This week’s update is dominated by my experience with “Lena”, the scammer from Gumtree who tried to fleece my wife of $800. There’s a blow-by-blow rundown of how it all happened in this video and it’s fascinating to think that these things can actually be successful given all the red flags. But they are, and in Australia alone innocent victims are stung to the tune of more than 3 billion dollars every year by fraudsters which is a staggering number. Understanding how these scams work and sharing that knowledge broadly with the less technical of those around us is part of how to combat this, so please share the tweet thread generously… and enjoy the entertainment 😊
References
- That Xbox problem with all the suggestions around weird HDMI behaviour? (not one single person suggested checking I’d plugged the cables into the right inputs 🤦♂️)
- When disclosure doesn’t happen and victims are notified by a third party, it can leave the implicated service in a really uncomfortable position (this shouldn’t be happening, and I’m sympathetic to Synduit’s position here whether they were actually breached or not)
- Our household didn’t escape unscathed from the Luxottica data breach (congratulations Charlotte!)
- I blew a lot of hours on a really flakey Azure Functions / storage queue problem that only appeared after a recent update (that pretty much wrote off my entire Wednesday)
- Ah, scammers, the source of endless entertainment for us all! (but also a source of great pain for so many people, so it was nice to inflict some back on them for a change 😊)
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