My Book: Toby or not Toby? That is the Question

The chances are that you found your way here because of my book, Toby or not Toby? That is the Question, which is available worldwide on Amazon – both in paperback and Kindle formats.

I wrote the book to help both cyber-beginners and the non-technical amongst us – using plenty of short paragraphs and bulleted lists, with minimal technical jargon. My aim is to teach people how to recognise for themselves, the signs of a scam – both current scams and whatever the future brings. The book also explains what to do if a scammer has you in their sights, and what you can do if you have been the victim of a scam.

Throughout the book I make several references to this website because it has additional free resources – and also, because I promised to link to some useful videos showing greater detail on “How To” improve device security, as well as expanding on some of the subjects that I wrote about.

If you haven’t bought my book yet, it takes just a few clicks, starting with the Amazon link above 🙂

These two fake passports, discussed in chapter 19, are from two seperate investigations – they have been created by the scammer using the same template in a popular photo editing app.

Most people just look at the passport, but it is actually the rest of the image that first gives away that they are fake.

In chapter 10, I discussed the importance of securing your digital life. This is the actual photo in one recent case which the scammer sent to his victim “to prove his identity”, in order to gain their trust.

This driving licence was taken from a victim in a previous scam – they had sent their licence to the scammer as part of what is known as KYC, the scammer has since repurposed that persons documents, changing the photo, name and date of birth, and used the licence in their next scam.

(KYC – Know Your Customer – is a legal requirement where financial companies must verify the identity of who they are dealing with. Unfortunately, KYC requests are also used by scammers to obtain copies of your ID documents).

Another example of fake driving licences and passports, this time from a scammer’s victim in the US.

Most US states have ways to check the validity of driving licence numbers online, and if my client had done so with this, he would have immediately noticed something was wrong.

The person whose photo was used by the scammer is actually a model on a well known adult modelling site – carrying out a reverse image search on her photo would have shown that.

And the address on the driving licence is that of a previous victim of the scammer – again, they have repurposed a previous victim’s ID documents for use in their next scam.

Precious metal and gem scams are still very common. They usually come with lots of fake certificates, Government and legal letters and invoices for handling costs, tax, etc.

These scams usually come out of the blue, starting with an email saying that you have been left gold, diamonds, etc, by somebody – it’s all a bit vague but the scammer’s goal is to draw you in using your emotions.

Quite often the scammer is pretending to be a celebrity – in the book I mentioned a case where the scammer was posing as “Thomas Cruise Mapother IV” (aka Tom Cruise). I have seen that name used several times, but these scams will use any celebrity’s name that gets chosen – especially if they have looked at your social media first and seen who your favourites are.

Don’t let yourself get taken in by a scammer, whilst sometimes these scams look like it’s a celebrity contacting you, on many other occasions they are crafter to look like it is coming from a Government official or a lawyer.

This is one of the strangest documents I’ve come across in an investigation – I think at this point the scammers are just making things up.

It is a fake HMRC document “promoting their victim from being a Middle Class citizen to Upper Middle Class” – because of the high value of the “victim’s inheritance”.

The “inheritance” being £9,600,000 of gold, diamonds and jewellery.

Why? Take a look at the list of the 5 pieces of personal information they are asking the victim to send – they want to work out how much they can scam from her.