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upworthy

scams

Michel Janse shares how she was the victim of a scam.

After falling victim to a scam on Facebook Marketplace, Michel Janse (@michel.c.janse) hopped on TikTok to give everyone a heads-up so they don’t have to go through the same thing. “Be smarter than me!” she said in the video.

Janse posted some furniture on the marketplace and chatted with a woman who seemed interested in purchasing it. She even looked at her profile to get a “vibe check," and everything seemed legit.

The potential buyer seemed to be careful to protect themselves as well. “For my safety, I just want to confirm that you’re a real person,” the buyer messaged Janse. “Are you ok if I voice call you from Google?”

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Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Local bookstore scammed out of $35K

Communities coming together for a bigger purpose is always a feel good story, so when we came across this story from WXYZ Detroit, we had to share it. Imagine being in business bringing stories to your community and creating a space where everyone could feel welcomed, only for a stranger to try to take it away. That’s exactly what happened to the owners of 27th Letter Books in southwest Detroit when a scammer purchased $35K worth of books with fraudulent credit cards.

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Democracy

Here's why those tiresome 'auto warranty' spam calls may finally become a thing of the past

“We’ve been trying to reach you concerning your car’s extended warranty."

via Pexels

Fraudsters making auto warranty calls are finally on the outs.

Is there a sound on Earth that fills people with more rage than the following:

“We’ve been trying to reach you concerning your car’s extended warranty. You should have received something in the mail about your car’s extended warranty. Since we have not gotten a response, we are giving you a final courtesy call before we close out your file. Press 2 to be removed and put on our Do-Not-Call list. Press 1 to speak with someone about extending or reinstating your car's warranty.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says there have been more than 8 billion unlawful prerecorded message auto warranty scam calls sent to American consumers since at least 2018.

The scammers lure people in with the lie that they’re calling about a car warranty and then ask for sensitive financial information to defraud them. Unfortunately, even though Americans lost out on $39.5 billion last year to phone scammers, the government has not been very effective at stopping the calls.

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Mozilla

Ever wonder what it's like to be hacked? Sarah Jeong did. So naturally, she decided to ask someone to hack her.

Jeong isn't just a random thrill-seeker — she's a respected technology journalist and lawyer, and she knew exactly what she was getting into when she recruited her friend Cooper Quintin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help her out. She wrote about her experience in GQ.

All it took was a couple of hours and some readily available tools, and Jeong joined the approximately 12% of the population who have fallen for a hack.

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