Author: Bastion
-
5 People Share Their Experiences Being Sextorted
Sextortion is a growing form of online blackmail where a perpetrator coerces victims into providing sexual images or videos, then threatens to share that content publicly if the victim doesn’t meet their demands, which often involve sending money or more explicit material. This manipulative crime leaves many victims feeling trapped, humiliated, and traumatized.
-
The New Face of Investment Scams on Facebook
If you spend enough time in Facebook groups about investing, retirement, or financial independence, you eventually start seeing the same kind of post over and over again. A person shares how they quietly built a multi-million-dollar net worth despite “never making that much money.” They talk about living with their parents to pay off student…
-
Fake “FBI Agents” Scammed This Retired Couple Out of $850K
It started, like a lot of these things do, with a phone call. The caller ID said it was the U.S. Postal Service. On the other end of the line were Peter and Diane Hata — a 75-year-old retired minister and his wife, a retired teacher, who’d lived in the same Covina, California home for…
-
Why Scam Calls Are Suddenly So Convincing (And How to Not Get Got)
A couple of years ago, scam calls were almost comically bad. A robotic voice would butcher your name, claim to be the IRS, and threaten to send police to arrest you in 20 minutes unless you paid your overdue taxes in Apple gift cards. Easy to laugh off. Easy to hang up. Those days are…
-
Why You Should Never Let A Stranger Borrow Your Phone
I was at CVS last night and a man came up to me and asked for help. I asked him what kind of help, and he said someone stole his phone outside, and could I use my phone to look up his phone number in the “find my phone” app so he could track it…
-
How a Software Engineer Lost $1.6 Million to the Internet’s Cruelest Crypto Scam
Steve Belcher is not the kind of person you would expect to fall for an internet scam. He is 52 years old, a software engineer living in Denver, and technically literate enough to understand the underlying mechanics of blockchain. He isn’t senile, and he isn’t naive. But in November, Belcher watched his entire life savings—$1.6…
