19] When she heard the scammer laughing, she realized it was all a hoax.
[00:10:24] Some marks deserved to be called suckers.
[00:10:27] And I think we found another one.
[00:10:28] This is Scams and Cons News.