Another day, another scam. Such is life at the moment. This scam starts with an email that hits your inbox claiming that you did a hit and run and they have evidence of that. And if you do not call them, they will rat you out to the authorities. Here’s a copy of the email that was forwarded to me:
Here’s why this is a scam:
- The grammar is rather bad. Typically this is the first clue that this might be a scam
- While I did redact the sender’s email address, it was a gmail.com email address. No business would ever use a gmail.com email address.
- If you look at the section where they give you a number to call, it says “= +” right before the phone number. Clearly a typo.
- The date of the alleged incident is 9/12/2021. As I type this the date is 7/27/2021 which means that somehow this accident occurred in the future.
- It encourages you to phone or they will rat you out to the cops. Which I am guessing that the scammer is hoping that you’ll call to say that this isn’t you. Which in turn they will badger you into paying up after sucking up your personal information.
- A Google search indicates that LLP Insurance is a real Insurance company located in the Greater Toronto Area. But not with a number that starts with 313. However, searching the phone number indicates that this number has been used in scams previously.
So I will give the scammers points for using a local insurance company to front their scam. And I will also give them points for trying to use the name of their potential victim to social engineer their way into getting paid. But in the interest of trying further figure out what these scammers were up to, I did try to phone the number using a call display block and I did get some upbeat elevator music. But then the call hung up. Likely because I was blocking the number that I was calling from. I suspect that the scammers want to capture the number that you’re calling from so that they can harass you into paying them.
In any case, this is clearly a scam that you need to avoid. Thus if one of these emails hits your inbox, delete it and go about your day.