If someone online offers you help, especially if it’s for free, you think to yourself: What could go wrong? Once you accept, they could ask you to return the favor, and you could feel obligated to comply. Just like in real life, if one of your friends offers you help, your instinct is to thank them and even to help them in return whenever you get the chance. Or you receive an email from a company offering their help for free. You see a pop-up on a website: It’s a messenger, and it looks like an IT company is writing to you, offering their help. Here are four questions you should ask yourself before each online encounter. Everyone should look out for online scams and question their online correspondence. How are people supposed to distinguish what is real and what isn’t? It’s not just elderly or less tech-savvy people who need to be careful. The internet and countless technological advances allow for the manipulation of software, emails, photos and even videos. Which emotions do they have to appeal to? What stories do they have to spin? Years of telephone scams trained them for the online world and gave them an idea of what works and what doesn’t. It doesn’t just happen to the most vulnerable people. It’s not your fault you became a victim of online scams. Before you know it, you’ve responded, putting your bank information in the hands of online scammers. So it’s important to be proactive when interacting with various messages online.įor example, when you receive a seemingly trustworthy email from a company letting you know you’re running out of time to make a payment. This simple principle, however, also works for scammers. These deals are designed using scarcity, a psychological trigger that gets you to react quickly, so it’s not surprising that it’s a widely used tactic. Have you ever bought something on sale because you didn’t want to miss out on a deal but ended up with buyer’s remorse after the thrill wore off? You likely realized that you purchased an item you don’t need and otherwise wouldn’t have bought without the sale.
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