Knowing the Formula of Scams, So You Don’t Get Tricked by Them
Scammers are getting more and more creative in ways to try and get people to give up their money or personally identifiable information. In this post, I want to dive into the five things to understand and look out for when it comes to identifying and steering away from possible scams.
We are now seeing scam attempts through email, websites, phone calls, voicemails, and even texts messages. They typically follow a formula that have one or more of the following factors that can help you to identify when you might be getting scammed.
Scams typically,
- Try to create a sense of urgency, panic, or fear of losing a product or service.
- They are vague in their greetings or pretend to know who you are.
- Typically come from an unknown and unidentifiable phone number or email that doesn’t match the company they may be posing as.
- Almost always try to streamline the process to fix the contrived issue, instead of having you contact the company directly.
Grammar in the email or message is off or not well written.
1. Creating a sense of urgency, panic, or fear.
Recently, I received a voicemail on my cell phone from an unknown number. It was transcribed in my voicemail.
“Hi this voicemail is from Comcast Xfinity we removed your 50% discount on your monthly bill and escalated your account for non-response $1000 fee is in queue this is your only chance to reverse it call the number that showed on your caller ID right now to resolve this thank you…”
No one wants to be levied a $1000 fee for not calling back, and I wouldn’t want to lose a discount on my bill. This is just one example of how scammers try to generate panic.
In this case, I use a call filter from my cell phone provider that flags messages that are potentially SPAM. Secondly, I don’t have a 50% off discount on my cell phone bill, so how can I lose something that I don’t have in the first place? Lastly, I have never heard of a fee for not calling a service provider back, especially when it is nearly impossible to get a call back from them. These statements are just to get you to act quickly, because when you act quickly, you don’t stop and think.
Negativity Bias
Chris Voss describes loss aversion really well in his book “Never Split the Difference”. We tend to take more risks to avoid a loss of something than to gain something. We as humans view loss or negativity much more dramatically then positive experiences. Because of that the scammers are preying upon that bias to get that fear of loss to drive fast reactions without thinking about the risks involved.
2. Vague greetings or pretending to know who you are.
Below are two emails that I received in my inbox that are posing to be from Amazon and Apple.
Notice that both are trying to generate panic and fear, but more importantly, both of these companies know my name. I have done business with both of them for many years.
Secondly, if we just pause and think about it, I get notifications from these companies almost every day about my account. When things ship, when they are delivered, and more. Yet, I haven’t gotten any notifications through my phone, computer or application that would indicate an account issue like this. In these cases, don’t use the link in the email, more on that later, sign into your account by going directly to their sites.
Furthermore, it doesn’t help the company to cancel my accounts because that would eliminate any future revenue from me as a customer. Companies like these two thrive on ongoing relationships and accounts. They don’t want to close the account, they just want an updated payment to keep the account active, if it were truly these companies.
Lastly, I have spent a lot of money with these two companies over the year. They know my name. Why are they just addressing me in the first email as “Customer”.
We are going to look at another aspect of these two messages to illustrate the next point.
3. Unknown or irregular numbers or emails.
These are the emails that these last two messages came from. This is how they looked in the emails.
It is pretty obvious that these emails did not come from the companies that they claim to be when I look at it from a laptop or desktop computer. Amazon and Apple spend a lot of money to keep @Amazon.com and @Apple.com, and these emails are not coming from either of those domains. But keep in mind that more and more people are getting their emails on a smart phone or tablet and not on a larger computer. In those cases the whole email doesn’t readily show, only the name shows like in these examples. They use this fact to prey upon people that may not make the couple of extra taps on the screen to assure that the email is coming from the actual sender.
The gibberish email from “Apple”, shown above are usually made realizing that it will very quickly be marked as SPAM or JUNK, which is why that place the link in the email that takes an unsuspecting user to a site or link that may look like it is from the sender, but it is a hoax and is designed to record personally identifiable information.
The same thing can happen with phone numbers. One hoax that has made the rounds is preying upon how so many people have their parents listed in their phone contacts as “Mom” or “Dad”. In this scam, they will have the outward facing name for their phone, programmed to show “Mom” or “Dad”, making you think that you may be getting a call from one of them. They may then pose as that person, but more commonly they may claim that they have abducted your parents or their device and demand payment as a ransom. For this reason I urge anyone with a cell phone to mark your family members with their names, like anyone else. That will make this scam immediately recognizable.
4. Conveniently placed links in the messages to solve the problem.
Like the two emails featured above, scam emails like this will create the urgency to try and make you act quickly without thinking things through. They hope that you will use the provided link to rectify this problem. The issue with this is that those links will take you to a dummy site that may look like it is from Amazon, Apple, Netflix, etc…, but it is just a site they are using to collect your passwords, name, account numbers, credit card numbers.
If you truly think there is an account problem, open a new tab, and go directly to the companies site and sign in that way to check your account. This way you know exactly where you are going ensuring that you are accessing your account.
Most browsers will also give you a preview to the target URL for a link when you hover over it. This will usually show up in small print at the bottom of the tab so you can check where you are going first. This occurs on a computer and not a tablet or phone though. That makes it even more important that if you think there is truly a problem, don’t use your phone, get on a computer and look before you click to avoid being taken to a dummy site that is looking to steal your info.
5. Grammatical errors.
Below is a list of some text from scam emails that I have collected.
“Please updates your accounts amazon”
“We lock your amazon account and hold all your last orders.”
“Your Robinhood account has been disable”
“We took this actions because the billinhg information did not match..”
You may not catch these things if you are reading them quickly because of the urgency that these scams try to manufacture. Let’s just pause and think for a second about it. These are massive multi-million or billion dollar companies. They have an army of editors that will ensure that any customer communications are written clearly and correctly. Simple grammatical mistakes don’t happen with large company communications to customers.
What do we do?
Pause.
Simply, pause.
Pause for a minute when you get a message or email that generates urgency. When we are stressed, we make decisions quickly, which is what the scammers are trying to cause.
Check with the company directly.
Don’t use the links provided.
Read it carefully.
Report it as SPAM.
Block the sender.
In a later post I will show some examples of scams that are coming in from text messages.
Mr. Dudley