Author: comptroller

Who Do People Contact Over Scams

I assume that many people when scammed contact the Police and probably talk with family, friends and neighbours in order to warn them.

However a legal web site surveyed people on this and the results are a little surprising.

This is a very small scale survey but is interesting.

On a larger scale, people tend to call the Police if there is an immediate situation or their bank or credit card company or similar or all of them. If the scam is finished then they are more likely to report it online to Action Fraud at www.actionfraud.police.uk or by calling 0300 123 2040

Action Fraud do record the reports and can instruct Police to take action in certain cases but otherwise they do little to help.

If you want your money back from a scammer – then a specialist recovery service will generally have better results than officialdom. Even so the chances of getting any money back is slim.

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Double Shot Pill Scam

This is obviously a quite ridiculous scam targeting people trying to lose weight but who don’t want to cut down their calorie intake.

“Double Shot” pills, in which blue capsules burn fat and red ones block calories

Manon Fernet and her Quebec-based company agreed to pay $500,000 to settle FTC charges this year over their Double Shot pills.

The marketers did business as the “Freedom Center Against Obesity,”.  One supply of pills “to lose up to 30 pounds” cost $79; the bottles “contained blue capsules that supposedly burned fat, and red ones that supposedly blocked calories,”

The marketers allegedly “claimed that the effectiveness of Double Shot as a weight-loss treatment had been proven by clinical studies.” NOT TRUE.

The advert above says that  the pills would enable a user to absorb just 72 calories from a 720-calorie plate of spaghetti.

Consumers were tricked into believing Double Shot “would cause rapid, substantial, and permanent weight loss, without diet or exercise,” the FTC said.

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Stupidest Scam Chinese Companies

The radio station receives endless scam messages offering the chance to work with Chinese companies.

Occasionally there are some in Mandarin Chinese.

With Google translate on-line free of charge – it’s easy to see what the message says in English.

“AI Intelligent One Click Matching”

“Email reading opens the sharing status background to grasp in time”.

“One click addition of overseas business opportunities”.

Well maybe – it’s not so easy after translation.

Further reading shows the email is trying to interest the recipient in new software that collects contact details from on-line sources.

Pathetic.

If you work for a Chinese company would you really choose to send out millions of emails in Mandarin to non Chinese companies?

Only a moron would consider that good Marketing

We wont be following up on this

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

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Facebook Conversations Checked Out

The New Statesman Newspaper carried out an interesting experiment to test whether or not Facebook was listening in to people’s conversations.

Six staff members picked one or more subjects that are not part of their lives and which they had never searched for online or bought anything relevant to the subject etc.

Then they each read out a script (with their phone switched on) designed to point out these subjects in their lives and see if Facebook then started advertising relevant items to them.

The subjects were things such as a vegetarian chatting about her desire for Domino’s Meat Feast pizza.

The most interesting was a lady named Lizzie whose lines included “I just wish there was an app that would sort it all out for you… some kind of contraception app”. When she opened the Facebook app the following  morning, she was presented with an advert for Natural Cycles, the first app ever certified for contraception in Europe.

WOW.

However, there’s a psychological phenomenon called the Frequency Illusion (or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon). It states that If you hear a new word or phrase for the first time and consciously have a conversation about it, finding out what it means, suddenly, for the next few days, you’ll see it constantly.

If someone says to you ‘when was the last time you saw a yellow car?’ you’ll see three in the next two hours.

For the other five people in the experiment (including the vegetarian), Facebook did not show anything even vaguely relevant to the subject’s spoken about. It’s just a statistical effect that some people will experience Facebook offering relevant and unexpected adverts at times that can seem spookily accurate.

Facebook are very clear that they do not listen in to conversations.

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