From the Globe HELP DESK:
"What to do when a thief hacks your eBay account; It was time-consuming and frustrating trying to regain control of my account and finances. I’m just glad I was paying attention. Here’s what I learned" by Emily Sweeney Globe Staff, October 16, 2020
Australia ranks high on my bucket list of places to visit, but not for any reason you’d expect.
I want to go there to track down a computer hacker who spent hundreds of dollars of my hard-earned money.
Let me back up a bit and explain.
I care not to hear some whiny complaining from some Globe $hit.
My current obsession with the Land Down Under began on a warm day in August, when I received an unexpected e-mail from eBay. It was a receipt for an expensive Weber grill.
Initially I assumed this was some kind of phishing scam, so I was careful not to click on anything in the e-mail. I opened a new browser window to log into my eBay account. My eyes widened at what I saw. That e-mail was legit. My eBay account had been hacked.
Lo and behold, in my list of recently ordered items, was the same Weber grill. It was a nice looking grill, too, jet black and shiny. It had a push button ignition, stainless steel burners, and removable folding side tables. It was even mounted on wheels! I had paid $799 in Australian currency (about $565 in US dollars) for this fabulous grill, and the money came straight from my bank account.
It was getting shipped to someone named Alex Stoker, at an address in Australia.
I typed in the address into Google Maps. Within moments I was looking at a street-level view of a four-bedroom house on a tree-lined street in Labrador, a beachside suburb on Australia’s Gold Coast.
It was a nice place to host a barbecue, I suppose. I pictured my Australian nemesis slipping some extra shrimp on the barbie for his mates, throwing his head back, and laughing under the sunshine in a green backyard next to the grill that he bought with my money. I was seething. I wasn’t invited to the barbecue, I was just invited to pay.
I wished that Alex Stoker lived closer to Massachusetts. I kept imagining myself showing up at the door and greeting him — or maybe Alex is a her? — face to face. “Ready for the barbecue, mate,” I’d say. Or maybe I’d keep it simple: “I’m here to pick up my grill.”
Those were the thoughts racing through my mind when I sat on the phone talking with a representative from eBay.
At that point the hacker and I were fighting a virtual battle to gain control over my eBay account. After I had removed the Australian shipping address, the hacker had added it back. So I changed it again. Then I scrambled to reset my passwords and secret questions.
The audacious Aussie who hijacked my account was now shopping for even more expensive things. (I could see in my list of recently viewed items that Alex had been browsing $900 Samsung phones.)
Getting my account secured took longer than I thought. I was on the phone with eBay for more than 45 minutes, but the customer representatives I dealt with were very patient and made sure I regained control of my account. I called my bank and notified them about the fraudulent charge. They told me to cut up my debit card and they’d send me a new one with a new account number.
After notifying eBay and my bank, I filed police reports with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center and with authorities in Australia.
I also vented about the ordeal on Facebook. I received lots of helpful comments (and plenty of empathy) from friends and acquaintances. I learned that quite of a few friends had gone through similar experiences, and some of them were much worse than mine.
I told my editors I would gladly fly to Australia to do some on-the-ground reporting and attempt to grill my rival from Down Under for some answers, but they didn’t bite, in part because of travel restrictions in place because of coronavirus, but I can share with you, dear readers, what I learned from this experience, and provide you with three key takeaways.
As if it would be that easy for her to board a plane so she could get in someone's face, and the three things she learned are keep a VERY close eye on all of your accounts, add extra layers of security, and here’s something else eBay told her:
I’m just thankful that I read that e-mail from eBay and realized that my account had been compromised. I caught it right away. If I hadn’t, the hacker would have drained my bank account.....
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Related:
"When Your Last $166 Vanishes: ‘Fast Fraud’ Surges on Payment Apps" by Nathaniel Popper New York Times, Oct. 11, 2020
The Great Re$et will take care of all that.
Charee Mobley, who teaches middle school in Fort Worth, Texas, had just $166 to get herself and her 17-year-old daughter through the last two weeks of August, but that money disappeared when Ms. Mobley, 37, ran into an issue with Square’s Cash App, an instant payments app that she was using in the coronavirus pandemic to pay her bills and do her banking.
