I just received an interesting phone call. It came from 866-656-8182. The guy on the other end of the line had a thick Indian accent and there was a bunch of telemarketing office noise in the background. He informed me that he was calling to send out $450 worth of free movie tickets as part of an anti-piracy effort by the movie studios. He just wanted to confirm my information. He then listed what he thought was my street address (but was actually the old one) and asked me to confirm. I asked "what's the catch? what do you want from me?". He then informed me that he'd just need to collect $5.95 and verify some information to ensure shipment of the movie tickets.
I told him I'd pass and promptly hung up without giving him so much as my name (much less a street address or any kind of billing info). This is obviously bogus. I wonder what kind of information he was going to request of me. $5.95 doesn't seem like enough to make the scam very profitable so there must be some other angle. A quick Google of the number brings up this thread. Seems a number of different stories are coming from these guys. I guess you have to keep your guard up 24/7.
Talks
- Synchronous Reads, Asynchronous Writes
Talk I gave at RubyConf 2009 on building large scale applications with RESTful services and AMQP messaging. - Machine Learning Techniques for the Semantic Web
A short talk on machine learning I gave at the NYC Semantic Web meetup. - Collective Intelligence
Talk at the 2008 Gotham Ruby Conference on recommendation systems.
Linkage
- My Github
- Feedzirra
My Ruby library for parsing and fetching feeds at blinding speed. - SAX Machine
My Ruby library exposes a DSL for building Nokogiri backed SAX parsers. - Typhoeus
My Ruby library for running HTTP requests quickly, easily, and in parallel. - NYC Machine Learning Meetup
The meetup I organize. Talks from researchers and practitioners on machine learning and related technologies and techniques.
Recent Posts
- Parse Domains from URLs easily with Domainatrix
- Resources for Synchronous Reads, Asynchronous Writes at RubyConf 2009
- Typhoeus, the best Ruby HTTP client just got better
- Bypassing wxWidgets error when building Erlang from Source on OS X
- Detect and Parse Atom and RSS Feed URLs from HTML with TruffleHog
- Using the Nginx Memcached module with Passenger
- First NYC Machine Learning Meetup
- Using Named Pipes in Ruby for Inter-process Communication
- On Ruby Interview with me
- Breathe fire over HTTP in Ruby with Typhoeus
Well, if the $$ was going to come via credit card, voila. Max the cards and then Paul ends up getting a nasty bill.
Posted by: Keith Casey | October 20, 2005 at 02:07 PM
That's true, but there are certainly easier (volume and level of effort) ways to get CC numbers. I guess this may just be another method...
Posted by: Paul Dix | October 20, 2005 at 04:22 PM