Is this a scam. Vanguard Purchase email.

W

wolf

Full time employment: Posting here.
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Dec 1, 2006
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Just received email today. From Vanguard. Confirmation. Purchase of 100 shares of Apple Stock. Never made this purchase. Looks pretty real.
Will have to contact Vanguard directly later. Anyone else receiving these fake confirmations....
 
What does this email tell you to do, log in to Vanguard? We have 2 factor on our Vanguard account so I don't see what they would gain from this email.
 
As noted, never click links on a questionable email. Hell, never click links on anything you did not just solicit. There are so many well-crafted scams that you can't trust anyone.
 
If you happen to be using a Yahoo email address and using their app to read your emails, this may just be a common mistake in the AI summary Yahoo has added to the top of your email and not part of the actual email. The actual body of the email from Vanguard is likely just a confirmation of something completely unrelated (changing a setting, linking an account, purchasing a mutual fund, etc) , but it seems to be common for Yahoo's AI to hallucinate many Vanguard confirmations into an Apple stock purchase when it makes up its email summary. The "helpful" AI summaries can be turned off in Yahoo's settings.

https://www.reddit.com/r/yahoo/comments/1iutta3/yahoos_ai_email_summary_inaccurately_reported
 
Thanks for the replies. Will delete. Weird thing. I did purchase on Vanguard, My and wife's IRA accounts.
Around 6 Agency bonds. May 19th. Received the usual, Vanguard confirmation emails on my Yahoo email
account. All fine. Again, just wondering, if others have received these "fake" confirmations.
I think I will change my Vanguard passwords.
 
donheff said:
As noted, never click links on a questionable email. Hell, never click links on anything you did not just solicit. There are so many well-crafted scams that you can't trust anyone.
Click to expand...
That's been my preference these days. And even if I know the email is legit, many times I find the provided links will go through a tracking service, which my PC will block. So, I will skip those legitimate links also.
 
statsman said:
That's been my preference these days. And even if I know the email is legit, many times I find the provided links will go through a tracking service, which my PC will block. So, I will skip those legitimate links also.
Click to expand...
same; if I think there is one I need to click on I either copy the link to a virtual machine or on an old laptop running Linux that I use for nothing.
 
The scammers are getting better. It used to be obvious when a Nigerian Prince has $14.3M USD that they simply needed help to transfer :)

Dont click anything in unsolicited emails, texts or on websites.

pwf
 
I don't recall receiving any fraudulent "Vanguard" email. My latest (received) scam contacts were from "EZ Pass" for allegedly unpaid tolls, and from "Medicare" telling me that I was entitled to a subsidy benefit (I'm not) and asking me to provide my BD, SS# and mail it back to them. (No, it was not from Medicare.)
 
I'm getting all sorts of scam emails these days.
 
I still curious about the OP's original e-mail.

Was it a scam or an AI hallucination?

Not that it changes the "never click on an e-mail link" advice. But I like to keep up on the latest scam trends. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.
 
CaptTom said:
I still curious about the OP's original e-mail.

Was it a scam or an AI hallucination?
Click to expand...
Given that the OP did later post that they use Yahoo and had been recently making real transactions on Vanguard, I'm almost 100% sure this was just Yahoo's incorrect AI summary added to the top of a valid Vanguard confirmation email.

A family member had this exact same Yahoo AI summary (purchase of 100 shares of Apple) added to the top of their valid Vanguard confirmation email about a month ago. That is why I recognized it immediately and originally responded to the OP to try to allay their concerns. I had found the Reddit post I linked sometime after I had helped my family member figure it out, so I knew the issue was a very common one.

It is unfortunate, that Yahoo is making valid emails look like scams, as it will end up making the scam emails more effective. Also, If people make the mistake of blocking a valid email as spam (as is often recommended for questionable emails), then they will no longer receive any confirmation emails from that company.

I can only imagine how much time Vanguard customer service has wasted responding to calls caused by these terrible AI summaries from Yahoo. I also found posts where people reported the Yahoo AI had similar hallucinations on emails from other companies with wildly incorrect quantities reported for item purchases, etc.