After seeing an errant online shopping charge on her Cash App, Ms. Mobley called what she thought was a help line for it, but the line had been set up by someone who asked her to download some software, which then took control of the app and drained her account.
“I didn’t have gas money and I couldn’t pay my daughter’s senior dues,” Ms. Mobley said. “We basically just had to stick it out until I got paid the following week.”
In the pandemic, people have flocked to instant payment apps like Cash App, PayPal’s Venmo and Zelle as they have wanted to avoid retail bank branches and online commerce has become more ingrained. To encourage that shift, the payment apps have added services like debit cards and routing numbers so that they work more like traditional banks, but many people are unaware of how vulnerable they can be to losses when they use these services in place of banks. Payment apps have long had fraud rates that are three to four times higher than traditional payment methods such as credit and debit cards, according to data from the security firms Sift and Chargeback Gurus.
The fraud appears to have surged in recent months as more people use the apps. At Venmo, daily users have grown by 26 percent since last year, while the number of customer reviews mentioning the words fraud or scam has risen nearly four times as fast, according to a New York Times analysis of data from Apptopia, a firm that tracks mobile services.
Driving the surge is the apps’ ease of use. People need just an email address to create a Cash App account and a phone number to make a Venmo account. That simplicity has made it seamless for thieves to set up accounts and to send requests for money to other users, something that was not possible with traditional bank payments.
The apps’ instantaneous transactions — compared to the two or three days needed for a standard bank transfer — have also meant that Venmo and Cash App have less time to detect whether a transaction is fraudulent.
“Fast payments equals fast fraud,” said Frank McKenna, the chief fraud strategist for the security firm PointPredictive. The apps, which are sometimes known as peer-to-peer payments services, “are super convenient for customers but that also makes them ripe targets,” he said.
Square, PayPal and Zelle do not disclose the rate of fraud on their apps. PayPal takes steps to “limit potential fraudulent activity and mitigate any customer impact,” a spokeswoman said, but she did not address whether it had seen more cases of fraud.
Zelle, which was founded by a coalition of banks, appears to have experienced less fraud because it has more robust authentication for new users and more legal protections in case of loss, security experts said.
“Protecting consumers from abusive scams and fraud is a top priority for Zelle,” said Meghan Fintland, a spokeswoman for Early Warning, the company that runs the app.
Of all the payment apps, fraud issues have been particularly acute for Square’s Cash App. As the number of people using the app daily has grown 59 percent over the last year, the number of reviews about it that mention the words fraud or scam has risen 165 percent, according to Apptopia.
The Better Business Bureau also said it had received more than twice as many complaints about Cash App as Venmo over the past year. That is significant given that Venmo has twice as many users as Cash App, according to Apptopia.
Lena Anderson, a spokeswoman for Square, said the company was “aware that there has been a recent rise in scammers trying to take advantage of customers using financial products, including Cash App. We’ve taken a number of proactive steps and made it our top priority.”
Square, which is led by Jack Dorsey, who is also chief executive of Twitter, introduced Cash App in 2013. While the San Francisco company was founded as a payments platform for small businesses, Cash App has become its largest source of revenue. In the second quarter, the app generated $1.2 billion of Square’s $1.9 billion in revenue, but Cash App has been more vulnerable to fraud partly because of how it handles customers, security experts said. Square has until recently offered only email support for the app, not a phone number for its customers to call. That led some customers to fall for fake help line numbers, like the kind that Ms. Mobley confronted. Venmo, in contrast, has a chat line on its app that customers can use for a quick response.
Ms. Anderson said Square began rolling out a phone line for certain customers on Oct. 6. It plans to make the phone line available to all customers over time.
Cash App also appears to be more prone to fraud because of how Square has built the business, industry analysts said.
In 2017, Square began a marketing campaign called “Cash App Fridays,” which gives money to Twitter users who post their so-called $Cashtag or username. The campaign, security experts said, provided fraudsters with a phone book of potential victims.
It also led to copycat campaigns, where people claim to work for Cash App and say they will give away a large sum of money if users first send in a smaller sum. One Twitter account, @CashappG, has been online since 2019 with the tagline: “Hi welcome to Cash App give away! Send money and we will send you double back!”
