Important Data About Scams and Prevention
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010For any business in the world, any store, a bomb threat can be a logistical nightmare. No one wishes their employees, customers, or selves to be killed in an explosion so this usually means evacuating the store. Bomb scammers prey on this fear.
In general, businesses and malls are the victims of bomb scams. Due to the amount of traffic in these establishments, bombing threats are always taken very seriously. There may be specific instructions not to contact authorities, but these instructions are often ignored and that contact is made. What is most terrible is that bombings have actually happened after a threat. And many people have died or been seriously injured as a result of these bombings. Because the scammer knows that no one wants to have to deal with something so tragic, they play upon it.
There are many types of these scams. A caller may phone in and say that a bomb has been put somewhere and can be triggered by remote. They will threaten that if they aren’t paid when they demand to be, they will set off the trigger. However, this rarely actually happens even when nothing is paid.
Most bomb scares are nothing more than bomb scams designed to extort money. The fear of bombs is real, and the mere threat of a bomb is often enough for the plan to succeed. Fear is a truly powerful motivator and scam artists know that many people will assume the threat is real and the bomb exists rather than take a chance on being wrong and having a bomb explode.
There are services like cell-registry.com/516/922/ that can help you to figure out who is actually calling during the time where money is being supposedly sent to the scammer. When picking up a wire a person must show personal identification and, while it can be forged, some are dumb enough to use real identification papers.
However, some bomb scams go to a personal level by threatening the family of an employee member, when doing this they will claim that the family member is a hostage and there is a bomb near them that will be detonated. Again, there have been times in the past when there truly were bombs that were detonated on an employee’s family member, and so the fear that it could be a legitimate claim is justifiable.
The fact is that police records of this type of bomb scam shows that most of these claims are scams being carried out by people who are actually in another country or state altogether. Your establishment has been most likely chosen randomly because the person making the threat has never even been through the doors. In some cases such thieves have even broken into the company’s computer system to get names and other personal information.
There are also programs made by hackers that are developed to ruin the bank’s data if money isn’t paid, called a logic bomb, which is one of the newer scams. The scam artists specifically target companies where all the business records history would be compromised, or a home computer where there is probably not a backup. When the victims consider the potential loss of their data against the money that is being demanded, many people decide to pay the ransom. Government agencies are attempting to put an end to this but it is difficult for police to figure out where the threats are coming from.