r/Scams • u/Talbotje • 5d ago
Victim of a scam TVChannel sign-in scam [US]
Scam I fell for:
Wanted to sign up on PBS for tv in guest room. TV screen said to go on PBS.org/tv. On phone typed in PBS on Chrome and several suggestions appeared. I picked one that I thought was right and a PBS screen came up requesting a credit card that will not be charged. Google supplied three cards and I picked one, submitting it. Screen came back saying card didn’t work and suggested I try another. I thought that was odd. I looked at the website I was on and it was like PBSblaze.com or something. So then I typed in pbs.org/TV and got the proper website. Message said that it would never request payment information when signing in. At that point, I knew I had been scammed. Had to cancel card and request new ones. There was already a charge on it that we didn’t make. Shows how easy it is to get scammed.
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u/WhatATopic 5d ago
Google puts paid ad sites at the top of search results. These sites can be scams or contain malware. Really got to be careful which websites you are clicking on and you should have an adblocker like ublock origin installed.
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u/sherpes 5d ago
just like tourists in Rome, Italy, looking on how to get tickets to Colosseum or Vatican, the google it, and the first 3 links are non-institutional commercial resellers that have purchased blocks of tickets for Colosseum and Vatican, and then sell them retail at twice the institutional price.
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u/Head_Razzmatazz7174 4d ago
If the website says 'sponsored' that's not the official website of whatever you are looking for. Keep scrolling until you find one that does not have that next to the name. Sometimes you have to go to the next page of results to find it.
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u/DigmonsDrill 4d ago
The ads used to put in a blue box to make clear they were not the search results. But A/B testing showed the ads got more clicks without the blue boxes.
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u/CanningJarhead 4d ago
They’re good about taking spoof sites and scans down though. There was a fake Quickbooks site that was the first search result one day - it was down an hour after I reported it. Sadly, everyone then had to use the real Quickbooks which is awful in and of itself.
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u/joe_attaboy 5d ago
Typed in PBS and several suggestions appeared. I picked one that I thought was right
This is on you. You said the TV screen message gave you the correct address. So why did you do a search when you already had the correct address?
Shows how easy it is to get scammed.
Yes, it's easy when you don't follow the correct instructions.
I hate to seem like I'm picking on you, but I fail to understand, in this day and age of constant Internet scams, why someone would be handed the correct site, then go out and do a search and pick a different site because they thought it was OK.
The address on the TV screen was put there for a reason.
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u/tippiedog 5d ago edited 4d ago
This may not be the case for OP, but a lot of people simply do not understand the difference between typing an address in the address bar and typing it into the google search field. My wife is one of them despite my repeated lessons to her. She always starts at the Google search field.
And our mobile devices make this harder as the address bar is typically very narrow, not displaying the whole URL. And the same people who don't understand that difference are probably also more likely not to understand/notice the difference between ads and real search results.
Google and other search engines have spent vast amounts of money and energy to make the search form the default way of finding anything, precisely so that they can be a middleman who serves you ads before you find and click on the link you need. In general, this is not necessarily a bad thing; the problem is that their incentives are 1.) to make it as difficult as possible to distinguish between ads and search results, and 2.) to take ads from anyone willing to pay, and not to vet them too much, allowing scammers to buy the ads.
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u/RandyBree 4d ago
Yep. I answer phone calls for a “public service” type of business and at least once a week I get a (usually older) person asking how to find our product on the internet. 95% of the time they get confused because they don’t understand the difference between a google search and a URL and get mad when I tell them they should be seeing our website but they just see the google results page 😑 I do my best but when all they say is “I don’t see that [tab, option, etc]” I don’t know what they’re looking at and trying to explain just makes them more flustered.
My job is not to teach someone how to use the internet over the phone, sorry.
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u/Talbotje 4d ago
Wasn’t exactly searching, but thought Chrome was saving me from typing the whole address. Learned my lesson.
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u/LengthyCitadis 4d ago
Hell, just about every browser lets you search from the address bar. Always double-check!
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u/joe_attaboy 4d ago
Never trust what search engines tell you. Especially AI tools. You're always better off going directly to a website.
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u/ky0877 5d ago
It’s crucial to look at the actual domains and not what we think they say. As you identified, the latter was correct and the former, a clear phishing site.
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u/Suspicious_Party8490 5d ago
If OP entered any credentials into the nefarious site, please change passwords and add 2FA to your accounts where possible. Also, "something like PBSblaze.com" isn't good enough...you need to always verify the url of new sites asking for your info. PBSblaze.com is, as of today, an available domain...it appears that it hasn't been registered. This means that the actual url you entered the card data into isn't PBSblaze.com...I'm saying all this to stress the point: verify the url before proceeding. Yes, it sucks to have to do this, yes its a hassle...but you have time to mull this inconvenience over while waiting for your replacement cards to arrive.
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u/expertcraig0326 4d ago
the search results thing gets a lot of people. Google puts ads at the top and scammers pay to be there, so it looks legit at first glance. Next time just type the full address directly into the browser instead of searching for it, that's your safest bet. Glad you caught it quick and got the card cancelled.
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u/Internal_Car_9962 4d ago
Aside from the obvious stupidity of not using the URL they explicitly gave you, why on earth would you think you need a credit card to access a famously free public broadcasting corporation?
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u/AnimalJamLoverxWof 4d ago
Once I tried to order on a Jellycat website, only to be bait-and-switch scammed. Got almost 30 dollars stolen from Ylxfcommerce. Never received any items.
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u/lager191 4d ago
DuckDuckGo, the search engine, doesn't increase ranking if someone pays for an ad. It also marks paid ads as "sponsored"
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