So Many Scams! - Scam Awareness December 2024

There are so many scams around at the moment - more, I think, than I have ever seen. Let's take a look at a few of them.

Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:26 Vertical Video ads
7:22 Why so obvious
7:59 PayPal Invoices
9:40 Heating Grant scams
10:22 Nobody deserves to be scammed
10:58 Fake USB storage

[austinkissling]

Any obvious A.I. voice ad is a no for me.

[Simmotipo]

one of the proudest I've been of my mum (late fifties, not the most tech literate, or at least not as much so as she used to be); she received a (genuine) call from her bank, but it was unexpected, and they were asking her for all the usual security stuff. She was unsure, and told the bank's agent that she didn't feel comfortable giving the info, and hung up. Called them back from the number of the back of her card 10 minutes later. Was very proud of her; even though the first call did turn out genuine, her caution was admirable! Though, I was actually somewhat disappointed with the bank as the lady who called my mum first didn't do anything encourage the call back, which I think really would have been generally advisable move in the context!

[TheScotsfurian]

got a good laugh when you used the extremely united kingdom map again later in the video, good bit.

[CVkpoooouyyggh]

As an Irish Person I can confirm we had too many bonfires this past Halloween and accidentally melted ourselves onto the UK

[n.s.mcmahon]

There's something about that fake Tik Tok voice that fills me with rage. I realized that I'm going to probably be a willful luddite in my old age. It's not something I'm excited for, but I'm already feeling it in my 30's.

[amethystfae]

I appreciate the call for people to check on others in their life - my grandmother was hounded for many years by a scammy company that wanted to steal every last cent from her. It can happen to anyone, even very experienced people who know all the signs can be caught off guard on a bad day.

[pheart]

I love the innovative heater that heats your entire house in ten seconds, designed by a 14 year old schoolboy who was tired of shivering in his schoolroom. Or this amazing fan that will cool your entire house, ditto..ditto..ditto..

[gamecube-debm]

i love how respectful you are to scam victims, people forget how to have compassion when they’re online 😿

[thany]

Can I just add - when they say "and it connects to your phone over bluetooth" usually means to stay far away from it, even if it's a genuine device. Because this passage usually means "and the ONLY way to get to your data is via bluetooth on your phone, using an app that demands your personal data and stores your (medical!) information on an insecure server". But they will never say that of course.

[TakeWalker]

"It's the pot, 73%." brb, choking on my sweet potato casserole

[psychedelikchameleon]

That fake government website was very realistic with the right colours, layout, text and style(except the url) so could easily be accepted as the real thing.

[Mushroom]

The question that has to be asked is " How and why does Google allow these Ads to run?". There are so many of them it's unfathomable how they allow it.

[gmo]

1:13 Internet speed, 10x faster, but then quotes 500 kbs, that's just 0.5 mbs. Connect 10 devices and download a 2 hour movies in 5 seconds, at the speeds quoted it would take about 9 hours.

[spiralfirst]

Even if it's a legitimate advert from a trusted company, I wouldn't buy it if they use these hideous AI voice generators.

[mordcore]

my grandma showed me an email asking if its real, and it was an obvious scam saying "all your photos from google photos will be deleted" in large red font. i told her that its fake and praised her for asking about it. i hope that she will continue to ask when she gets less obvious scam mails.

[Xeres]

Your spam awareness increased my salary! I got an email from my supervisor "You do good work, I would like to propose a salary increase, *if you answer right now, it'll be just in time for this month*" - Something along those lines. Of course, I took the time to look up inflation numbers and made a counteroffer. Next week, I got confirmation from HR _and_ since it was too late for this month salary, they would add it to next months payout! So, yeah, learning trigger phrases really works!

[davidp]

Someone tried to scam me by email starting in September of this year, I was able to drag it out for over two months. I loved wasting their time.

[OnlySlightyRadioactive]

Thank you. I rely on your scam awareness videos to help me understand what kind of scams are happening and how they operate. I'm pretty sure you've saved me from getting scammed a number of times now. I know I shouldn't rely to your videos solely, but they are definitely a useful resource for me. Keep up the good work. You're really helping people with these videos.

[murderalphabetinc.]

The humor of making fun of the scammers, who *do* deserve the insults, is always nicely balanced by the insistence that we not insult the people who fall for these scams, and that's one of the reasons I love the scambaiting videos (in addition to the cooking videos)

[SheyD]

That you can't even trust off the shelf items from physical stores to be what they say they are is kind of crazy. Not being a good product is one thing, but a scam item is next level bad.