Australian Fake Kidnappings

This fake kidnapping ploy started in Taiwan with Chinese gangs preying on Taiwanese students and the gangs involved have started up in Australia, targeting overseas students.

The parents of the ‘kidnapped’ student get a call saying their son or daughter has been kidnapped and the kidnappers seem to know about the student, thereby convincing the parents who then try to find the money to pay the ransom.

Their attempts to contact their son or daughter fail.

What has happened is that the gangs started by targeting overseas students (especially Chinese students) where the parents will have trouble travelling to the University.

They learned what they could about their targets initially then contacted the targets – claiming to be the authorities, telling them their life is in danger and they could be deported or imprisoned.

They learn more about the target so as to be able to convince the parents and they warn the target not to contact anyone or talk with anyone and to ignore phone calls, emails etc. as these could be false.

This is a nasty business as the parents will be terrified and pay a ransom and the target will be terrified to talk to anyone and in fear of prosecution.

The official advice is that anyone who receives such threatening calls they should contact the authorities immediately and certainly not just pay a ransom.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-wasters do let me know, by email.

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Sea Salt Stupidity

When you go in the supermarket nowadays you’re likely to see plenty of different brands of table salt and sea salt and various ‘fancy’ salts.

We all know that salt is a food preservative and flavour enhancer so almost everything you eat will have some salt in naturally or that’s been added.

This latest scammer is trying to stir up worries over salt – to further her aim of making money at your expense of course.

Some basic facts

  1. Table salt is the chemical sodium chloride and is perfectly natural and essential in minute quantities for a healthy life
  2. Table salt can be dug out of the ground in some places in salt bearing rocks, ground down, purified and you have salt to sell.
  3. Sea salt is the salts that are in sea water. This is usually made by collecting sea water in large pans and letting the sun dry them out to leave the salt residue.
  4. Sea salt is almost entirely sodium chloride (I.e. the same as table salt) but with some added other salts such as potassium chloride. This is generally considered to be healthier than pure table salt as the potassium in particular is beneficial for health in small doses.

The scammers message starts with supposed facts to frighten people, including

  • Morton’s Salt makes salt for chemical processes such as producing plastics, but 6% of their production becomes table salt
  • Most sea salts are as bad as table salt as the refining processes strips way “missing things”
  • “The belief that a low salt diet can prevent heart disease – is false”

The scammer is trying to get you to watch a video clip.

That’s all this is about – frightening people into watching a pointless video clip for which she gets paid.

Don’t worry about types of salt etc. just make sure you stick to the government recommended limit on salt intake.

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

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Fake Lead Generation

There are endless companies offering to send out millions of emails to sell your products. Some are genuine businesses that take care over their mailing lists but many are just spammers who buy mailing lists from anyone and send out any rubbish they are paid to.

There is also a different approach where you don’t pay for the number of emails sent out but for the number of leads generated from the emails.

Generating leads means that someone (or a computer) has clicked on a link or returned an email in order to show further interest in whatever is being promoted.

This sounds like a better option for the business buying the service and in some cases it is.

But there are many unscrupulous people who when offered a payment for each lead generated, manage to create huge numbers of supposed leads, but they may be very poor quality leads. “Poor quality” in this case means people who are tricked into clicking or replying to something nothing to do with the item being promoted so the chance of them buying is very slim.

They are a variety of ways to do this, including:-

  • Offering entry to a competition with big prizes
  • Fake retail vouchers e.g. 100 pounds Marks and Spencer voucher for answering 3 questions
  • Massive supposed discounts
  • Clickbait i.e. the link is labelled with something to catch the eye that may be completely irrelevant to the actual link e.g. “Revealed: Meghan Markel’s Secret Past”

The easiest approach for the unscrupulous is to simply invent supposed leads or buy spam mailing lists and claim they have responded.

Protect your business – do not buy leads unless you are absolutely sure it is the best approach and the business you are buying from is ethical and can get the results you want the way you want.

Do leave a comment on this post – click on the post title then scroll down to leave your comment.

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Clear Vison in 7 Seconds

“Medical experts are stunned by this Nobel-prize winning vision secret…” claims the email.

Of course, there is no secret and certainly no Nobel prize for scammers.

Novel prizes are awarded years after the discovery or experiment occurred and are known world wide – so how can something be a huge secret that will ‘destroy the foundation of the eyecare industry’ yet also be known around the world.

I didn’t notice the world’s eyecare industry collapsing over the last few years – did you?

“In fact, even folks who were once legally blind are now seeing in crystal clear HD vision”.

Seems there’s nothing this scammer wont claim.

HD Vision is a term from the world of computer screens and TVs – there’s no such thing as HD vision in humans except in the mind of a very stupid scammer.

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

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