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A comment on my last rant reminded me about this.. one of the most hilarious trends/pranks/scams.. the number of people who fell victim to this is quite more than what I thought it would be..
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Every time management says "were now using SaaS product X, and they're giving a webinar so we can learn how to use their solutions to take our business to the next level!" — I can't help but associate it with Nigerian Prince scams.
The longer I'm a developer, the more I think vertical integration and inventing your own shitty wheels isn't such a bad idea.
Their generalized, overpriced seat-per-month service always boils down to "vendor lock-in, nothing can be customized or exported, integrations are a pain in the ass, and within a few months the bills will explode because of some overage fee".10 -
When I left school I decided to apply for a junior dev role. I received a call back later that day and they tried to sell me access to some course with the promise of a job afterwords. They gave me a website to visit to find more information.
I Googled the company and found that it was as I suspected a scam and that they had been praying on the jobless for sometime.
So, I played around on the site they told me to visit for a while and found a rather simple SQLI. I managed to pull the admin email/password (which they stored as plain text) the email address belonged to a Gmail account.
I tried the password for the Gmail account turns out the account belongs to the person running the scam. I find an email from the hosting account and you guessed it the password was the same.
I pulled the site down and replaced it with a picture of the person running the scam along with his name and the words "I'm a dirty scammer".
Then I sent all the info to the police (he'd been running a few others scams too) not sure what that lead to I didn't hear anything back.1 -
The cleaning lady saga continues...
(previous: https://devrant.com/rants/1850777)
Had an appointment with their manager, stuff gets discussed and coordinated at a 3x slower pace than if I'd done it myself (as usual because fuck efficiency when there's muggles involved -_-), yada yada.
*mail addresses for contact start getting discussed*
Incompetent fuck of a manager: And you $realName, your email address is $company@nixmagic.com, then changed to $nickname@nixmagic.com? Mind explaining this?
Me: Oh yeah that's just because I give out different email addresses to each contact person when it involves public forms or registrations, helps with spam prevention and putting the company name of the correspondent in there helps with easy recognition when some company's database leaks and I start getting a lot of spam on that mailbox.
IFOM: Really.. we actually weren't sure whether we should reply to something with our company name in it.. you know, not sure whether it's legit etc. Why would anyone want to use one of our email addresses as theirs?
… Let that sink in for a moment. They think that $company@nixmagic.com is theirs? Just because it's their domain (minus TLD) in front of MY FUCKING DOMAIN? How about you start by learning how email addresses work first, because clearly you have no fucking clue about it. Are you the kind of brainless fucks that get lured in by http://totallylegitbank.com.freehost.com/... scams? Fucking stupid piece of fucking shit.
Oh, and when you're using MS Exchange, of course you can't know that when you're having your own domain, you actually also own every fucking mailbox on it, because Microshaft doesn't allow you to have more than n amount of mailboxes, unless you gobble up money for them. But you know what, in my case it's a fucking catch-all domain running Linux on its servers, so yeah I can use whatever the fuck I want in front of it, including your stupid fucking cleaning company.
IFOM: And then there's your current designated email address. $nickname@nixmagic.com..
Oh you're going to criticise that as well?! Yeah condor is my fucking nickname all over the internet, and my username on all my systems. That's why I use it. But you know what else is an email address that you might come across, because people are shallow idiots like that? ILoveBigTits69@gmail.com or something like that. You know what, how about I address you next time from ILoveBigTits69_OhAndYoursAreAWashboard@nixmagic.com, because you know what? I CAN FUCKING DO THAT. But you know, I at least am halfway fucking professional about my business-related stuff, so I won't because I really don't want to be associated with such an email address. So don't you fucking dare to criticize me for using my fucking nickname instead of my real name.
Long story short, people are fucking idiots.6 -
Dev Community
On Facebook groups- most are scams.
On SFO - strict.
On Reddit - Somehow helpful
On Telegram - 'nobody cares about you'
On Wechat or CSDN - They curse you.
On Dev.to - incomplete.
On Gitter - 'no body cares'
On slack - boring.
On Naver blog - somewhat helpful.
On whatsapp - crypto referal links everywhere
On Twitter - 'JAVASCRIPT bla bla bla'
On Google GRoups - classic
On discord - friendly
So far what I experienced, what about you guys?10 -
So for context, I'm doing an Apprenticeship in IT and naturally I've been put on help desk.
I've recently been given a phone on my desk since I'm trusted enough and know enough about our software that there's no risk to me accepting calls.
I get the standard ones, a number from a different country, poorly pronouncing a co-workers name, asking if they can speak to them. I give my normal response, "I'll just check if they're in a meeting and I'll get back to you" (which they somehow always are) and ask if they would like to leave a message. They obviously don't since they're usually scams.
Since Tuesday I've started getting calls from "BT Technical Support". I don't use BT. My company doesn't use BT. So, it's clearly a scam.
Yesterday, the same guy calls me up, Thomas he says his name is. I go along with it for a while, agreeing that I've noticed our network has been slow until the point where he asks me to begin to install TeamViewer. I realise what he's going to do so I ask him what the problem with our network is.
I hear him start to respond but he stops. He's got no clue what to say, so I say to him, "Thomas mate. I think our biggest problem with our BT network is that we don't have BT."
He puts the phone down.
So I ask you for help, lovely people of devRant.
I have a Windows 10 VM ready to go. I have a couple notepad files labelled as "Passwords" and "Bank Details". What else can I throw on there to make this guy think he's hit the jackpot without really causing too much damage?
Any ideas would be appreciated. <36 -
#include <rant>
Using angry standard;
Int main()
{
cout << "So my mom recently started "exploring the web". I'm sure you already know where this is going; she ended up signing up for a free trail of some diet pills with her credit card on some sketchy website. The website never sent any product but attempted to charge her card over $300 multiple times. My mom's bank noticed and froze the account. She has now opened an investigation with the banks fraud department and is awaiting response. I took the liberty of running a whois look up and found the companies website is held by GoDaddy and is hiding behind Domains by Proxy (GoDaddy's sysadmin hider). I'm angry that she's in this situation but I have no idea of how to uncover the real company behind the diet pills site." << endl;
Return 0;
}3 -
Hey! Heard you like scams.
Seriously, what even is this? I heard about this, but didn't think it would happen to me.
Also based on what they want to be doing with another person's computer can also double as a botnet too.
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Had someone call saying "they are going to help me with protecting against the hackers". I played around for awhile until he asked what operating system I had. When I said linux the gig was up. He knew I was messing with him....2
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There should be a NGO for properly destroying scammers. And I'm not talking about documenting the scams. I'm talking about having the resources to deny them service, find their identities and report them to authorities. Even meddle with their computers using malware.
These people are preying on mostly elderly people and stealing their money.3 -
(pseudorant)
Any ideas on how to end with computer scams (fake Microsoft support calls, money flips and the other gazillion)?
I'm really tired of this. A$$#les abusing unsuspecting people, abusing our elders, shielded behind a remote control session.
I know that this is very I.T. I'm just appealing to the extremely powerful distributed knowledge of all SUPERB people in devRant.
Thanks and hope that this was not tl;dr2 -
My org (of which i'm basically CTO) has this administrative tool that a team uses to combat spam and scams, which is quite the problem for us.. the tool was written like 9 years ago, by my predecessor, very quick & dirty and unaesthetic and without input from those who would use it as far as interface or UX... it got modded a little a few years later by a kind of amateur coder who was at the time on the spam control team, and now there's this new maybe slightly less amateur coder guy on the team who has written this amateur tool that scrapes data off our site and massages it and stores it on his own server and then provides a better interface, or so they say.... this is all because for a couple of years people didnt want to "bother me" with a request to improve our internal tool, they thought I was "too busy" doing other things... so instead this outsider has built this stupid thing that lives on his own personal server and so now we have these problems to do with performance, security, privacy for user info, etc etc... someone please shoot me....1
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So it's 5 am and a random Snapchat adds me. Of course I know it's a bot. I tend to answer these because i'm curious of how clever the ai has become in these scams. Still hasn't improved in like 5 years. Here I am telling this ai how shitty it is at it's job and telling it how it could be better by using deep learning to copy the way others talk and actually be convincing and then I think to myself, "well damn, why don't I just build a better ai." Seriously thinking about it. Ended up leaving the chat after telling the ai to inform it's lizard overlords I am for hire if they want a better trap.
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No, that Nigerian prince is not real and it is a scam, and no, I am not jealous and I don't envy you, you know what, it is totally legit ... I was lying ...
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NFTs and cryptocurrency is a scam and it annoys the fuck out of me that big names keep pushing them... Especially people in software development that really should be able to see through the bullshit.24
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I had a dream about AI.
I was contracted at a company that did some dodgy things. One of the things they "produced" was train car covers. They said the beauty of "selling" these is that they only showed that they shipped them to customers, despite never shipping them. This allowed the customers to take credit for covering their train cars to meet some environmental quota. It was a racket to satisfy someones auditing books somewhere.
Well my specialty was AI systems. I provided various types of AI for them to use to run their scams. However, there was a rule. I was not allowed to sell them or bring onsite any level 5 or above AIs. Level 5 or above AIs were AIs capable of independent thought. Not sure what levels were below, but I can imagine level 1 was probably pattern matching. Level 2 maybe can make decisions based upon rule sets.
As the dream progressed I found myself smuggling a level 5 AI onsite by combining 2 lower level AIs with complementary systems. Once "hooked up" they would act as a single level 5 AI. Not sure if I was working on some sort of industrial espionage or undercover for some sort of legal agency. I woke up too soon to find out who I really was.5 -
Just got another email from servíce@intl-paypal.com <zlvx... (noticed that “í”? Me neither) that says “[N3YywM] <https://amazon.co.uk... ” and it goes on and on...
wow, service? Seems important! I guess I should open it and click on every link!!! 🙄7 -
March's Khyber Weather was out of ordinary
Phishing and CEO-scams continued in March with even more activity.
SUPO told in their annual letter that focused attacks are day-to-day deal against Finland and Finnish companies. Positive things being that functionality of communicational services was better than average and there were new guidelines published about IoT-products' minimal requirements in the Great Britain.
Source:
Finnish Communication Regulatory Authority
https://viestintavirasto.fi/kybertu...
Translation by:
@joas1 -
SMH at parents who fall for online scams, and won't listen to me, their computer science educated son, that it is indeed a scam and do not pay them $400 to fix a pop-up.
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Found this in one of the group's I'm in on Facebook. When everyone called him out on scamming people into helping him mine Etherium, he responded with so much word salad about entrepreneurship and blockchain he could open up a vegetarian eatery.
Very professional. I'm sure someone is gonna land a dream job on this one.
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!rant Just random thoughts
Funny things aside, our job is very important when it comes to influence people through ads, well presented "studies", quizzes and polls that contribute on people's decisions. I think we all have some kind of story that we can more or less relate to what is described in the article below.
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the...
It would be wise to think twice not only about algorithms, UX and implementation details but also about ethics. We should not have as our primary goal to make the browsing experience more pleasing but safer and easier to avoid scams and traps.
Your thoughts on the topic? -
Use a product that is not the greatest, but does its job fairly well in the human capital management market. Anyhow this POS can't communicate very well with Azure extended end points via rest. FML. Now I'm building workarounds and I know this bs is gonna bite me in the ass.
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Scammers are finally testing other content.
I don't recommend testing that QR code. Idk what it does.
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Even mac app store is not safe from fake deceptive apps by scammy devs!!
http://howtogeek.com/281849/...
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