Hey there YouTube, do you want to give away all of your hard-earned savings to a scammer?
Stay tuned to hear some ways to detect the scams and stay safe online.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes a scam as a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation. Basically, someone trying to take your money without a physical threat.
I receive some form of scam usually via an email about 5 to 10 times
a day. Thankfully, most of these end up in my spam folder and I never actually see them. Some though, do slip through so I thought I’d take a moment to have a look at a few and explain how I recognize
them as scams.
The first 3 points I look at are: Is it too good to be true? This is
a simple one that people often forget be it due to greed or some other
blindness, we forget the basic internal fact check: If it seems too good to be
true it’s probably a scam.
Secondly: What do they want from me? Usually, it’s clicking on something or a request for personal information that they can use to scam you in some other way.
Thirdly: Where are they trying to lead me? This is, in fact, almost the easiest one to spot. Did you know that simply by putting your cursor to hover over a link, most programs will display either as a pop-up beside the cursor or down the bottom left or right corner of the screen, the address where clicking the link will take you. If it doesn’t match up with what they’re saying it’s time to be on high alert.
Here are some examples that I found in my spam folder this week:
The first one, other than the warning that Gmail has posted, the obvious thing for this one is that it’s from the Canadian Tax Office, and I live in Australia, so it’s clearly a scam.
The second one is from a well-known big Aussie company, the hardware store Bunnings, but hovering over the link shows that the link will take me to a website called work-careersservice.com. Scam
The third example, a job that earns thirty-five thousand dollars a month. That fails the too-good-to-be-true test. Scam
These are just a few examples from emails I’ve received in the last few days.
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