Four Traits of a SCAM

There are a lot of scams in the world, and they seem to be proliferating at an exponential rate. Anyone trying to sell something on Craigslist quickly learns that it is overrun by scammers. If you apply for a job these days, there is a stronger chance that it is a scam job just trying to learn your personal details and get money from you. And who has not been approached by a cryptocurrency scammer claiming they can make you rich, rich, rich for just a small investment?

Protecting Yourself, Co-Workers, Friends and Family

The best thing you can do, at the individual level, is to teach yourself (and everyone else) how to spot a scam. You want everyone to have a healthy level of skepticism and evaluate all incoming messages, no matter how they arrive (be it email, web, SMS, social media, voice calls, etc.), and look for potentially suspicious signs of a social engineering scam. A scam is a scam is a scam. Most scams have the following traits:

• They arrive unexpectedly
• The ask the receiver to do something the sender has never asked the receiver to do before
• They indicate a sense of urgency, claiming the receiver will be penalized if they do not take action immediately
• The requested action could be harmful to the receiver or their organization if the requested action is taken and is malicious

The scam warning signs are summarised in the following flow chart below:

Teach yourself, your co-workers, your friends and family these four traits of scams. They should evaluate all incoming messages, no matter how they arrive, and see if the message has all of these traits. And if it does, then the receiver should confirm the validity of the request before performing any further actions. Please share this message and graphic with as many people as you can. We are all in this war against hackers and social engineers. Spread the message.

One note of caution. Not all scams contain all four traits. There are some advanced scams where these traits do not apply. For example, in a mortgage escrow scam, an intruder has usually successfully compromised a mortgage lender’s (or escrow agent’s) computer, scans for pending housing sales and then sends bogus bank money wiring instructions to the party buying the house on the day they were expecting to be told to make a loan escrow payment. The request arrives from the person they were expecting it to arrive from, on the day they were told to expect it, for the amount they were expected to have to pay to get the loan. Everything looks legit, but they do not know that the bank wiring account information leads to the attacker’s bank account.

So, not all scams have the four traits above, but 99% do. And being aware of  these four traits of scams will stop most of it.  

Let’s make it significantly harder for scammers to be successful. Now go fight the good fight!

from an article by Roger Grimes, https://blog.knowbe4.com/traits-of-most-scams