Received this email from a reader. Has anyone any idea what was going on?
Yesterday afternoon, at approx 2:10pm, I started receiving emails (and phone calls) from a variety of websites, mostly financial (home loans, car loans, debt consolidation) but also other services (BMC music, TheScooterStore, Netflix).. claiming to be responding to requests from me (at their websites) for services or information.
I’ve received about a dozen emails over the past 24hrs, and about the same number of phone calls at home and about half a dozen at work.
So somebody is entering my name and personal information (home & work phone, work email, home address & home value – all relatively public info – so far nothing worse like SSN or other credit info) into a variety of websites and signing me up for various services.Some of these websites (I have spoken with several sales people on the phone) are part of marketing networks that either share or sell such information (leads) and I have tracked several of these down to a common source.. although it appears that are at least several root sources involved.
My question is this: what is the scam?
Its possible its just personal harassment and there is someone out there that is trying to give me a bad time or is playing a not-so-funny joke.
It doesn’t feel like identity theft – they don’t seem to have private info, but instead seem to have assembled some relatively public info and are inputting that into a bunch of websites.
Could this be someone trying to defraud a marketing network? If so, do you know how that works?
Ever heard of anything like this before? (maybe this is a common thing?)
Btw, at least some of the companies contacting me are legit (QuickenLoans for example, and they were quite helpful on the phone) so it seems the “fraud†is on the input side?
I asked the person who was the target of this attack how he knew for sure he had been speaking with people from QuickenLoans, for example. It seems they just seemed credible, and helpful, so he never questioned their claims or asked to call them back.
It all reminds me of this.
I don't know this scam directly, but there are several similar scams.
For example, there are a set of services on the Internet. Alice has
accounts at one or more services, and signed up using her email
address alice@example-x.com. The attacker contacts all the services
for some innoculous support request pretending to be Alice, using the
email address alice@example-y.com. Some services ignore the request
as Alice doesn't have an account there, some respond to alice@example-x.com,
some respond to alice@example-y.com. Those which respond to the attacker
alice@example-y.com, the attacker saves. Later the attacker contacts those services
and claims to be Alice who has lost her password. The email address
alice@example-y.commatches that which Alice had used on an earlier support request, so the help desk helps the attacker change Alice's password.