Blog archive.

[Wayne]

What price fun?


I’ll admit I tend not to think too much before doing things. I have done 100 mile round trips to buy a £3 DVD, or spent an entire day and way too much money for something purely “because it’s funny”. At the end of the day, I’m an almost 50 year old who still gets to behave like a 16 year old, only with bigger means and more horsepower. Where does that put me when it comes to buying something just to prove a point? Let me explain here:

In a recent blog post, I pointed out that having HTTPS before a site’s name doesnt make it secure, it just means the link between you and the site is secure. Anything after that is purely down to how honest the site is, and you can still be robbed blind using the information you shared. Jeff (Big Al) made a point to show this to his employer after they claimed that “HTTPS is safe”. Now, to prove my point even more, I bought another domain and made it HTTPS without putting any content on it at all. If we were an actual business rather than a group of volunteers I could claim this as a business expense now I’ve talked about it here. We’re not though, and it came out of my own pocket. In my eyes it was worth it as it made a humorous point and didn’t really cost too much in the grand scheme of things. At what point however does it go from “lighthearted fun to prove a point” to “HOW MUCH????” £1? £10? £100? Do you see it in terms of cups of coffee? Pints of beer? Is “three pints of beer” too much to pay for a “one and done” joke? Have any of you reading this spent good money purely to prove a point to someone else? I’m genuinely interested in how far people have gone so they can say “I told you so” to someone else when it comes to cybersecurity. Let me know your opinions on this, I really do want to know.

[Wayne]

Think of the damage that could have been done.


One of the places my friend and I like to visit is the local recycling centre. You never know what you’re going to find there, and always at an absolute bargain of a price. This week I saw a laptop there. Time for an upgrade on my laptop for a faster version, plus I already had a donor for my old one. I’ve also got RAM and an SSD drive that’ll speed this one up. Everyone’s a winner!

I’m told by the place that it’s had a fresh install of Windows, but as I’m upgrading the drive to an SSD anyway, there’ll soon be an even newer install. First job, add in the extra RAM. All works fine. While checking things out, I get a notification of an email. I can imagine some of you already know where this is going. Yup, I was not only able to access the former owner’s email account, featuring bank and Paypal information, but look through all the documents still left on the drive too. Luckily I’m an honest person. With all the information I had in front of me, I could have easily done some serious damage. It was an absolute goldmine for a bad guy. I made sure to completely wipe it anyway before swapping it out.

A number of years ago, I bought a hard drive at the local market/car boot sale. This one had the person’s CV and a topless photo taken on a webcam in among the documents. That one got wiped pretty damn quick too!

What options are there to protect your data then? There are free programs out there that will completely wipe a hard drive, replacing all the data either with zeros or random data. Another way is to completely reinstall Windows and use the option to reformat the drive first. You could remove the drive and sell the PC without one. There are even places you can send your old drive to be shredded. Whatever option you choose, do something. The next person who gets your system may not just use it as a topic for a blog post.

[Wayne]

The “Kyle Files” pigeon.


It’s been a stressful, hectic week here, so I think it’s time for a bit of levity. A few years ago I was asked to appear on an episode of “The Kyle Files”. I live in South Wales, and the show is filmed in Manchester, so it was a long drive there and back for what was essentially a few minutes of airtime. Luckily I had a friend join me for the journey, and he took great delight in telling everyone where he worked that he was having the day off to go with me as I was going to be on “The Jeremy Kyle Show”. This is the same guy who told everyone I was going to be on Crimewatch too, never mentioning it was as an expert, not a suspect.

A few weeks later I had a call from them again asking if I could come back and do more filming. This time they offered to pay for a train ticket and a hotel for me. They’d reimbursed me for my petrol the time before, but this time I could chill out on the journey, plus wouldn’t have to do about 10 hours of traveling in one day, so figured why not.

I met the film crew, and we started filming some introductory footage of me. Basically, I was to walk down the busy street, sit on a bench and “people watch”. They seemed to want to make me out to be someone who could spot a scammer just by looking at them. This is where the problems start. I’m sitting on a bench, very obviously being filmed by a TV crew and looking at the people going by. Suddenly everyone is looking at me like I’m some kind of weirdo! At one point I get completely distracted by a pigeon wandering around on the street, to the point they had to stop filming. I explain what was happening, we make a small joke about it and move on. The rest of the day was pretty good. More filming outdoors, meeting Jeremy Kyle again and then off for the night in a hotel. Back home the next day, then off again the day after to fly to Vegas to speak at a conference. Now all I had to do was wait for the program to be shown.

A few weeks later it’s finally on. I’m annoyed that they’re saying my name and not the site’s, then it happens! They only went and filmed the damn pigeon and spliced him into the footage!!!! There were 4 people in the world that watched the program and got the joke. Now you all know how a pigeon appeared on prime time TV purely to make 4 people laugh.

