This article explores how scams affect you; what do scammers do; how do you expose yourself to scams and ways you could protect yourself.

How do Scams affect you?

Bank accounts emptied
Life’s data deleted
Job loss
Relationships with family, friend, relatives and colleagues destroyed
Homelessness
Substance abuse
Severe harm to health
Sink into poverty that turns you into a criminal and/or a scammer yourself

Scammers

Will call the victim to say he is from the I.T. department to get the victim to reset his/her password and give the scammer the victim’s password code.
Seeks to gain a victim’s confidence and thereby getting him/her to disclose information that should be kept secure.
Blackmail or bribe victim’s colleagues to ask his/her personal details so the scammer can use the victim’s personal information and secrets to hack his work/ personal devices and blackmail victim.
Impersonate as a C.E.O., celebrity, or authority figure, so the victim will add them as friends into his/her social media accounts. Scammers could then look at victim’s online spending habits and schedules to mine personal and confidential information.

Victim may be blackmailed into becoming their saboteurs in his/her job, so they profit from victim’s company’s competitors.

How do you expose yourself?

Answering questions on forums or Q&A websites is one of the infinite ways for criminals to mine your data, profile & social engineer you.

How to protect yourself?

Phishing Emails & C.E.O. Fraud Emails

Consider any and all emails, text messages, phone calls, or social media communications from all banks, credit card companies, healthcare providers, stores, authorities, everyone to be potentially fraudulent.

Know that the tax office or other businesses will never ask for your confidential personal information via email.

Don’t reply to unsolicited requests for your personal identifying information (your name, date of birth, social security/tax file number, or bank account number) by phone, mail, online, or from family, colleagues, friends, bosses, and people in authority (everyone).

Google

Google “Examples of social engineering scams.”

Friends and Acquaintances

When someone makes friend with you and ask you for your personal questions to solicit your personal details, especially your home addresses to blackmail you. Take a photo with your friend that asked you such questions.

If your friend hesitates to take a picture with you, that person may be a dodgy person that you should eliminate yourself from the environment or eliminate the dodgy person from your life.

Should something happen to you, the police detective knows who is within your circle of influence from your devices, journals, and photos to run facial recognition systems from the police database to investigate the crime.

Self-Care

Journaling

Record a journal of the conversations you had with whom at the end of each day with the photos of your acquaintances in your encrypted journal on three separate local S.S.D. drive backups and three different online cloud drive backups (or just one if you find it too much of a hassle).