Johnny Depp warned fans about online scammers impersonating him following a Gizmodo report that revealed the Federal Trade Commission received nearly 200 complaints about fake Depps bilking people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. “Sadly, it has been brought to my attention that online scammers are intensifying their efforts …
Read More »
One of the most intriguing and little-known corners of the music industry’s vast, seedy underbelly centers around a bunch of rare records released between 1976 and 1978 for one purpose only: scamming the IRS. During this two-year period, a mix of crafty and bumbling crooks took advantage of a tax …
Read More »
Users of Donald Trump‘s social media network, Truth Social, are reporting being scammed out of large amounts of money by people they meet through the site. According to FTC complaints obtained by Gizmodo through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, some Truth Social users have reported losing tens of …
Read More »
There’s no such thing as free money. But on TikTok, the apparent solution to that adage seems to be ignoring it entirely — often committing fraud in the process. Over the weekend, the phrase “Chase bank hack” went viral on the video-sharing app after users became convinced that the ATM …
Read More »
An Ohio woman was scammed out of around $122,000 by someone pretending to be former Journey frontman Steve Perry, according to WKYC in Cleveland. The unnamed 75-year-old victim took her story to the Westlake Police Department last month, claiming she was first contacted by someone pretending to be Perry on …
Read More »
The story of the infamous “Hollywood Con Queen” — a long-running scam where an impersonator lured film industry hopefuls to Indonesia with the promise of career breakthroughs — will be the focus of an upcoming Apple TV+ series, and Rolling Stone has your first look at the trailer. The preview …
Read More »
Sam Lipman-Stern was 14, he’d just dropped out of ninth grade, and he needed a job stat. There wasn’t a host of options for an underage kid in New Jersey in terms of gainful employment, and his main interests at the time — skating, graffiti, filming his friends on his …
Read More »
When Austin, 26, was in his last year of college a few years ago, he was in a precarious financial state. He’d just moved out and was living on his own for the first time, and his part-time job as a social media manager wasn’t paying much. “I felt like …
Read More »
N ov. 27, 2007, was a hot and humid Tuesday in Manila, Philippines, and David Bunevacz was getting the shit kicked out of him. He had been invited to the home of one of his partners in a recent cosmetic surgery venture, the Beverly Hills 6750 clinic in Makati City, …
Read More »
I n late March 2020, Haywood Talcove, a CEO at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, was packing up his office, having sent his employees home. He was worrying about laying off his staff, his family’s health, and how he was going to manage two young kids at home during the pandemic. But …
Read More »