Non-fiction writer Petteri Järvinen decided to cheat himself. Adobe Stock / AOP / Kari Pekonen
Non-fiction writer and IT expert Petteri Järvinen says on his blog from a case where a Facebook scammer got himself scammed. This is an ever-spreading scam campaign in which Finnish accounts are hijacked and used to spread messages.
Briefly, the scammer presents the victim as familiar and claims to be competing with him. The scammer tries to get the victim’s phone number. A “check number” will be sent to your phone to find out if you won the race. In reality, the number sent to the phone is the Facebook Verification Code used to hijack the victim’s account.
You can read more about the scam here.
Wrong code
Järvinen says he received a scam message in Facebook Messenger.
– In the morning I got once again “Can you give me your cell phone number?” -Facebook scam. This time I decided to try something new instead of a humble sacrifice. I answered in the affirmative and sent my phone number, Järvinen writes.
Shortly afterwards, Järvinen received a Microsoft identification code on his phone, which was part of a message in Turkish. Järvinen decided to cheat on the scammer and gave him a fake code. After giving the code, the scammer quickly announced that luck was on the side of the friends and they had won a total of 8,100 euros.
This is what the scam message that originally moved looked like. Screenshot
Järvinen says that continuing the conversation is tedious for the scammer, as this will probably have to use Google’s translation machine, which will take time.
The scammer then asked Järvi to tell him the bank he used and his username. Here too, Järvinen gave incorrect information. Järvinen claimed that the transfer did not appear in the account, after which the scammer asked to check whether the numbers were spelled correctly.
He then whistled across the game and exposed the scam to the scammer.
– I think you’re a Turkish cheater. How much money have you made with this scam, Järvinen replied to the scammer’s message, after which the scammer ended the conversation immediately.
Had to spend precious time
– I would have liked to see the look of a guy when he realizes that he has spent time with the victim and realizes that he has been dragged himself, Järvinen writes in his blog.
Järvinen wonders what would happen if people started responding to scammers’ messages, trying to fool them. This would require personal time from the scammer, which in turn would make it more difficult to make scams because scams like this cannot be automated. However, Järvinen points out that when cheating scammers, you need to know what you are doing.
– In this case, I could have increased the pain of the cheater by responding very slowly and playing stupid so that I wouldn’t know what went wrong. It would have caught the scammer’s attention for a long time, Järvinen says, also mentioning Microsoft support call scams where you can pretend to be stupid.
– If enough Finns did this, the word could spread and scammers would learn to avoid Finnish victims, knowing that cheating scammers is the way of the country, Järvinen says.
However, keep in mind that the safest way to deal with scam calls and messages is to ignore them. Scams can be reported to services, making it easier to detect them automatically.