What is The Beard Czar Scam

There is a trend for fashionable beards and some men will buy products to help them grow such a beard and for grooming.

Beard Czar heavily  advertise their products for beard growth and grooming and they have a website at www.beardczar.com

Selling such products is perfectly legal of course.

It’s the special offer they advertise that is the problem.

The offer is that you can try their product for 1 month at a cost of $4.95. The small print with the offer says that you are automatically signed up for their auto-shipment program which sends you 1 month supply every 30 days and charge your credit card.

Unless you cancel that subscription within 14 days then you will be charged $89.99 and so on every 30 days.

There is a phone number to call to cancel but people trying that find it very difficult

See https://www.bbb.org/phoenix/business-reviews/hair-ornaments/beard-czar-in-phoenix-az-1000039261/reviews-and-complaints

for people’s experiences of dealing with this company.

Beard Czar have followed the typical scammers model and created lots of fake reviews online to make it difficult for people to find genuine reviews.

If you type Beard Czar on Google, it finds the Beard Czar website then a lot of reviews with titles such as Beard Czar Warning – Read This Before You Buy It”, “Do Not Buy “Beard Czar” – SIDE EFFECTS REVEALED!!”, Do Not Try “Beard Czar”- All Side Effects HERE!!! – Health Fly Up”

These are just sales pitches dressed up to look like reviews. This is an attempt to deceive people and this kind of action is only carried out by people who don’t want the public to know what’s going on.

Companies that operate this kind of model where they send you a product then do everything they can to make it difficult to stop their charges – are best avoided.

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

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Stupidest Scam or Spam of the Week Mega Anti-Oxidant

“5000 times stronger than vitamins A, C and E combined” is a scammer’s tagline.

Vitamins are naturally occurring and we need certain amounts of them to make our bodies run efficiently.

Lots of people have health issues that can be helped by ensuring adequate vitamins in their food and some people just p=have poor diets so need vitamin supplements.

However all vitamins can be harmful in large quantities

e.g. taking as little 5 times the recommended amount of vitamin A can lead to liver damage, bone loss, hair loss and more. Taking several times the recommended does of vitamin E increases the chances of stroke and death.

Even relatively safe vitamin C can cause medical problems if over dosed.

So, something 5000 times stronger than vitamins A, C and E combined would absolutely be lethal.

The scammer also claims that this new ‘nutrient’ will rewind time on your cells to make you younger again.

The scam is a mixture of misunderstood science and fantasy and a lot of exaggeration.

Never never trust unsolicited emails offering a magic remedy – they are either non-existent or potentially dangerous.

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Jim Browning – Scam Fighter

Jim Browning is the Internet alias of a software engineer and YouTuber who focuses on scam baiting and exposing scam call centres and he publishes the results on Youtube.

Browning began researching scam operations after a relative lost money to a technical support scam. He started his YouTube channel to upload footage to send to authorities as evidence against scammers.

He has since carried out various investigative scam baits, infiltrating computer networks run by scammers who claim to be technical support experts and use remote desktop software to take control of the victim’s computer.

Such scams usually involve unsolicited calls offering computer services, or websites posing to be reputable companies such as Dell or Microsoft.

BBC Panorama

Browning was featured in a March 2020 episode of British documentary series Panorama, in which a large-scale technical support scamming operation was infiltrated and extensively documented by Browning and fellow YouTuber Karl Rock.

The duo recorded drone and CCTV footage of the facility in Gurugram, Haryana, and gathered incriminating evidence linking alleged scammer Amit Chauhan to a series of scams targeting computer-illiterate and elderly people in the United Kingdom and United States. During a private meeting with his associates, Chauhan was quoted as stating, “We don’t give a **** about our customers”.

Some of his call centre agents were recorded scamming and laughing at a British man who admitted to being depressed. They were also recorded conning a blind woman with diabetes. Although he was arrested along with his accountant Sumit Kumar in a raid.

In 2021, Browning was targeted by scammers who pretended to be YouTube support staff and misled him into deleting his own channel. His channel was reinstated four days later. He explained in a video that the scammer used Google Chat to send a phishing email from the “google.com” domain and convinced Browning to delete his channel under the pretence of moving it to a new YouTube brand account.

