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Received this email from a reader. Has anyone any idea what was going on? <\/p>\nReceived this email from a reader. Has anyone any idea what was going on? <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve 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.
\nSo somebody is entering my name and personal information (home & work phone, work email, home address & home value \u00e2\u20ac\u201c all relatively public info \u00e2\u20ac\u201c so far nothing worse like SSN or other credit info) into a variety of websites and signing me up for various services. <\/p>\nSome 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. <\/p>\n
My question is this: what is the scam?<\/strong> <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
It doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feel like identity theft \u00e2\u20ac\u201c they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem to have private info, but instead seem to have assembled some relatively public info and are inputting that into a bunch of websites. <\/p>\n
Could this be someone trying to defraud a marketing network? If so, do you know how that works? <\/p>\n
Ever heard of anything like this before? (maybe this is a common thing?) <\/p>\n
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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fraud\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is on the input side?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I asked the person who was the target of this attack how he knew for sure<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n