Yahoo's AI better save people a lot of time in the future to make up for how much of people's time they've wasted so far.
 
I can't imagine wanting an AI summary of any e-mail I receive. I'll skim it, and if needed, read it myself thank you.

Likewise, if I take the time to compose an e-mail, it will already summarize exactly what I want to say, using exactly the words I want to use. I don't like the idea of some e-mail client messing with it.
 
wrxwag said:
Given that the OP did later post that they use Yahoo and had been recently making real transactions on Vanguard, I'm almost 100% sure this was just Yahoo's incorrect AI summary added to the top of a valid Vanguard confirmation email.

A family member had this exact same Yahoo AI summary (purchase of 100 shares of Apple) added to the top of their valid Vanguard confirmation email about a month ago. That is why I recognized it immediately and originally responded to the OP to try to allay their concerns. I had found the Reddit post I linked sometime after I had helped my family member figure it out, so I knew the issue was a very common one.

It is unfortunate, that Yahoo is making valid emails look like scams, as it will end up making the scam emails more effective. Also, If people make the mistake of blocking a valid email as spam (as is often recommended for questionable emails), then they will no longer receive any confirmation emails from that company.

I can only imagine how much time Vanguard customer service has wasted responding to calls caused by these terrible AI summaries from Yahoo. I also found posts where people reported the Yahoo AI had similar hallucinations on emails from other companies with wildly incorrect quantities reported for item purchases, etc.

Yahoo's AI better save people a lot of time in the future to make up for how much of people's time they've wasted so far.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the info. In my case, the yahoo summary page, matched the information below. It looked like a real Vanguard confirmation. One confirmation was the "100 shares of Apple". The other confirmation " 100 shares of ABC stock". Strange.
 
Vanguard's confirmation emails to me don't indicate security names and type of transaction. I don't understand how Yahoo's AI would summarize something that isn't there.
 
RetMD21 said:
Vanguard's confirmation emails to me don't indicate security names and type of transaction. I don't understand how Yahoo's AI would summarize something that isn't there.
Click to expand...
Summarizing things that aren't there is exactly the problem with a lot of current AI. Yahoo's AI seems to be especially terrible, but these issues are similar to the reason that Apple pulled theirs back so quickly after it started wildly misrepresenting things.

AI tends to make things up (hallucinate) when information doesn't exist instead of just saying nothing or that it doesn't have all the information. If the Vanguard confirmation actually contained information about the transaction, then the AI would likely summarize it correctly. Without information, however, the AI guesses what would most likely be there instead. It knows the email is a confirmation of a transaction from a brokerage, so it makes a fairly reasonable guess that the most likely brokerage transaction is buying a stock. Now that it "knows" you bought a stock, it figures that the most likely number of shares you would have bought was 100 and the most likely stock you would have bought was Apple. The AI then happily reports that you bought 100 shares of Apple even though the confirmation from Vanguard only said it was confirming a brokerage transaction.

Even AI used for simple tasks like transcribing doctors' recorded notes apparently tends to fill in silent points in the recordings with completely made up things in the transcription that the original person never said.
https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-transcription-tools-hallucinate-too
 
wrxwag said:
.......

Even AI used for simple tasks like transcribing doctors' recorded notes apparently tends to fill in silent points in the recordings with completely made up things in the transcription that the original person never said.
https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-transcription-tools-hallucinate-too
Click to expand...
I read the link. It's very concerning. IDK about other places but in the US there is an incredible volume of medical documentation that is repetitive and irrelevant done for billing purposes. Hallucinations in transcription cold be a real problem particularly since some of the content is bizarre.
 
wrxwag said:
Even AI used for simple tasks like transcribing doctors' recorded notes apparently tends to fill in silent points in the recordings with completely made up things in the transcription that the original person never said.
https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-transcription-tools-hallucinate-too
Click to expand...
I wonder what they do with all that "recorded" stuff when the doctor asks permission to record the session. Does that get the AI treatment as well? I've never seen anything in "MY CHART" (the portal for our health care).
 
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