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PSA: this is not medicare, if you get this message just ignore and delete. I get quite a few spam/scam texts, but I figured I'd put this here because this one is impersonating medicare.
Remember, they wouldn't send you a link to click, and always read the URL. It's always going to be something that's dodgy.
screenshot of text
Got this exact one a few days ago. And a call from Thailand. And of course, my tolls are once again unpaid. I really feel sorry for older people. The scam situation is out of control.
Lol! My partner got the toll one last night - we don't own a car nor drive 😂
I also feel bad for the oldies, it's fucked how many of these texts are sent
The toll ones are especially funny in Perth - there are no toll roads in WA. 😃
The toll one is odd, I never got that particular one until I made a rare and very short trip (like one junction) on Eastlink a couple of weeks ago. I've had five scam texts since then. If you go on the Eastlink website there's a big red 'priority alert' warning at the top of the page, so they're obviously aware of it, but it seems to me that their system is compromised somehow.
I get those too
Does medicare even send messages sat 2am?
Highly doubtful. I did get a COViD confirmation at a similar stupid time, but that was full lockdown etc.
I reported it with PhishReport (that website I mentioned the other day), and here's what that looks like for anyone curious:
First you open a case on PR:
Then you submit it to google safe browsing
Then to Microsoft's Threat Intelligence page:
Then to the domain registrar (who provide the domain (site) name). In this case it's NameSilo and they're kind of shit when it comes to this sort of thing, but they do do their job so I can't complain I guess:
Then normally you'd submit a report to their domain host (who actually host the phishing page), but they use a Chinese host, Tencent, who really don't want to do anything so they make it difficult and phish report doesn't have a link to their phishing report page, just their copyright takedown page, so you'd probably need to email them. I decided to not bother for now
It seems that a lot of scams now are based out of China. Most of the phishing links I get, at least the ones targetting Australians, are coming from china. And Chinese companies really really really do not want to do anything about such phishing and scam websites. Tencent always cause me problems when I try to report them. They also demand all your personal information, so I submit my reports to them with false information, because I don't really want them passing along my address and personal information to criminals. But that's unfortunately just how it is now
Whoa Baku! You're a good egg! I had no idea about any of this, thank you!
Is that the same Tencent that owns all those gaming publishers/devs/IPs‽
Yep. They actually own or hold shares of a fucking shit ton of things. They own 4% of Tesla, 40% of epic games, I'm pretty sure there was a thing a few years ago where they bought a minority of discord and Reddit, they've got their fingers in just about every gaming company. They're basically Chinese google, except rather than directly running products under their own branding, they just take the profits other companies generate
Update: namesilo placed their domain into Client hold, which essentially renders their domain useless unless removed.
If you're into a more technical explanation that hopefully doesn't just sound like jargon:
spoiler
Basically what they've done is deactivate what's known as DNS records. DNS records are what actually tells visitors browsers where the site itself is. The site itself is on a Tencent server somewhere in china and still exists (it hasn't been deleted or removed or anything). But without the DNS records, people visiting the dodgy domain have no way to know where the sites content is. I imagine namesilo will not be renewing their domain, so that means for the next year or so, the site will not be visitable.
But it doesn't seem to have taken effect just yet, possibly because it's cached by someone somewhere. Within 24 hours it should be completely done though
I got a scam toll text that actually got past the spam filter recently. I checked my account through the proper means and found out Linkt had been charging me a manual lookup fee because my e-tag hasn't been working. This has been going on for years.
And you wonder why they choose toll payments as their scam