Many (most?) of you have seen those annoying captchas that are designed to see if you are a human. They often don’t really stop hackers but the always annoy users.
And, recently, you have likely seen different ones on different websites, so you don’t really know if you see a different one whether it is real or a scam.
This one is a scam.
The window above is what you see. What it is asking you to do is to run a program that the malicious website has downloaded in the background.
THE PROGRAM COULD DO ANYTHING. ANYTHING AT AL.
If you get this request when you go to a website it is, pretty much, a 100 percent guarantee that the site is malicious.
That doesn’t mean that the site started out that way. It could be that the owner didn’t secure the site and as a result, it has been hacked.
Either way, LEAVE THE SITE IMMEDIATELY. CLOSE THE BROWSER. DO NOT GO BACK THERE.
Parking ticket scams have been around for a while but technology is allowing the scams to evolve.
One scam is when someone places a parking ticket on your windshield. The ticket is not real. The fine is not real and even the barcode to pay it is not real.
But people scan the barcode on the fake ticket and then give the attacker their credit card information.
More recently, there has been an international wave of text message parking ticket scams. The scam starts with a fake text message like this.
There is a link in the text message to pay the ticket and avoid a fine. This is not a link to the parking authority. But Google is a trusted domain so Apple allows the link in the text message in.
If you tap on the link you are taken to the attacker’s web site and you get to give the attacker your information and/or get your phone infected.
If see if it is real, from another browser window go to the city’s web site and see if there is really a ticket.
This is a very scary scam, but it is a scam. You get a phone call from someone who sounds like a family member. They tell you something like I am in some foreign country or distant state and have been arrested and need money. Or I was in a car accident and am in the hospital (maybe via a text).
The bottom line is:
Create fear
Create urgency
Need money
Send it now
Here is a reason example, ripped from the news:
I am not going to say this is never true, but the odds are very low.
More than likely, someone found enough video online from a family member that they could train an AI with it and you can make it sound like anyone – such as one of your kids.
If you have a way to do this, message the supposed “victim” privately while you are still talking and verify they are okay. If you can’t do that, make up some excuse and hang up and then contact the supposed victim.
By the way, the supposed victim may hand you off to a “police officer” or “doctor”. That person is the closer and will do damn near anything to close the deal. Knowing that going in helps. If you have to, just hang up. They will call back, but it may give you a minute to think.
I have seen this scam happen when the supposed injured person is sitting right next to the person who is being scammed. Needless to say, that scam didn’t work.
You can report this to the local police or the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (www.ic3.gov), but don’t expect either of them to come to your rescue; doing that will give the cops more information about the different scam techniques, frequency, etc.
Unless the scammers are really stupid (and that does happen occasionally), finding them is hard and prosecuting them, likely in a foreign country, is even harder.
So, the best way to handle this is a good defense. In this case, knowledge.
