I remember once that my mom got a spam mail from a friend whose account had been hacked. In the email, it read that she had lost her luggage while going abroad and needed some money. In reality, her friend was still at home on the couch. After reading it, it's probably obvious that it's phony. Yet the fact that you read past the heading at all proves enough. By masquerading as people we know, the greater the chance that they'll get a response from abusing our trust in others. They might not work all the time, but it does show how incidents like the one involving Donna Summers in Mount Washington, Kentucky are possible (to varying degrees of severity). This can also be seen by spam callers who use spoofed numbers with your area code to try and get you to pick up. And if you do, even giving yes or no answers is enough for spammers to use voice-authentication to open bank accounts under your name. Stuff you would not normally see as harmful, like answering a simple question, can turn out to be pretty valuable.
Often we think of the victims as the elderly or those who are unaware of technology in today's context. They might not know that the IRS would never call you, or that by opening a link on a cryptic email they are left vulnerable to malware. But there is also more to scams than just preying on technologically gullible people. As with the example of the luggage-less friend, many of these scams use fear tactics or play on your willingness to be a "hero". What monster would not try to help their friend if they had no means to get food or housing in a strange place? Who wants to be told they'll be sued if they don't do as the person on the other side of the phone says? Scams like catfishing manipulate our emotional trust in them and craving for human connection to make fools of people and get away with an average of $6,000 a person. As unlikely as we are to click on the email from Solomon Odonkoh, we should always keep in mind the possible consequences our actions can have on us. No one wants to be scammed, but that will not stop people from coming up with more technologically advanced methods of trying to get us to submit.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130712-behind-the-spam-scams
https://kb.iu.edu/d/afvn
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/nigerian-prince-scams-still-rake-in-over-700000-dollars-a-year.html
scamming is an art. there are a lot of angles to a scam and it takes time to pull of a scam, and a lot of time to figure out how not to get caught.
ReplyDeleteSadly, these scams are becoming more and more complex, and they’re no longer targeting just gullible people like the elderly or 12-year-olds online. My brother is a senior in college, and he received a text from a random number about a job opportunity. The sender explained that my brother’s friend was working at the company and recommended him for the position. What made it believable was that the text contained my brother’s friend’s full name, that friend’s nickname for my brother, and a picture of my brother’s friend and another person. The only reason my brother could tell it was a scam was because the sender referred to the other person in the photo as a girl, but he was a boy. Thankfully, my brother didn’t reply, and a few hours later, his friend posted he had been hacked. Because of how believable these scams are getting, we need to become more and more cautious about the emails we open, the links we click, and the texts and calls we respond to. We can no longer trust messages from random numbers, even if they say they’re a friend of a friend (kind of like stranger danger when we were kids).
ReplyDeleteScamming is only getting worse in my opinion. With robo calls humans no longer have to do the actual work. If robots can call millions of people a day the return on investment is even higher. Additionally because they can now fudge phone numbers it is all getting very dangerous. I know my great grandma has fallen for multiple scams now so we just took away her bank account information. It is sad how certain groups are targeted and taken advantage of.
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ReplyDeleteOne example of these scams are on Instagram. Recently, tons of accounts are being hacked into and messaging the account's followers and friends with a link and many believable messages. I've had 4-5 friends get hacked and send me links. Although it's very common now and hard to fall for, these hacks keep advancing. Rather than receiving an email or message from someone you don't know, they are hacking people's accounts so that it shows that you got a message from someone you actually know. As these scams improve, I think that one day we will have to question every text or email and be extremely cautious not to fall for these scams. People are encountering scams everyday, and just less than 1% of people falling for these scams can allow the scam companies to receive enough money to come up with new scams that keeping becoming more and more believable. I believe that we should we taught more about these scams to make us more aware of these scams. If it wasn't for my parents explaining to me at a young age not to trust people online, and about these scams, it is very possible for normal mid-age people to fall for these scams at least a few times in their lifetime.
ReplyDeleteSources:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/9-instagram-scams-avoid-192650720.html
Scamming is something very interesting and it amazes me how people do it so easily. But at the same time technology is growing which means that so will scamming. Right now it has already been getting worse and it will continue too. Scamming is not something that everyone can do is a unique thing that each individual has and the skills they have to do this. As well, as scamming has got so big it is going to begin to be something very dangerous. We all have to be very carful on things we trust with our personal information because in a blink of an eye everything can be gone due to the fact on how scamming is getting so big.
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