Legally Speaking by Cassandra Savoy, Esq. OP/ED
There are a couple of other scams you should be in the know about…like the “Mystery Shopper Scam.”
One of my clients who has been unemployed for almost a year and who is desperately seeking a full-time job (so she can move out of her parent’s home) actually fell for this one. Some guy called her to ask her if she had a job. When she replied that she did not have a job, but was looking, the caller announced, “This is your lucky day! I have to fine five people today who can work from home and who need flexible hours to become personal shoppers. We have loads of people who simply don’t have the time to shop for themselves.”
After twenty minutes of what I can only think of as mind-numbing conversation, she agreed to give them $150 of her very precious income to purchase training materials so that she could get started. The “training materials” were to be downloaded to her. After giving her credit card information, and $150 being charged to the card, she never received the training materials, and she could not contact the firm’s representative by phone!
And, let’s not forget the ole Digital Greeting Card scam! With this one, you receive a digital birthday card, or holiday card, or sometimes a plain old e-mail. When you open the card from a scammer, it unleashes malicious software (malware) to your computer that can steal your personal information and in effect, ruin your life. The worst part about the greeting card scam is that you don’t necessarily know before it is too late that it’s a scam because sometimes, they come from people you know whose e-mail has been hacked.
Sometimes the greeting cards come from someone with whom you communicate using Facebook or Twitter, then suddenly you receive a greeting card from the person. BEFORE you open a greeting card, it might be a good idea to call or text the sender to make sure they actually sent you a greeting card. If you open first, everything on your computer could be open to the scammers for the taking. In effect, this is how the corporations are being held hostage. Sometimes the malware freezes the files or renders the system inoperable requiring the corporation to pay a ransom to retrieve the files.
The Dating and Romance scams are the worst because they take advantage of people’s emotions and their money. They work like this. You go on the site. You select a profile. You communicate with the persona and build a rapport. Then the person starts asking you for money. Remember this: one in ten newly created dating profiles are fact. In 2020, Americans lost $160 million in online dating scams and the average loss was more than $20,000!
You would think that this one would be easy to spot. The person falls madly in love with you too quickly without ever having seen you. They promise to meet you, but despite “plans” the meeting never happens. That’s usually when they ask you to wire them money to cover the unforeseen emergency. The one “emergency” grows into a another, into another and so on…The rule is: NEVER give money to someone you have not met!
The internet is a permanent way of modern life. There is no likelihood that we are going back to the pre-internet days of yesteryear. So, here are a couple of additional tips to help you stay safe on the internet.
If you download malicious software, get rid of it. That may be harder than it sounds because you may not know that it’s there right away and because these programs are designed to be hard to detect. You may need to reset your computer to factory defaults. It is worth taking your computer to the Geek Squad to get rid of the malware.
If you send money to a scammer, you might just be out of luck because most banks invoke the “Let the Buyer Beware” policy. (That’s what the bank told my friend, but the bank was kind enough to cancel her card and disallow the additional charges the scammer added to the card. She was only out of the original $150) But, you should report it to the bank at once because even if you don’t get your money refunded it will help nail the scammer.
Guard your personal information, e.g., social security number, bank account number, address, birthday, with your life!
Use a VPS and avoid public WIFI. It sounds good to say that I am going to Panera Bread or Starbucks to use the public WIFI, but public WIFI is the cybercriminals heaven. If you use public WIFI, make sure that you have installed a VPN (Virtual Private Network) on your device so you can protect yourself. A VPN is the best option other than simply no using public networks.
