Email spam and scams are commonplace in this modern world that we live in. So common place in fact that in today's world it is more uncommon for someone to have never seen one of these scams then it is for someone who has seen them. Nearly all of them either seem very harmless on the surface (you've won something, chain letters, or even promises of huge savings are all perfect examples). Today's blog is going to first divulge into some common email and phone scams and the threat that they can cause you. From there I'll discuss a few tools that could help you should you come across any of these scenarios and finally I'll end with telling you about a situation where someone very close to me almost fell into one of these traps. 

Social Engineering is a form of scamming that preys on the vulnerabilities of the human mind. People by nature are weak to certain triggers, especially in realms that they have little understanding of. Tell someone that their computer has a virus, and they panic. By and large people do not understand what a virus looks like on their computer, only that it’s bad. So you tell them they have one and they are that much likely to give up whatever information they have to make the problem disappear. Even if the problem never existed in the first place. 

There are many types of scams that exist in the wide web today. As we quickly as we learn to recognize one type another grander, more clever, smarter scheme is being cooked up to replace it. However smart we are, they are smarter. However if you learn to recognize patterns, you should be able to protect yourself from these nefarious people who are out to do you harm. 

http://www.moneycrashers.com/common-email-internet-scams/

The above website lists some of the most common internet scams you could come across. As well as some ways in which you can avoid falling into these well-known traps. 

The Foreign Lottery Scam

This is one of the most common forms of scam. People live their entire lives waiting for something good to happen to them. This preys on that mentality of people. By telling them they are super lucky and won something you prey on hope and joy. People then give you the information you want under the guise that you are giving them the information to send you money. You play right into their hands. 

Chain Letters

These may seem like more of an annoyance then anything but I feel like they are worth noting here. "Send this to _ many friends and something wonderful will happen.” We've all see them at least once in our lives. On the surface they seem fairly harmless. A silly little game to play among friends. In truth however every time you forward one of these emails you  put every person you email at risk of being added to a large Email group, that can then be sold to other companies and the spam continues in droves. Only once and you head down the rabbit hole. 

Bank Breech Confirmation

Another very common scam, again preying on the weakness of the human mind. Your bank, the place where you keep your money, has been breached.  They need you to sign into your bank in order to validate your credentials and secure your information. They even provide a link to your bank site. Except the bank site is a fake and you've just given them all your bank information. 

There are many other types of phishing scams that pray on the unsuspecting and the seemingly weak. I could go into many more examples but I think that it could take me an entire day to do so. However the following couple of sites have a myriad of other examples for your information purposes.

https://itservices.uchicago.edu/page/examples-email-scams

http://www.hoax-slayer.com/nigerian-scam-list.shtml

https://www.fraudswatch.com/category/email-scams-examples/

So, you now know how to field out a few of the email scams that are floating around today. That’s great. But what about the hundreds of other scams you don’t know about? How do you arm yourself against those? Can you arm yourself against those? Sure you can! I’m going to talk about a few steps and tricks that you can look at while you evaluate whether that email is real or trying to scam you.

1)      Your first line of defense is actually your simplest. Use your own common sense. If something seems too good to be true, nine times out of ten it probably is. If something seems like it is crazy overstated, don’t trust it. Verify by your own means. Human beings are equipped with a miraculous sense to not trust something that isn’t true. Survival. Use that to your advantage.

2)      Look at the sender of the email. Does it come from an individual? Does the email domain seem overly generic (such as Gmail, or yahoo?). Companies will rarely send you an email from an individual person. Companies also often have their own domain for their emails. Look for an email that ‘looks’ official.

3)      Be wary of links in emails. If you hover over a link you can see the true path that link is headed to? Does that new pathway seem legitimate? You can never truly be 100% sure that a link is really what you want, but the link should start with the place that you are headed. Ex amazon.com can have other pathways after this, but it should not be secure.amazon.com. The only way to 100% guarantee that you are going to the right place is to type the address yourself into your browser.

Another few resources to keep in mind are snopes.com and hoaxbuster.cciac.org which allows you to look up emails to find out if they are on a list of well-known hoaxes and scams. You can also forward the email to spam@uce.gov, which will not allow you to prevent the emails from coming in, but will allow the (blank) to get a better grasp on the scams that are out there.

I’m going to leave you with a personal story from my life. One scam, the scam about someone being stuck in Nigeria, hit very near to me once. I have a cousin, his name is Ryan, and generally we don’t speak about him much. He is pretty much the scum of the bottom, cocaine addict, has three children, all different mothers, he abandoned his wife and all of his kids. Fell off the grid. I don’t tell you any of this for revenge or sympathy, it’s important to this story because he is the very kind of person who would go over to Nigeria, strike up some shady deal, and get stuck there.

So when my grandmother, the only person in my family who still would give Ryan the time of day, got a phone call saying that Ryan (yes, they got that specific) was stuck in Nigeria and needed money to get home. She fell for it, and hard. She went to everyone she could to get help as well (thankfully, because we were able to get her to rationalize things and go to the police rather than sending money blindly). Ours is a story that could have gone very sour very fast.

They prey on this, giving you directed information, very specific to you. They do their research. Always verify with an outside source anything that requires you to give information about yourself or your bank account. Remember guys, use common sense, be smart, and you’ll be just fine!