Tag Archive for: Spammers

How to stop robocalls on iPhone, Android: These apps fight spammers


Remember back in the day when your phone rang, and you would answer it? Robocallers have ruined that. Now we stare suspiciously at every call and send unknown numbers, even when it looks local, straight to voicemail. And for good reason!

So far, in 2021, scammers have made 22 billion calls nationwide. That’s roughly 67 calls to every man, woman, and child in America. Answering calls from an unknown number invites a scammer – and in many cases, actual criminals – into your life.

Here are the five most straightforward ways to block robocalls and eventually get them to – mostly, hopefully, fingers crossed – stop calling us for good. 

The FTC says  robocalling – which it defines as calls meant to sell your something without your express permission – is illegal, period. Full stop.

1. Don’t answer. Ever.

Never pick up a call you.suspect is spam. Every single time you engage, even a little, it paints a giant red target on your head and means you will get more calls, period.

Every time you engage with a scam caller, you’re encouraging a criminal industry to continue harassing us all.

I know it’s tempting to “try to mess around with the scammers.” I’ve heard from hundreds of people throughout the years who think they’ve found the exact right way to annoy the annoy-ers – and oh, isn’t that great fun? 

Source…

Keybase moves to stop onslaught of spammers on encrypted message platform

All scammers, all the time: my Keybase message inbox.

Enlarge / All scammers, all the time: my Keybase message inbox.

Keybase started off as co-founder and developer Max Krohn’s “hobby project”—a way for people to share PGP keys with a simple username-based lookup. Then Chris Coyne (who also was cofounder of OkCupid and SparkNotes) got involved and along came $ 10.8 million in funding from a group of investors led by Andreesen Horowitz. And then things got increasingly more complicated. Keybase aims to make public-key encryption accessible to everyone, for everything from messaging to file sharing to throwing a few crypto-coins someone’s way.

But because of that level of accessibility, Keybase faces a very OkCupid kind of problem: after drawing in people interested in easy public-key crypto-based communications and then drawing in blockchain lovers with its partnership with (and funding from) Stellar.org, Keybase has also drawn in spammers and scammers. And that has brought a host of alerts and messages that have made what was once a fairly clear communications channel into one clogged with unwanted alerts, messages, and other unpleasantry—raising a chorus of complaints in Keybase’s open chat channel.

It turns out there’s a reason spell check keeps wanting to tell me that Keybase should be spelled “debase.”

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Facebook tentatively concludes spammers were behind recent data breach: Report

  1. Facebook tentatively concludes spammers were behind recent data breach: Report  The Straits Times
  2. WSJ: Facebook believes spammers were behind its massive data breach  Engadget
  3. Spammers, not a nation state, behind Facebook data breach, report says  KARE11.com
  4. Facebook hack update: Nearly 30 million users’ data stolen. How to find out if you’re one of them  USA TODAY
  5. Full coverage

data breach – read more

Spammers prefer Trump over Clinton, but are rapidly losing faith in Trump

Whatever difficulties Donald Trump may be having with white college-educated women, African Americans, Latinos, hawkish conservatives and the co-hosts of “Morning Joe,” he’s far and away the favorite presidential candidate of at least one demographic group: spammers.

However, he seems to have lost significant support among that group as well.

These conclusions are drawn from a year’s worth of data assembled by Network World Test Alliance member Joel Snyder, a senior partner at Opus One in Tucson, Ariz. Opus One has been testing anti-spam products for more than a decade, and, as the following chart shows, Trump-related spam has dwarfed Clinton-related spam over the past year … only less so as the campaign has worn on.

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Network World Paul McNamara