I just received a text message from someone claiming to be Andi Gutmans. It’s the same kind of CEO text message, where they claim to be in a meeting and need you to do something for them real quick. The thing is, I’ve never worked with Andi outside of PHP, so I think they’re targeting me based on data from LinkedIn, where it shows I “work for” PHP in my experience history.
I might have taken this too far. Just before the “Call me now” message, this number tried calling me twice using FaceTime audio. I declined both times.
@ondrej I just like the idea that maybe, just maybe, they were calling to confess because they’re worried they actually got someone fired, but I didn’t want to answer.
@ramsey I meant the scammer would be using a program to mimick Andi’s voice trained on his public appearances. Here, I am only guessing that these things exist from different conferences…
@ondrej Ah, right. I see. I’m not sure these particular scammers are all that sophisticated. They don’t intend to do phone calls. But, you could be right; I didn’t answer, so I don’t know.
@tjdraper I’m not sure what they’re using, but I’m guessing they have a service that’s registering Twillio (or something like it) numbers with throw-away iMessage accounts.
@tjdraper I seem to recall that Apple planned to open up iMessage for others to build on so you could use it from Android and Windows, but I’m not sure whether that happened.
@ramsey I’d have been tempted to say something about it like, “you’re a blue bubble now? yesterday you were singing your new android phone's praises, seems a little wishy washy”
@ramsey Can you give a quick summary? (I’d like to watch it, but I might not have time for a few days.) I’m struggling to imagine feeling sorry for a scammer.
@shiflett The short of it is that many of these scammers are lured into it by promise of a good job, and then they are captured, enslaved, and trafficked around, forced to run the scams or will face beatings or worse.
@ramsey That episode left me unsure of what to do. Not stringing them along leaves them with more time to work on potentially less informed victims, and making it more expensive for their employers seems like an effective strategy to combat it. Maybe the right answer is to string them along without making a mockery of them? I honestly don’t know, but raising public awareness does seem crucial.
@litzinger So… I might have taken it too far and insinuated that Andi was about to be fired because he called in sick to miss the board meeting that I’m currently in filling in for him, and we’re all wondering what meeting he’s in now where he’s about to give a presentation.
This resulted in me receiving two calls from the number, which I declined, and the text message “Call me now.”
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