“It gives scammers a ripe opportunity,” said Satnam Narang, a researcher at the security firm Tenable who has written about the fraud on Cash App.
Emily Bradford, an unemployed 21-year-old in Washington, said she lost $75 last month after getting a message through Twitter offering her $3,000 through Cash App if she paid an initial “clearance” payment. When she sent the money, the person who messaged her disappeared. She reached out to Cash App’s support email, but hasn’t heard back, she said.
“I figured since they were dealing with money, especially others’ money, they’d have a very good security system and customer service,” she said of Square.
Ms. Anderson, the Square spokeswoman, said the company had recently added warnings about copycats on its messages about Cash App Fridays.
In 2018, Square also introduced the ability for people to transact in Bitcoin on Cash App. That has made it easier to move illicit gains off the app because Bitcoin can be sent to anonymous addresses that are much harder to trace or reverse than traditional financial transactions. Venmo and Zelle don’t offer Bitcoin.
Cash App’s popularity for fraudulent schemes is evident from conversations and listings on dark net forums and markets, where criminals gather to do business. In August, Cash App was mentioned 10,577 times on dark net forums, up 450 percent from a year earlier, according to an analysis by the security firm Sixgill. Listings for Venmo and Zelle rose around 50 percent on the dark net in the same period.
Ashley Tolley, 31, a mother of three in Travelers Rest, S.C., recently experienced the criminal activity on Cash App firsthand.
In August, she said, she received requests on the app from addresses that appeared to be legitimate, but with a letter or two changed. While some of the transactions were rejected by Square, one went ahead without her approval. The thief took $560, which was a month of child support payments from the father of her two youngest children, from her account.
Square told Ms. Tolley that she could ask the fraudster to send the money back to her. But the person had already deleted their Cash App account.
“I’m the sole provider in my household,” she said. “For that to be gone — I broke down, I was in tears.”
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Truthfully, it's their own fault for not reading the fine print or hiring a personal assistant for $50 to do it for them, and you better get used to being hacked and ripped off:
"The new coronavirus may remain infectious for weeks on banknotes, glass and other common surfaces, according to research by Australia’s top biosecurity laboratory that highlights risks from paper currency, touchscreen devices and grab handles and rails. Scientists at the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness showed SARS-CoV-2 is “extremely robust,” surviving for 28 days on smooth surfaces such as glass found on mobile phone screens and plastic banknotes at room temperature, or 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit). That compares with 17 days survival for the flu virus. Virus survival declined to less than a day at 40 degrees Celsius on some surfaces, according to the study, published in Virology Journal. The findings add to evidence that the Covid-19-causing coronavirus survives for longer in cooler weather, making it potentially harder to control in winter than summer. The research also helps to more accurately predict and mitigate the pandemic’s spread. [The coronavirus tended to] survive longer on nonporous or smooth surfaces, compared with porous complex surfaces, such as cotton."
The LIES NEVER STOP when it comes to pu$hing the GREAT RE$ET -- in this cash, pushing the cashless world based on fraudulent fear!
Are you SICK of the CROCK OF SHIT STUDIES YET?
“Our results show that SARS-CoV-2 can remain infectious on surfaces for long periods of time, reinforcing the need for good practices such as regular hand washing and cleaning surfaces,” said co-author Debbie Eagles, the center’s deputy director, in an emailed statement Monday. The coronavirus is transmitted mostly through direct contact with an infected person, especially the virus-laden particles they emit while coughing, sneezing, speaking, singing and even breathing. SARS-CoV-2 may also contaminate surfaces when these particles settle, creating so-called fomites that the researchers said may play a lesser, though important role in transmission of the virus.“It does raise some critical issues around the need to keep on disinfecting surfaces, even when community cases are low,” said Trevor Drew, the center’s director and another co-author, in an interview. “We still need to carry out those disinfection regimes, both personally and at a public level, even when there don’t seem to be any cases around because there may well be some residual virus that yo’ve missed.”
I can't take reading this $hit anymore, folks, sorry.
