Beware of scammers!

Nickie

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Note: if you are contacted by someone claiming to be a young woman, looking for a "Ukulele Singer", for her upcoming wedding, be very careful.
"She" will likely give her name, and the groom's name, and their ages, even a phone number. She will kindly answer all your questions and requirements. She will ask for pricing, and may even specify pre-wedding, wedding, and reception music, but even when pressed, won't give a genre or song preference.
It will likely be in a city very nearby. She'll seem very excited about her "big day."
The English may be bad, "she" won't make any song requests, but will ask lots of questions. Don't give out your phone number, and certainly do NOT give out any banking information when she offers to have a friend make an advance deposit for the music.
 
Wow. Scammers are everywhere. Thanks for sharing. Just learned about physical attack hackers today — they inconspicuously join smokers on their break and then enter a business as people go back to work, so they can find an empty work computer to exploit.
 
Got a phone call a couple of days ago with the ID showing my power company. The caller with an accent said he was a technician on his way over to turn off the electricity in 45 minutes. I had paid my bill online a few days earlier and I know my utility company always sends written notice for lack of payment long before they turn off the power, so I knew this was BS. I called him out on it, saying I know this is a scam, he just replied, "Have a nice day." and hung up.

I then called my utility company fraud department, she verified that I had no turn off on my account, but didn't realize that the scammers can spoof the actual utility phone number. She did put in a report.


This is Michael Kohan in Los Angeles, Beverly West near the Beverly Center
9 tenor cutaway ukes, 5 acoustic bass ukes, 11 solid body bass ukes, 11 mini electric bass guitars (Total: 35)

• Donate to The Ukulele Kids Club, they provide ukuleles to children in hospital music therapy programs. www.theukc.org
• Member The CC Strummers: YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/CCStrummers/video, Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheCCStrummers
 
I'd heard of most of these before but the wedding one is new. Also spoofing your own phone number (how did they think that would work???). Scammers are sneaky. Stay vigilant, folks. Hope you're not speaking from a perspective learned the hard way, Nickie.
 
So, ubulele, have you been trying to scam yourself?:rofl:
No, Squeaky, I haven't been scammed in years. I'm an IDShield rep, and I study scams and ID thefts.

The 1st tip off was that she had no song preferences. No woman would ever tell you that, for her wedding.
 
The IRS has a warrant out for my arrest I guess. That's what the recording told me anyway. I don't think that they are going to catch me though. I might be old, but I'm quick and crafty.
 
I have received those a lot. s will be coming by tomorrow if I don't respond".poor scamming when they say "the cops will be coming to get me tomorrow if I don't return the phone call. Although I heard that the scammers male things look their scam look very bad. They only want the uneducated to respond, and a bad set up premise should weed out those they don't want. I have alway wondered what would happen of the Nigerian price who needs $ 5,000 to free up his millions that he will share with me was told that I needed $ 1,000 to cover the cost of breaking the investment to get their money.
 
On the News here in the UK a retired businessman received a pop up offering enhanced PC security on his home
PC for a sum of £550 yes £550 he accepted and paid.

Then as part of this another enhanced security he had a person take over his PC and state wow this is the worst ever but for £4000 I can resolve it.

The stupid guy paid £4000.

There are times people should be locked up for their own protection.
 
But with the uke gig scam, how do they get your money?
 
But with the uke gig scam, how do they get your money?

I'm sure at some point there would be a request to put up money for some related purpose. These scammers are good at coming up with stories that sound believable, at least by those who aren't naturally skeptical.
 
But with the uke gig scam, how do they get your money?

My guess would be that they offer to make an electronic deposit on your gig fee but will need your bank account information to make the transfer. Once they have your bank information, they hack your bank account and clean out whatever you have in it.
 
I wonder why and how they target ukulele players? It can't be random, I mean you don't just blanket the populous in the hopes of landing on a ukulele player who actually does gigs. They have to be getting names and numbers somewhere. Now I'm getting paranoid about who is selling our info to ukulele scammers. Anyway, did she call you or email you, how did she contact you? What tipped you off that it wasn't legit?
 
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I wonder why and how they target ukulele players? It can't be random, I mean you don't just blanket the populous in the hopes of landing on a ukulele player who actually does gigs. They have to be getting names and numbers somewhere. Now I'm getting paranoid about who is selling our info to ukulele scammers. Anyway, did she call you or email you, how did she contact you? What tipped you off that it wasn't legit?

A lot of ukulele groups, like the one I belong to, have a presence on the internet (our group is on meetup.com) that identifies them as ukulele groups. Maybe that's how scammers find ukulele players.

I'm convinced that the agencies that are responsible for music performance licenses (for example, BMI and ASCAP) scour the internet looking for groups that play music and meet in public places. When our group started using meetup, the cafe we were meeting was visited by representatives of BMI and ASCAP demanding to see the cafe's performance licenses and threatening legal action if the cafe owner continued to permit the playing of music in the cafe without a performance license. It may not be that difficult for someone looking to scam ukulele players (or musicians generally) to join a meetup group, hack contact information, and then contact the people whose information they've taken.
 
I wonder why and how they target ukulele players? It can't be random, I mean you don't just blanket the populous in the hopes of landing on a ukulele player who actually does gigs. They have to be getting names and numbers somewhere. Now I'm getting paranoid about who is selling our info to ukulele scammers. Anyway, did she call you or email you, how did she contact you? What tipped you off that it wasn't legit?

I've been contacted by strangers numerous times to play, but they've all been legit, up till now. This one emailed me.
The 1st tip off was that she had no favorite songs to request. No woman would say that.
The final tip off was her asking for my banking info....at that point I was tempted to write back F--- you!
But I didn't. I told her I'd take a check on the day of the wedding. Never heard from her again.
Not even sure it was a woman!
 
I've been contacted by strangers numerous times to play, but they've all been legit, up till now. This one emailed me.
The 1st tip off was that she had no favorite songs to request. No woman would say that.
The final tip off was her asking for my banking info....at that point I was tempted to write back F--- you!
But I didn't. I told her I'd take a check on the day of the wedding. Never heard from her again.
Not even sure it was a woman!

Well I wouldn't know what women would say or not say, but I certainly agree that if you get an offer to do a gig that is accompanied by a request for banking information, it probably isn't legit. I'm still wondering how they got your name and email address. Did you Google their email address to see what comes up? It might be interesting. I've done that before and sometimes you get all kinds of info.
 
I worked for the Water Company. We billed every two months. It took delinquency of two billing cycles before Collection Proceedings were initialized. And three cycles before shut off was authorized. And even then, the scofflaws were allowed to make a payment plan to catch up.

Bottom line, any sudden communication regarding imminent shut off is almost assuredly bogus.. We would send personnel out to the house, if necessary, to make collections...

Of course, that was how we handled the situation.
 
I have quite a bit of experience on this subject and I would just caution people who get phone calls, just hang up. Be careful how you answer random emails. Many of the calls and emails are not scamming, they are mining. They mine every bit of information that they can get from you and they sell it to scammers. The very fact that one answers a call is worth something. How long you stay on the line is worth something. Some people like to be clever and play games with callers, but every single word is being recorded and sold. They get enough words, those words can be rearranged to make it sound as if you are saying something else. So don't try to play games. You won't win, they know what they are doing. Good for Nicki, not responding with a F***k off. They don't care and that response is worth something to someone.
 
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