Every year it seems scammers get more andmore clever, with new techniques designed to steal from us.
And the best thing you can do to fight themis learn their ways so you can spot the scams from a mile away, so that’s what we’regoing over today.
I’ve got about 7 scam techniques that areeither brand new, or have become more prevalent leading into 2020, most of which are internetand phone based, and how you can also defend against each one of them.
Before we jump in, it is essential that Ido my shameless plugs of course.
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And with all that out of the way, let’sget started.
So the first one you need to watch out foris a pretty clever email-based scam.
With this, the scammer will basically impersonatesome high level manager or executive.
They might do this by either spoofing theemail address, or use the person’s actual email account to send it out if they manageto break in with a stolen password.
Then for the scam, they will email multiplepeople at the company below them, telling them they need to go buy gift cards usually, saying it will be a gift for other employees on your team or whatever.
The scammer might tell the victim to put iton a company credit card, or to buy it themselves and they’ll be reimbursed, and also tellthe victim to send the gift card codes to them.
Then once the scammer gets the gift card codes, they’ll just disappear.
This type of scam has been reported by severalpeople on reddit, who have either fallen for it or come close to, and is probably goingto be more common around holidays when the whole lie about needing the cards for giftsmakes more sense.
This scam may also be tougher to detect becauseit can be more personalized.
But now that you know about it, you can easilydefend against it by simply calling the person who supposedly needs these gift cards andactually speak to them to confirm, or go talk to them in person.
Ok the next scam is a variation of a phishingscam, which has become a lot more popular.
The idea is a scammer will send out a tonof fake shipping confirmation emails pretending to be Target, Amazon, or some other onlinestore, and then give you some kind of login link to ‘track your order’.
But then it takes you to a phishing site designedto look like the real site, requiring you to log in, and then it just steals your credentials.
There are a lot of possible variations tothis, for example the scammer might say something like “there’s a problem with your order, log in here to fix it” or whatever.
They may even be able to personalize it byusing information from previous data breaches to actually include your real name in theemail to make it seem more legitimate.
This is another one that will be more commonduring holiday months where people make lots of orders online, so if the scam email happensto arrive soon after you actually order something, you might not think twice and then fall forit.
Now there are a few ways you can defend againstthis scam.
First, be highly suspicious of any shippingconfirmations or purchase-related emails if you didn’t actually make any orders.
Next, remember that usually stores will includethe names of the products you ordered in the email.
Not always but usually.
So if the email is overly generic, don’tclick any links, and just go to the site directly yourself to check any order status.
Ok up to number 3, this is another email-basedscam having to do with online stores, but it’s not a phishing scam.
This particular scam technique occurs whena scammer has already gotten access to one of your online shopping accounts.
They may have done this in any number of ways, whether it was a previous phishing attempt, or a stolen password database or something, but that’s not the point here.
The trick is that the scammer will place anorder to buy a bunch of crap to themselves using your online store account using savedpayment details, and then hide the fact that they did this by signing you up for a tonof spam emails, which hides the order confirmation email.
Because normally if they ordered somethingwith your account, you would just see the email and become suspicious if you didn’torder anything, and hopefully check it out.
So they sign you up for a ton of spam to burythis order confirmation mail, hoping you won’t see it.
One example from someone on reddit who spottedthis spam gave the example that they got a ton of spam from government newsletter, allfrom the ‘govdelivery.
com’ domain.
Fortunately they still spotted the order emailand was able to cancel it.
So the way to defend against this scam isbecome very suspicious if you all of a sudden start getting a ton more spam than usual, especially if it’s from one source, and actually go through all the emails makingsure nothing is hidden in there.
Because remember, this is a technique scammersmay use if they’ve already got you somehow.
Alright up next is a really devious one, whereironically, scammers initially call a victim pretending to be government officials warningthem that their identity was stolen.
In one specific example, scammers called someoneand said they were from the Social Security Administration, telling the victim that theirsocial security number was stolen and used to rent a car.
They then scared the victim by saying therented car was found with a bunch of illegal drugs inside, and they needed to comply withthe investigation or face prosecution.
They even had someone pretending to be a borderpatrol agent, saying the supposedly rented car was found near the border and was usedfor smuggling, or all sorts of scare tactics.
Eventually, you guessed it, they convincedthe victim to buy thousands of dollars worth of Google Play gift cards, which scammersthese days love.
Now, it might not always be this obvious, for example the scammer might demand a wire transfer, saying your bank account was compromised, or that there is stolen money in your account or god knows what reason.