The YouTube channel for Browning is at https://www.youtube.com/c/JimBrowning

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

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Large Scale Ransomware Attacks

The ransomware threat is on the rise as almost 40% of businesses reported an attack in the previous year according to a recent survey.

Security firm Malwarebytes surveyed companies and found one-third of victims lost revenue as a result of a ransomware attack. It’s the downtime caused by the ransomware rather than the cost of paying the ransom that does the most damage to a business.

Malwarebytes™ (software company selling anti-malware products) released its “Second Annual State of Ransomware Report”. The multi-country study surveyed 1,054 companies with no more than 1,000 employees across North America, France, U.K., Germany, Australia, and Singapore. More than one-third of businesses have experienced a ransomware attack in the last year. Twenty-two percent of these impacted businesses ceased operations immediately.

Key Findings

“Businesses of all sizes are increasingly at risk for ransomware attacks,” said Marcin Kleczynski, CEO, Malwarebytes. “However, the stakes of a single attack for a small business are far different from the stakes of a single attack for a large enterprise.

The impact of ransomware on SMBs can be devastating. For roughly one in six impacted organizations, a ransomware infection caused 25 or more hours of downtime, with some organizations reporting that it caused systems to be down for more than 100 hours. Further, among SMBs that experienced a ransomware attack, 22 percent reported that they had to cease business operations immediately, and 15 percent lost revenue.

The most common source of ransomware infections is via email – links to scammer websites or malware loaded attachments.

Seventy-two percent of respondents believe that ransomware demands should never be paid. Most of the remaining organizations believe that demands should only be paid if the encrypted data is of value to the organization. Among organizations that chose not to pay cybercriminals’ ransom demands, about one-third lost files as a result.

“Companies of all sizes need to remain vigilant and continue to place a higher priority on protecting themselves against ransomware.”

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UK Gov Cyber Essentials 10 Step Plan

This is a summary of the UK Government 10 step plan for Cyber Essentials, which is designed for organisations looking to protect themselves in cyberspace.

1.      Risk Management

Embed an appropriate risk management regime across the organisation. This should be supported by an empowered governance structure, which is actively supported by the board and senior managers. These should aim to ensure that all employees, contractors and suppliers are aware of the approach, how decisions are made, and any applicable risk boundaries.

2.      Secure Configuration

Identify baseline technology builds and processes for ensuring configuration management can greatly improve the security of systems. Develop a strategy to remove or disable unnecessary functionality from systems, and to quickly fix known vulnerabilities.

3.      Network Security

The connections from your networks to the Internet, and other partner networks, expose your systems and technologies to attack. By creating and implementing some simple policies and appropriate architectural and technical responses, you can reduce the chances of these attacks succeeding. Your organisation’s networks may use of mobile or remote working, and cloud services, makes defining a fixed network boundary difficult.

4.      Managing User Privileges

All users should be provided with a reasonable (but minimal) level of system privileges and rights needed for their role. The granting of highly elevated system privileges should be carefully controlled and managed.

5.      User Education and Awareness

It’s important that security rules and the technology provided enable users to do their job as well as help keep the organisation secure. This can be supported by a systematic delivery of awareness programmes and training that deliver security expertise as well as helping to establish a security-conscious culture.

6.      Incident Management

Invest in establishing effective incident management policies and processes to help to improve resilience, support business continuity, improve customer and stakeholder confidence and potentially reduce any impact.

7.      Malware Prevention

Malicious software, or malware is an umbrella term to cover any code or content that could have a malicious, undesirable impact on systems. The risk may be reduced by developing and implementing appropriate anti-malware policies as part of an overall ‘defence in depth’ approach.

8.      Monitoring

System monitoring provides a capability that aims to detect actual or attempted attacks on systems and business services. Monitoring allows you to ensure that systems are being used appropriately in accordance with organisational policies.

9.      Removable Media Controls

Removable media provide a common route for the introduction of malware and the accidental or deliberate export of sensitive data. You should be clear about the business need to use removable media and apply appropriate security controls to its use.

10. Home and Mobile Working

Mobile working and remote system access offers great benefits, but exposes new risks that need to be managed. You should establish risk based policies and procedures that support mobile working or remote access to systems that are applicable to users, as well as service providers.

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/guidance/10-steps-cyber-security has further information.

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