Why am I bringing all this up now? As you know, YouTube suspended our account last week. We’ve been trying to replace as much lost footage as we can, and while searching I actually found the episode online. I don’t know how long it’ll be there, but you can check it out at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6th3eu if that’s the kind of thing you like. As for the pigeon, here he is in all his glory!

[Wayne]

All our videos are gone.


Yesterday, when I went to check out Youtube, I noticed that I needed to log into my account. When I did, I was told that the account had been suspended. All my videos we gone. I registered an appeal, and today was told it had been unsuccessful. So now all the years of videos are gone forever. As you can imagine, I’m completely deflated right now. Times like this I question why I even bother doing this when it can all be wiped out so easily by people with no understanding of what we do.

[Wayne]

Just when you think they can’t get any lower, guess what happens.


A recent blog post talked about how low a scammer will go to get money from someone. If I’d made that post today, this would be added to it. Let me explain….

We have a form that people fill in when they’ve dealt with a sextortion scammer. It’s how we get the information to post on our site. Yesterday we received one that was pretty gruesome. There’s no actual sextortion involved in the typical sense. This time it seems that a “female” offered her services on a site and was turned down. The next part of the scam involves the “pimp” character contacting the person claiming they “make her loss time”, and this is where it goes way too far. The next part says “if you don’t pay you and your family will be executed one by one since we have all the information of each one of them do not try to block me or turn off the phone because I have all your information including those of your relatives”. That’s bad enough, but they then include images of dead people. To be more exact, people who had been murdered, including one of a male with gunshot wounds and a gun by his side, and one of a young female who’d had her arms, legs and head cut off. That last one is an image that’s never going to leave me for as long as I live.

When we say that there’s no low a scammer won’t go to, we really do mean it. The next time someone tries to justify scamming people or seeing scammers as anything but scum who will do anything to get money off a person, imagine that person reading their messages and not only being threatened with execution, but being sent sick, disturbing images like the ones I’ve described earlier.

[Wayne]

Same as it ever was.


When being interviewed, a lot of the time I get asked the same questions. Today we’re going to look at one that tends to get asked when I mention I’ve been doing this thing for almost 15 year, and that’s “How have the scams changed in that time?”

First of all, some scams haven’t changed at all. Take for example the “dying widow” scam, which was the first scam I ever responded to as a baiter back in 2005. The basic idea behind the scam is that the scammer is playing the part of a widow who’s just been told she only has a short time to live and wants her considerable wealth to go to good causes when she dies. That’s where you come in, as the person chosen to distribute said wealth. These scams have remained pretty much unchanged at all, including some of the same scripts still being used to this day.

Some scams have disappeared altogether, or been replaced with different ones. Back in my early baiting days, scammers from the Philippines were almost always females or males transitioning to female. They’d appear on webcam, flash you a smile (or more) and claim that you’re their boyfriend and wouldn’t it be great if you would send them some presents. That went away, to be replaced by sextortion scammers when a law came into effect outlawing “cybersex” and “cam girls”. One door closed, only for another one to open.

Some scams continue, but have evolved over time. Let’s take romance scams as an example. Years ago, the scam would involve the scammer’s character asking a victim for money, usually via money transfer service. It was easy back then to tell people to never send money to people who they’d only ever met online. These days though the romance scam has become much more complicated. Why? Mainly because of the use of fake websites in the scam nowadays. A fake site can make the scammer look much more legitimate, and some will even have a fake courier company site made for them as an example. The scenario now changes from “Can you send me money?” to “I’ve sent you a gift, you can check its progress on the courier company’s website.” and then “This is the courier company. We need you to pay more fees before you can receive your item”. Now the narrative has changed from “send me money” to “you need to send the courier company money”.

These are just a few examples, but it shows that there’s no simple answer to the question “How have scams changed in the past 15 years?”

[Wayne]

It’s like drinking your own piss in the desert.


During a recent media interview, I spoke about companies that charge scam victims for “help”. The emphasis was on the fact they’re charging people who may already have no money left after the scam for help that’s often free on sites like this one. What we didn’t bring up was what some of these sites offer as part of their paid service. We’ve read reports from people who went to them after being sextorted that they call up the scammers threatening them with law enforcement. That’d be great if it wasn’t for the fact the scammers are able to do this without ever revealing any of their real details. All they’ve actually done is put the person at more risk of their footage being released by the scammer in retaliation. It’s stupid, dangerous and they have the nerve to charge people anything up to several thousand dollars for it. Like drinking your own piss in the desert, if you survive it’s despite it, not because of it.