The primary way to defend against this scamis to know that the government is not going to call you to tell you your identity is stolen, and definitely won’t threaten you with prosecution by phone.
And OBVIOUSLY, for god’s sake, the governmentis not going to ever ask you to buy freakin’ gift cards.
Seriously, I feel bad for the guy who losta bunch of money to this scam, and I guess he was under heavy pressure, but he’s stilla moron for falling for it.
Just always be suspicious, ESPECIALLY whengive cards are involved, and you’ll be fine.
Ok the next scam is actually really sophisticatedand one that even the most tech savvy of you might still fall for.
This one takes advantage of a feature of allthose virtual assistants these days, like Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, Siri, and allthose.
You see, when someone asks AI assistants tocall a certain business, they often will use search engines to look up the top result forthat business for the customer support number to use.
Then they’ll either give you that numberit finds, or just call it depending on what you asked it to do.
But here’s the really tricky part.
Turns out scammers have started setting upfake customer service phone numbers, then pay to promote these numbers with ads or othersketchy tactics, so they end up near the top of the results.
And even I am not 100% sure how this works.
It seems like these AI assistants apparentlycan’t tell the difference between an ad and an actual search result.
But regardless, the way the scam works isthe virtual assistant will call the fake scam customer support number instead of a realone, then the fake representative will try to get you to do all sorts of stuff.
Depending on the company you think you’recalling, they may instruct you to install malware, or have you log into a fake websiteand steal your info, or anything really.
And the worst part about all this is mostpeople will assume they’re safe because they called the company, it’s not like theyreceived some suspicious call, without realizing the number they called isn’t real.
So the way to defend against this, I wouldsay, is don’t use virtual assistants to just auto-dial for you.
Always do a search yourself, and make surethe number comes from the official company’s website, and never call a phone number that’slisted in an ad in search results.
Alright we still got a couple more scams togo over.
This next one really sucks because it hasto do with directly stealing your money, and you don’t even have much control over defendingagainst it.
What the scammer does is first get some ofyour basic information, probably from a breached online database, which you can’t control, and then either emails or calls up your company’s HR department, or payroll department.
Then, they pretend to be you and tell theperson that you want to change the bank account where you receive your paycheck via directdeposit.
If the HR representative falls for it, youprobably won’t even realize what’s happened until your next payday when you don’t getyour money.
I believe you wouldn’t be on the hook forthe cash, the company would, but you still have to deal with the stress of missing apaycheck and having to sort it out with your employer.
Apparently these scammers are pretty smart, and the emails they send can seem very legitimate.
Like here’s one example, it just said, “doyou have a minute? I need you to help me take car of somethingimportant.
I need to update my direct deposit for payroll, can you get it done on your end?” Depending on the email address the scammerused to send it from, especially if they got into your real email address, that would bereally convincing.
So I guess really the only way you can defendagainst this firstly is make sure you keep your email account secure with a unique, strongpassword, and ideally use two factor authentication.
Then always keep tabs on your bank accountto make sure payment deposits arrive when they should.
Alright the final scam is a new, trickiervariation on classic bank phone scams.
And it may even be used to circumvent twofactor authentication methods.
What happens is the scammer will call youup pretending to be your bank’s fraud department, asking if you made some purchase, which youobviously didn’t, and then they offer to block the transaction.
They then ask for a piece of information thatby itself you might not think can be used to scam you, such as your bank member ID, user ID, email address, or something you use to login, but not your password.
Then they’ll go on the bank’s websiteand use the lost password function, along with whatever info you gave them.
With some banks, this will trigger a confirmationtext message with a code to be sent to your phone, but it might not say anything abouta forgotten password in this text.
So the scammers then ask for that code fromyour phone, and use it to log in to your account themselves.
Depending on your bank they may already haveenough to steal money from you, or they may keep digging for more info, even asking foryour bank card PIN.
Obviously everyone knows you should nevergive your PIN number to anyone claiming to be the bank, unless you specifically calledthem, but again the trick here is you don’t realize you gave them other info they canuse to take over your account.
So the way to defend against this scam isnothing new.
If you ever receive a call from someone claimingto be your bank, never give them any info unless you actually call them, and use theofficial bank phone number on the bank card.
And be aware that scammers might be able touse seemingly innocuous info to scam you, so be extra careful.
If you want to know about even more scams, I’d recommend this other video I made this year talking about other new online scamsto watch out for.
You can just check that out by clicking thethumbnail right here.
So thanks so much for watching guys, and havea good one.
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