CONS AND PROS
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It seems like we're living in a society that's full of scams, hoaxes and questionable practices committed by individuals or corporations these days. Some scams are purely horrible, some are more incredible than egregious, and some are just really, really weird.

Welcome to Cons And Pros, a weekly roundup of the most outrageous scam stories we have come across this week.

TurboTax Lies To Avoid Giving Refunds To Customers

We already know that TurboTax sucks. Not only is it blatantly using dirty design tricks to keep you from finding the company's free filing version, but it's also deliberately hiding its free filing search page from Google searches. Like I said before, at this point, TurboTax isn't an outright scam, but it might as well be.

And as if all of these misdeeds weren't already bad enough, ProPublica reported this week that the company is blatantly lying to customers that FreeFile, the company's free filing product, isn't managed by the company, but by the IRS, so they can get out of refunding its customers.

We've heard from 16 people who say they were denied refunds and told that the truly free version — Free File — is a government product that's not run by TurboTax. Ten others reported being told that ProPublica's stories were inaccurate, or that our coverage is "fake news" or "fictitious."

None of that is true.

ProPublica posted audio of one of those interactions:

 

[ProPublica]

Amazon Sellers Hit By Hackers

According to Bloomberg, last year hackers hacked into 100 Amazon seller accounts and stole money that comprised sales proceeds and business loans from Amazon to third-party businesses. The attack was extensive and has been ongoing for at least half a year, from May to October 2018:

Amazon said it was still investigating the compromised accounts and believed that hackers managed to change details of accounts on the Seller Central platform to their own at Barclays Plc and Prepay Technologies Ltd., which is partly owned by Mastercard Inc., according to the filing. Amazon found the accounts were likely compromised by phishing techniques that tricked sellers into giving up confidential login information.

[Bloomberg]

Don't Pick Up, No Matter What

Thanks to the rise of robocalls, I haven't answered any phone calls from unidentified numbers for the past two years. And now I have yet another reason to continue to not do so.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) put out an alert on "one ring" call back scams. In this type of scam, scammers ring your phone once and then try to keep you on the phone as long as possible when you call back in order to incur expensive toll fees. 

Someone answers or maybe you get a recording. You stay on the phone listening to the person or trying to decipher what the recording is saying.

Unknown to you, though, you have been connected to a line with high interconnect fees, similar to calling a 900 number, and a bloated phone bill is on its way.

[The New York Times]

The Lady With The Mysterious Trunk

Atlas Obscura is running a series of stories on the greatest female scammers in history this week, including stories of a woman who sold poison as makeup and another who successfully deceived French bankers with tales about a fictitious American millionaire

My favorite from this series is a fairly simple one about Barbara Erni, an 18th-century thief who committed at least 17 burglaries using only a treasure chest. Well, a chest and a man hidden inside.

Before turning in for bed, Erni would insist that her chest was far too valuable to leave out unattended in a bedroom with minimal security. Instead, she would demand that the innkeeper store her chest in their best, most secure room, perhaps even one that held valuables of their own. Innkeeper after hapless innkeeper fell for Erni's tale, squirreling away the hefty trunk into a room that contained their own precious possessions[.]

[Atlas Obscura]

Like I said, it's a fairly simple scheme, but it was apparently effective enough for Erni to utilize it for 15 years. And it was also good enough for "Ocean's 11."

An Unprecedented Look Inside A Scam Call Center In India

Most of the scam stories we get are usually from the perspective of victims of fraud. Very rarely do we get an inside look into how scams work from the operator's point-of-view.

And that's why videos like this from Jim Browning are so rare. In his video, Browning exposes the inner workings of a call center in Kolkata, India that's running a refund scam.

 

<p>Pang-Chieh Ho is an associate editor at Digg.</p>

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