[Wayne]

How low can you go?


When doing interviews, I’m often asked about the worst scam or scammer I’ve seen. Over time, that has changed due to having seen the scammers reach even lower lows. Let’s look at a few that I’ve seen over the years, starting with the very first “low” scam I experienced.

Noma is a horrendous disease that eats at a person’s mouth and face. The images of people suffering from it are both hideous and heartbreaking. A scammer pretended to be a noma charity and sent out emails asking for a $1000 donation to help rebuild a child’s face. They even had a link to a genuine noma charity, who was informed and put a warning about the scam on their site.

“Recovery scams” are a particularly nasty scam, where a scammer will message a scam victim claiming to be law enforcement and able to get their money back. In reality it’s the same scammer coming in for another attempt to scam the person. The person may already be left with nothing and desperate after their first scam. That doesn’t matter to the scammer, so long as they get some more money.

People have taken their own lives after being sextorted, yet some scammers will use that fact as part of their threats to the person. They will say things like “If you don’t send the money I’m going to release your video, make you famous and you may as well kill yourself like Daniel Perry.”

Many years ago we were in a call with a scammer. He was told that the money we were about to send was needed for life saving medication for the person’s son and he would die if he didn’t get it. The scammer cheerfully promised the money would be back within 2 days. This was despite knowing that if they took the money, a small child would die.

Recently I had a scammer claiming to be looking for someone to distribute Jeffrey Epstein’s millions to charities.

Also recently, I had a scammer claim “This fund belongs to our Late Costumer Mr. Zhang Zhaoyun from China who died without a Will after being infected on the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship with his wife and daughter with { Covid-19 } Coronavirus 5 months ago”.

Cameroonian scammers create sites to sell nonexistent N95 masks and PPE, but they also create sites to sell nonexistent “Suicide” pills to those who feel their quality of life is so bad the best option is to end it. A person who sends money for them will never receive them, but will receive blackmail threats from the scammer over the fact they tried to buy illegal medication.

Which one do you feel is the lowest?

[Wayne]

I must have a trustworthy face.


This week I was asked by a neighbour to help with buying a new PC for one of her sons. We went through all the options, and when it came to buying it, we had to put her details onto my PC. It’s the usual stuff – name, date of birth, address, email address, password, phone number. Yes that’s right, I asked her for her password and she gave it to me without question.

Last week I was asked by a friend to fix her laptop and upgrade it at the same time. I’ve worked with computers for over 35 years, and built my first PC back in the 80s. My first job was in fact building computers. “Install some extra RAM and upgrade the drive to an SSD? No worries. I’ll need the laptop, the charger and your password”. When it arrived, the password was written on a post-it note stuck to the inside.

A few weeks ago I was asked to copy all the data for a company run by the son of a friend from their dead PC to a USB stick to go onto their new PC. Guess what I told them I needed.

These aren’t isolated incidents, and it got me thinking.

In every case, I was given sensitive information or access to sensitive information simply by being a “person of trust”. Luckily I am a trustworthy person, or think of the damage I could have done with it. Now imagine how many people give out their information to people who pretend to be people of trust. All a scammer need do sometimes is claim to be the police, the person’s bank etc. and they’re given the tools to empty a person’s bank account or ruin their life. Just because someone SAYS they’re someone, doesn’t mean they are. Whenever you’re asked for money or sensitive information that would allow someone access to your money by someone, always double check to make sure they are who they claim to be. If they’re genuine, they’d rather you did that. The scammers, they’re not so keen.

[Wayne]

HTTP not so S


We’re often told that if a site starts with HTTPS then it’s secure, but what does that actually mean? In its simplest form, all it really means is that anything you share there, such as information on a form, is protected from being seen or altered by any third parties (think bad guys) on its way to the site. It stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. HTTP is the same, except for the Secure part. One of my sons has recently created a website that I helped set up with him for his non computer related hobby. It’s on a cheap shared hosting plan and has practically no content right now. Before any content was even added to the site, I went in and changed it to HTTPS in the settings menu. Let me explain this again to you. A brand new site with no content shows up as https://www. and the name of the site. People are often told that the S in HTTPS stands for secure, and indeed it does. It does NOT however mean that the site is legitimate. I own a site with an utterly ridiculous name that I have just for the comedy value of being able to use an email address with its name in it. It has no content at all, but it’s also HTTPS. Don’t be fooled into thinking a site that starts with HTTPS is safe. It could still be used for scamming purposes. Always do your research when buying anything online before parting with a single cent. Check the site is legitimate by doing things such as checking how long it’s been around, what the online reviews are like etc. If you’re still unsure, then you can of course ask us about it and we’ll help the best we can. Just remember that the S doesn’t stand for “safe” or “scam free”.