Con artists behind the ‘Hi Mum’ and ‘Hi Dad’ WhatsApp scam are now targeting victims through new channels, a fraud expert has today warned.
Fraudsters are now using other avenues such as ‘traditional’ SMS and text messages in order to approach their victims, according to Chris Ainsley, head of fraud risk management at Santander UK.
Such scams have appeared on WhatsApp in recent months, with 1,235 reports made to Action Fraud between February 3 and June 21, tricking Brits into handing over £1.5million in just six months.
It comes after a 53-year-old nurse Toni Parker lost £2,450 when a scammer impersonated her son, claiming he had dropped his phone down the toilet and needed money.
And it didn’t occur to her to try calling on the supposedly lost phone? You know, just to double check? Nope, obviously not. This scam has been around for a long time in various formats, so falling for it is a mug’s game.
On the subject of scams, I was phoned the other day by the ‘department for public health’ from India – although they had spoofed a Manchester number. They noted that I’d had my vaccinations…. That was as far as they got. I’d hung up on them by this point. The UK does not have such a department – it’s PHE and as for my vaccination status… Anyway, PHE isn’t going to be calling me any time soon. Yet people fall for this stuff.
I usually try to keep them talking for a bit, on the grounds that the more time they waste on me the more it’s costing them to get to the next mug. It can be quite funny pretending to go along with it before slowly drifting off script.
Hmm, wonder what dark personality traits that one reveals?
Whatever dark personality traits it reveals, I must have them as well. 😉
“The UK does not have such a department – it’s PHE”
Granted its the same fools working in it no doubt, but PHE no longer exists. It is now The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). A minor point but some confusion could be caused by the name change, making the scam seem more plausible to some people.
I’d missed that one.
“And it didn’t occur to her to try calling on the supposedly lost phone? You know, just to double check? Nope, obviously not. This scam has been around for a long time in various formats, so falling for it is a mug’s game.”
Agreed, except that the scammer’s main targets are not only the gullible but the elderly and vulnerable as well. Whilst the elderly and vulnerable can be excused, the person in the article obviously comes in the gullible category, but you have to also ask what makes her so. I suspect she is a totally honest person who trusts everyone because although she’s aware that scammers exist she finds it hard to take that not everyone is like her, and to be fair, people in general wouldn’t believe that a stranger has her son’s contact details for her in Whatsapp. Its reasonable for her to believe that her son has borrowed a phone or bought a new one, hence getting a call from him on a different number. I’m just trying to imagine what makes people fall for the scam here. The elderly, not being in the least tech savvy, would fall for it every time and these are the people the scammer is really looking for.
That being said, the scammers themselves are even more gullible to the tech savvy. Remember the Nigerian 419 scam and the scam baiter site 419eater.com? Those on that site even had the scammers getting stupid tattoos, saying things like ‘baited by volk de plankk’, so intense was their greed. The present day equivalent is a guy called Jim Browning on Youtube. If you have more than a passing interest in avoiding or even getting back at online scammers, his channel is well worth a watch.
What the channel is all about
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5bzQpMYgvs
Jim Browning’s Channel
https://www.youtube.com/c/JimBrowning/videos
Yes, I’ve watched many of Jim Browning’s videos.
As for targets, my experience is that they use a scattergun approach in the hope of someone falling for it. If not, they wouldn’t keep wasting their time on me.
Here in France the Indian Scammers ‘phone people with English names to tell us that we have a computer problem and it is giving a problem for either Microsoft or Orange (the telephone company) and, for a small sum, they will cure it.
Of course all they want is access to your computer to extract any Bank details and any other financial information.
As barbarus, I keep then talking. I ask questions telling them that I think that they must prove that they are not scammers. It is wonderful to hear them squirm as they try to give answers. One, who claimed that he lived in Paris could not give the name of the edifice at the western end of the Champs-Élysées.
I simply cannot be bothered. I just hang up.
I don’t answer in the first place. I never answer calls from numbers I don’t recognise, if they really want to talk to me, they have to leave a message.
UK Health Security Agency? So has Public Health England become a toxic brand then? The new outfit is something entirely different presumably and not just the old one wearing a false moustache.
It changed last year Stony. PHE was closed down because of their poor handling of the plandemic. Not sure, but I think that meant PPE procuring and the disastrous track and trace app. They should have been shut down in the anti smoking days if you ask me. Anyway, it seems the apt description for UKHSA is ‘same shit, different name’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Health_Security_Agency
‘Poor handling.’ You are being too kind.
My response to scam callers depends on my mood at the time. Usually I just hang up, sometimes I do my best to keep them on the line by pretending to co-operate with them. And sometimes I blow a football referee’s whistle down the phone at them. I do that because I have been told that if the listener is wearing headphones it hurts.
Good luck to any scammer addressing me as “Mum” or “Dad” – I don’t have any children!
I had a call from “Sky” yesterday. I heard the first few syllables and said “no, you’re not: you’re a scammer so piss off”. Thirty seconds later the same bloke called me again from a different number – I wasn’t polite that time . . .
A friend recently asked me to lend him money (I trust him) via whatsapp.
I immediately phoned him to check it was him before I did (he paid me back after 5 days)
A few months back, I received an unsolicited text, supposedly from Queensland Health informing me that I had been a close contact of a positive COVID case and to get tested and to isolate. It had a link for more information. Close contact was in the revised sense that went from being within 1.5m of an infected person for fifteen minutes to being in the same shopping centre, hotel or stadium at about the same time as an infected person.
It was probably genuine as I had been at the named venue. Nevertheless, I deleted it and ignored it as in this day and age, only an idiot clicks links in unsolicited texts. In reality, if Queensland Health does want to contact me, given that I don’t answer unknown phone numbers, it will have to come knocking on my door. Even then there are no guarantees, if I don’t like the look of who is at my door, I won’t answer it.
A letter dropped through my door yesterday claiming I’d won something called a “Scotland Loves Local Glasgow Gift Card”. I’m no fool. An illiterate word salad like that tells me it’s obviously some kind of scam.
I had one purporting to be from the Post Office. It addressed me by my e mail address which does contain my name plus btinternet.com. The e mail was dated in top left using UK style date but in the body of the text it was the 8th March, 8/3 which is the US type date. Oh dear. It appears my address for the package from my “local council” was INCORECT (sic). I looked at the e mail it had come from which was blah blah.co.jp. These people really do not try anywhere near hard enough do they? They are morons. That people fall for this rubbish is tragic.
I just came across this related story.
https://notalwaysright.com/just-keep-scamming-just-keep-scamming/254264/
Almost unbelievable idiocy.
Good God.