Sunday, August 21, 2022

Sextortion, Scams, Privacy in the Toilet (Metaphorically)

Yesterday, a man with a foreign voice telephoned my landline, and without verifying with whom he was speaking, he proceeded to ask me about my vaccination status. He was quite verbally assertive about his inquiries. 

If I understood him correctly, he did not believe that I was fully vaccinated against shingles, and he wanted to administer a two-shot vaccine (which might cost up to $250 a pop, but he did not tell me that). It seemed to me that the call might have been a HIPAA violation... or not.

Anyone can claim to be anyone over the phone, and I believe anyone can control what Caller Id displays. There are Covid-19 vaccination scams, so why not Shingrix scams?

Australian legal blogger Dennis Miralis of Australian defence law specialists Nyman Gibson Miralis shared an excellent advice piece on What Everybody Ought To Know About Scams (Down Under). 

Words in parenthesis are mine. I could not resist the word play.

Original link:
 
Apparently, in 2021, Australians were scammed out of two billion Australian dollars. After investment scams, the next most lucrative or prevalent scam appears to be categorized as romance-and-dating. Not all of the latter would be sextortion. Dennis Miralis does not mention sextortion, just to be clear.

Legal man of mystery, Celes Keene of Klemchuk LLP on the other hand, does mention sextortion, and a whole lot of other intriguing information about your vulnerabilities, and privacy or lack thereof.

Sextortion link:
 
Legal jeopardy link:
 
Creepy age extrapolation link: 
 
Disclaimer: I call Celes Keene a "man of mystery" because the links to his author profile re-link to some of his best and most recent copyrightable works. I apologize unreservedly if I have jumped to offensive conclusions.
 
 
 
No photo, no blurb, no guidance as to his preferred pronouns...but given what he writes about, he is probably "walking the talk" and demonstrating how to follow his own excellent advice. 
 
Of the three excellent articles, the one that seems to me to be most interesting to authors is the one about how law enforcement is using reverse keyword searches to select suspects with a real life, arson crime narrative.
 
When I started writing, my research was conducted in libraries and in person. I interviewed interesting people; private pilots, an airforce pilot, lawmen, gun shop owners, funeral directors, a fencing master, Survivorman Les Stroud, a weatherwoman, a witch, a doctor or two and more. Now, there's Search, and with it the risk of being misunderstood if one happens to search the wrong topic, in the wrong place, using what some might call the wrong engine for the purpose.
 
As Celes Keene points out,
"...without proper restrictions on reverse keyword searches, the long arm of the law’s current use could lead to them arresting citizens that searched for terms for innocuous reasons. As an example, they note that a person searching for the specific term could trigger law enforcement investigation or surveillance, regardless of whether the person was searching that term for educational reasons or other completely innocent reasons." 
What is sextortion? Celes Keene explains, 
"Sextortion refers to the process of a scammer extorting payment from victims by securing sexually explicit photos, screenshots, or recordings of a victim through reprehensible means."

Celes Keene says that awareness is key to prevention, in other words, to not being a victim. That advice is probably good, whether one is an author searching for reprehensible information, a recipient of an invitation to sext, or a privacy enthusiast who avoids sharing their age/driver's license/biometric data on social media.

Do I need to explain my reference to privacy in the toilet? Unlikely, except that the thesaurus is less helpful than I expected, and my meaning is that privacy is destroyed, eradicated, gutted and sacked. It would be an adverbial phrase of Degree, rather than of Place.


Posted by RowenaBCherry at 10:31 AM

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)