Wire fraud shows no signs of abating and appears to be growing. Even then, they still have hope that their online lover will come through. Romance scam victims will give away every cent they have, break every long-lasting friendship they have, break off contact with any skeptical family members until the money and assets are gone. A lot of lonely hearts are being scammed. I continue to get email from friends and family members about romance scams. We know how official that is, right? Romance scams It was an email address that “exactly” matched the legitimate owner on record using an domain. If my daughter and son-in-law needed any more proof, they could look at his email address. Further, the “landlord” was out of the country on National Guard tour of duty and would be unable to show them the house. He said they would see for-sale signs in the yard, but to ignore them because the “landlord” had been scammed by the real estate firm and no longer wanted to do business with that firm. The “landlord” told my daughter and her husband to drop by the house and look in the windows. The emailer said he owned an attractive property and he was not only offering lower-than-market monthly rent terms, but my daughter’s deposit and every month’s rent thereafter would go toward actually owning the house (“without having to pay unnecessary taxes and fees to the greedy banks”). I was not aware of this type of rental scam, but she was skeptical enough to send it my way to see if I thought it was a scam. My daughter is looking for a new place to rent and received a scam email. I always say, “When in doubt, chicken out!” I also have other ideas I’ll share below. They got an email request for work to be performed for someone that contained five common scam email techniques, including the claim, “I’ve been scammed in the past, so I want to do things a little bit differently.” This always equates to some bogus transaction method.Įveryone told him and his wife to run away from the scam. He and his wife run a small business, usually advertising online and interacting with nearly every customer online. Someone on Spiceworks, a very cool and technical computer-related blog, needed help to determine if a proposed business deal was a scam. Here are a few examples of the most common scams I’ve seen. Consider adding the following information to your company’s security awareness training program. Many people and businesses try their best to inform people about the various scams. The number one scam defense is awareness education. Most don’t know that they can still be held responsible for a “cleared” check. Many people have no idea that Microsoft doesn’t call you to let you know your computer is infected with a virus. The deciding factor whether someone can be scammed is awareness of the scam presented to them. So, don’t shame victims thinking that they were dumb or a patsy. Victims come from every slice of society, including doctors, lawyers, engineers, Nobel Prize winners, mechanics and even IT security workers. I’ve interacted with hundreds of people who have lost money. Defending against scams starts with awareness Unfortunately, this is unlikely to change soon. When transactions, checks and bank accounts can be checked in seconds, why is it taking two to five days to verify if a check is truly valid? It isn’t a technological reason…or it doesn’t have to be. Still, I wish when a bank confirms a check has cleared that the check depositor no longer needs to worry. The banks are up-front about what their initial “clear” means, and they are under a lot of pressure to let the people who deposit checks spend “their money” as soon as possible. “Cleared” in the banking industry doesn’t mean safe to spend. This is not true! The bank can reclaim the money at any time if it doesn’t get it from the fraudulent check. What fools the victims is that they mistakenly believe that they are safe once they deposit the check and the bank clears it. Anyone in our field would know this was a scam, but only because we’ve seen it before. The scammer said he needed the seller to accept an “emergency” check for larger than the sales price, and then send the overage to someone else to complete the transaction. This type of emotional pull is called a stressor event. The scammer agreed to pay full price and cover shipping, but then had a sudden family death of the person who was supposed to pick up the plant and pay in cash. The email thread he sent me had all the classic scam tip-offs. In this case, he was selling a valuable cactus plant. It’s one of the hundreds I’ve read over the last 20 years. I recently received an email from yet another victim of a Craigslist scam.
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