how do they know your house tho thats what am wondering
If you are a homeowner, property transaction records are public information in the US. Plenty of data brokers collate from the numerous city/county databases for those who only know your name.
They likely buy leaked data that would include things like your full name and email, perhaps an address. Even if an address isn’t there, legal data brokers often have your address for a small payment anyways. From there they likely use something like Google Street view.
I worked for an ISP that uses Openreach’s infrastructure in the UK. In order to make changes to customer installations or repairs we had to call an Openreach Contact Centre. These were basically big call centres in India. Many of my customers got contacted by scammers from India shortly after me contacting Openreach about their accounts using information like their address, contact details and information about the work they were receiving, and demanding things like card details to ensure the work went forward.
It was obvious Indian workers in those call centres were taking pictures of customer account details and using that info to scam those customers, but my company refused to do anything about it because we “lacked evidence” and just told us to let customers know any communication about their accounts would come directly from us and we’d never ask for any card details etc.
I’m certain any other companies, whether UK or US, that use centralised admin from India and similar places with poor security will be plagued with these exact same issues.
It’s really not a hard screening algorithm: do I know this person, or have I done business with this company? OK, does the URL check out? Then I’ll respond to that person’s email or go log into that company’s website, not using a link from the message I received. Otherwise, it’s spam.
Also, there are no pictures of my dick online, or of me having sex. Anyone claiming otherwise doesn’t know me. Nice and easy.
For me this would not work. I have my own domain and give out like me-authy@example.com So if the email is sent to that I wound just know who leaked my email adress. Change email and ban everything to to the old adress. I never get spam this way.
Do you send all outgoing email from individualized addresses too?
I do the same as you (raccoon.uber@ball.com), but all my outgoing emails come from (raccoon@ball.com), it worked great for about 5 years until people with me in their address book started getting hacked.
I can in Thunderbird but I don’t reply to companies. They have no reply email adress. Like here is your order number or there is our latest campaign. I use customer chat for help or company have internal message system like banks. In general I like to avoid using email due to the protocol design.
You have no idea what I’m capable of in <<City>>. 🤣
Such an obvious mail merge. I’d imagine there is a way to automate pulling the Google Street View images and pasting them in the document, but I don’t know how it’s done.
But yeah, I got version 1 from that article and just shook my head at such a pathetic extortion attempt. I was like, “C’mon now…everyone in my life knows I’m a polyamorous hedonist. I could sell some of them whatever video you could ever possibly have of me that you definitely don’t. 😂”
My wife got that one twice already. Not very bright people.
