Sometime in 2017, a credit monitoring organization suffered a breach in its security and its clients were subsequently exposed to the shenanigans of unethical people and groups, groups who are intent on robbing us of our assets. I was one of the millions effected by the breach, though I lost no cash to the heist. Since then, my spam filter has been vigilantly monitoring incoming e-mails, identifying suspects, and dumping them into the “junk” folder. Sometimes, legitimate contacts are junked, but I routinely monitor the folder and rescue them, sending them back into the free world. But the hits just keep coming.
In the cyber-techno world, there is a term for certain attempts to open password protected files. “Brute force,” or sending thousands of random passwords at the files in the hopes of finding the correct one, is one of the techniques used. One group of scammers has taken aim at me by using brute force. The bandits pretend to be a legitimate anti-virus provider, sounding the alarm about the expiration of my protection. I’ve no account with the provider named — who sent me two alerts while I was writing this — and I ignore the potential fall of the sky. I know of no way to block the senders, so I continue to get multiple alarms each day. And the bandits also send e-mails that mimic banking institutions, alarm companies and hardware companies; some of the e-mails try to entice me by offering gift cards.
About a year ago, I started to get phone calls from the St. Louis Missouri 314-area code. I lived in St. Louis for 19 years before I came to Indianapolis for the second time, and most of my telephone/cell phone contacts are in that area. One of the callers left me a message, identified themselves as representing a hospital association and asked for me to return the call. The caller asked for another person, though, someone I do not know. I called the person who left the message and railed at them, saying that I did not know the person they had asked for, nor did I have a relationship with their institution. The caller warned me that the person they were looking for had given my number to many people, and that I was likely to get many calls from other institutions looking for that other person. That proved to be painfully true. I get many calls from Missouri, and my cellphone identifies most of them as “Scam Likely.”
My cellphone is registered on the federal “Do Not Call” website, and for years, that registration has been sufficient to deter scammers. When I would answer suspect calls, I would say, “You are violating a ‘Do Not Call’ registration: Do you want to continue?” The bandits would hang up. But these recent scammers, set loose by the person who gave them my number, call me many times each day from different Missouri numbers. Most of them do not leave a message and I cannot report them. But they keep hammering away, hoping that I will make a mistake that will allow them to plunder my accounts of the twelve dollars I have amassed.
Cyber-attacks represent the brave new world we have entered, and the bandits who daily ride against us, have resources that overtop the safeguards we can bring against them. The scum-bums are using brute force techniques, calling, calling, and calling, hoping that someone will make a mistake and give them information they can use to steal from us.
I am being vigilant, however, and making every effort to avoid the scam wham.
cjon3acd@att.net