SARS-CoV-2 spread via fomites is plausible, researchers at Kansas State University said in a study released ahead of publication and peer review in August. They analyzed the coronavirus’s stability on a dozen surfaces and found it survived five-to-seven times longer under cooler, less-humid spring/fall conditions compared with the average temperature and humidity in summer. The finding bodes badly for controlling Covid-19 during the Northern Hemisphere winter, said virologist Juergen Richt, who led the research. “If we couldn’t control it very well during the summer, we are in for a big surprise,” Richt said in an interview.
Bought off liar!
Scientists at the Australian government laboratory have determined virus survival previously for hundreds of different viruses. The research received funding from Australia’s defense department. It involved drying the coronavirus in an artificial mucus on different surfaces, at concentrations similar to those reported in samples from infected patients, and then re-isolating the virus over a month.
The CDC said they have no isolated strains of the alleged virus, and no one in the world has isolated the fake and phony piece of $hit that is simply season flu (CDC not counting flu this year, either).
Speaking of Defense Department studies, what do the make of the a Defense Department study of the risk of catching the coronavirus on a packed commercial flight that concluded that a person would have to be sitting next to an infectious passenger for at least 54 hours to receive a dangerous dose of the virus through the air (and yet we all must wear masks and social distance?).
Honestly, folks, this rank-rot shit is unbearable and insufferable.
FUCK THIS!
The study was also carried out in the dark, to remove the effect of ultraviolet light, as research has demonstrated direct sunlight can rapidly inactivate the virus. “While the precise role of surface transmission, the degree of surface contact and the amount of virus required for infection is yet to be determined, establishing how long this virus remains viable on surfaces is critical for developing risk mitigation strategies in high contact areas,” Eagles said. The persistence on glass is an important finding, given that touchscreen devices such as mobile phones, bank ATMs, supermarket self-serve checkouts and airport check-in kiosks are high touch surfaces which may not be regularly cleaned and therefore pose a transmission risk of SARS-CoV-2, the researchers said in the paper. They found the longer survival time of SARS-CoV-2 than seasonal flu on banknotes “of particular significance, considering the frequency of circulation and the potential for transfer of viable virus both between individuals and geographic locations.” Before SARS-CoV-2 was declared a pandemic, China had started decontaminating its paper currency, suggesting concerns over transmission via paper banknotes existed at the time, the researchers said, noting that the U.S. and South Korea have also quarantined bank notes as a result of the pandemic. The survival of the coronavirus on stainless steel at cooler temperatures may help explain Covid-19 outbreaks linked to meat processing and cold storage facilities, the authors said. Their data support the findings of a study showing the survival of SARS-CoV-2 on fresh and frozen food as well, they said. A reduction in temperature to about 6 degrees Celsius correlates with about a 10-fold increase in the virus’s survival, Drew said. Blood and oils associated with fresh meat and fish processing and handling may also help to preserve the virus. “It’s going to survive for much longer in cooler conditions, and that’s irrespective of whether it’s on a surface or whether it’s in the air,” Drew said. “This may help to explain why the sort of environments, such as slaughterhouses, would be potentially a more hazardous area.”
The COUNTERFEIT COVID HOAX is also being used to CREATE FAMINE, too!
Related: Transmission risk: Focus on hands, not surfaces
That comes from the Washington Compost of all people, and totally contradicts the agenda-pushing Australian bull$hit as they say stop wiping down your groceries and mail.
Kind of makes you forget all about the tyrannical lockdowns based on the lie:
"As if from hibernation, Australia’s second-largest city emerged from one of the world’s longest and most severe lockdowns on Wednesday, feeling both traumatized and euphoric after weeks of shared sacrifice that brought a deadly second wave of the coronavirus to heel. It took 111 days, but Melbourne and the surrounding state of Victoria recorded no new infections on Monday, and on Wednesday thousands of stores, cafes, restaurants and beauty salons opened their doors for the first time in months. The collective exit for a city of five million came suddenly and none too soon — Mr. Andrews had insisted on a very low threshold of cases before lifting the lockdown. It ended a dizzying and lonely experience that many in Melbourne described as an emotional roller coaster with effects on the economy, education and mental health that will linger. The turnaround since July has been dramatic: Infections at the time were threatening to spiral out of control. Now, Victoria has subdued the virus while European countries that had similar caseloads a few months ago — and that ended their lockdowns after overcoming initial waves of infections — are struggling....."
Meanwhile, right next door:
