Beware of this telephone scam.
Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Friday, November 4th, 2022. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com.
On this show I want to talk about telephone scams. Not merely someone pretending to be from Amazon, or the tax department or Microsoft. These are calls you ought to know to hang up on. I’m talking today about sophisticated scams.
A person I know in Toronto, I’ll call him ‘Vern Greenshoes’, got a phone call this week from someone claiming to be from the “Federal Government Fraud Investigation Bureau.” First, there’s no such agency in Canada or the U.S. But bear with me.
The caller said a crook using ‘Vern’s’ credit card had been arrested at a big Toronto shopping mall trying to make large purchases. The arrested man said his name was ‘Jules Greenshoes.’ He claimed the credit card belonged to his cousin ‘Vern’. No, said ‘Vern,’ I don’t have a cousin. The so-called investigator then told ‘Vern’ to phone 911 and report the incident to a specific police inspector. So ‘Vern’ hung up the phone, called 911 and was transferred to a supposed police inspector. Then he got another phone call from the fraud investigator saying his bank account had been compromised so he should cash in his retirement fund and move the money to a particular bank. Not only that, the investigator told ‘Vern,’ he shouldn’t tell the bank why he was doing this because the bank…
