Category: Scams
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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How a Simple Text Message Triggered a $1 Million Scam
It started, as these things now almost always do, with a wrong number. A stranger texted Amos Jiang in August. The message was meant for someone else. That should have been the end of it. Instead, it became the beginning of a months-long digital relationship that would eventually drain more than one million dollars from…
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Pig Butchering Scammers Are Using Every Entry Point Possible
It started with a notification on my phone. Not a text, not a WhatsApp message from a wrong number, but a ping from Nextdoor—the app designed for finding lost cats and complaining about leaf blowers. The message was from a user named “Sloane L.” It was polite, specific, and seemingly harmless.
