With all of the scams and fraudsters gaining strength seems hard to avoid crime. I thought perhaps I could hear from others who have experiences to share. Seems so hard to stay away from crime.
Here is what my wife experienced recently:
The What: Wife’s airline bonus miles were stolen. We were planning a trip so wife called airline to book tickets using bonus miles. Airline informed her of her miles being significantly less than mine which was strange. She had never used her bonus miles.
The How: Someone hacked into her EVA account….then transferred the miles to two other people. My wife noticed about six months ago that she could not log into her account. But since was in middle of moving she did not investigate. So seems the person hacked in and changed the password. My wife did not receive any message from EVA about password change or mile transfer.
Result: EVA requested she file a police report. Police called her after one month so say still investigating. After two months EVA gave her miles back to her….after much discussion back and forth.
I have become a little paranoid with all the strange mails received every week. I even stopped paying for Norton anti-virus software as I am sure half of the mails I receive from “Norton” are not authentic so I simply do not want to authorize any payment or give out my bank account information. The wife’s hotmail account has been hacked numerous times. She also had Apple related hackers and began receiving fake Apple email links…which were confirmed as fake by Apple online support. Our friends have experienced the range of trouble from simply LINE money request fraud, to phone calls from “friends” needing urgent money…all the way to fake daughter abduction. And of course, the fake great investment opportunity which stole money from my friend’s husband (she was a very unhappy woman). It is just getting really crazy.
As far as making payments with a credit card, why not just have an account with a small amount of cash and a debit card that works like a credit card? That’s what I do for a few small app subscriptions I have as I don’t have a credit card anyway. If there’s something more expensive I can just make a deposit that’s enough to cover it.
People always say ‘hacked’. That’s not what’s happening.
Hacking is an attack on the IT infrastructure, exploiting zero days etc. Most services are pretty secure. Hackers get into systems from time to time, but the passwords are encrypted. Brute forcing them is very expensive. That only happens for very lucrative targets. Like people who are known to hold many bitcoins or celebrities.
Mostly it is phishing. Convincing a person to click on a link in a fake email and give up their account password voluntarily by sending them to a fake website mimicking a real service.
Sometimes people get tricked to install some malware on their computer that can also steal passwords by monitoring all input into the computer.
Humans are the weak link and much easier to attack than systems designed by software engineers.
I got scammed by a foreigner in Taipei asking me to try some hand salt then selling me marked up skin products. I was looking for skin product at the time and the foreigner spoke English so I didn’t suspect the scam.
Later on I found out about this scam online and the products are worthless since you can buy them online for very cheap and they are low quality (they try to sell you 10k NTD products worth only 100 NTD online). I ran into a Taiwanese who tried to do the same a few years later and didn’t fall for the scam.
My firstbak credit card has been done numerous times for fraudulent transactions. Probably 4 or 5 times I’ve had to cancel my credit card because of fraud. Really common. I work a lot in South East Asia so that doesn’t help . But I think some were stolen from online or maybe internally somehow .
I’ve been take for a large amount of money in a manipulated crypto crash on Oct 10th. You can check it out its one of the biggest financial frauds in history where 20 billion was lost in 15 minutes by manipulating the oracle prices of crypto currencies. 10,000s of people were bankrupted I reckon. No prosecutions and in the same week Trump pardoned the guy who was part responsible , for earlier crimes !
I never got my fair share of the inheritances from a Nigerian prince, nor a share of the $250m from my deceased distant relative, whose attorney contacted me by email.
You haven’t because you haven’t contacted me yet . As the world’s biggest provider of jester financial services CLOWN GLOBAL SECURITIES is honor bound to trick you out of your foolish earnings.
We do not know what happened but could be any method of what you mentioned. EVA told her that the miles were stolen about six months before she tried to use them…which was about three months before she noticed she could not login to her account. EVA said others had the same problem. After the miles were stolen seems they changed my wife’s email account so she did not receive her monthly miles notice. Previously she did not have to login to see her miles which were in the monthly email from EVA.
While living in Singapore I was maybe the first to receive a fax from Nigeria wanting help to send money abroad. For fun I actually replied by fax and got a call from them. After that I reported to police who had never heard of such a thing. That was in 1994.
The story you told involved EVA’s mileage scheme. Over at Cathay Pacific—my usual airline—the flyertalk forum is currently chock full of tales of miles being stolen, redirected . . . all manner of trouble for frequent flyers. The speculation I’ve read at flyertalk is NOT that there is some phishing operation, but that some folks somewhere in the system are involved in some criminal operation(s). And for whatever reason, they have determined that stolen miles, placed in other accounts, have value . . .
Speaking of inside jobs, years ago I called in to China Airlines to refund a ticket and they asked for the card number. A couple weeks later I had two charges out of Japan, equalling about $1200usd.
The miles fraud (the what in this topic) is not speculation—that has been happening. But yes the mechanics of this fraud (i.e. the how it is happening) is still a subject of speculation, at least to me.
Yeah I had something similar after giving the pin on the back to a vendor directly which I very rarely do. Couple of weeks later ,fraud transaction. It may happen. But I work with an agent for years who has my security pin and it’s fine.
Years back I had an auntie stop me in Taipei Main Station saying she had lost her wallet and needed money for a bus ticket to get back to Kaohsiung. I gave it to her knowing it potentially was a scam, but hoping I was helping someone in genuine need.
A few years later I was stopped again in Taipei Main by the very same woman using the very same story. I told her I remembered her and would happily go to the bus station with her to buy a ticket to Kaohsiung for her. She didn’t take me up on my offer.
Last year, during a visit to Raohe Night Market, I was walking with a friend when a Filipino tourist approached me and asked if I spoke Tagalog. I don’t, but my friend is from the Philippines, so she could. The tourist started speaking in Tagalog and showed some foreign currency bills. I didn’t really understand what he was saying, but the situation felt a bit odd. I just told him we weren’t interested and walked on.
Later, I asked my friend what he wanted, and she explained that he was trying to exchange Philippine pesos for Taiwanese dollars. I’m not sure if it was a scam, but it definitely felt unusual and he was looking for fellow countrymen late at night, which seemed a little suspicious.
On a side note, it’s not very common to find foreign currency exchange offices in Taiwan, especially at night. If you don’t exchange money at the airport or bank then it can be tricky to find a place to exchange currency after hours. Some ATMs do offer currency exchange, but for tourists, locating these ATMs at night might be a bit challenging
When I moved to Hualien my wife and I would sometimes hang out at the local temple. A cop there would share stories of the university students being duped to send money to scammers or buy some type of gaming card which I did not understand. Was so many that they put up signs at the 7-11 and asked staff to call them if seemed student was scammed. The cop said he was at 7-11 almost every day….luckily only about 30 meters from the police station.
