You have the tools to protect yourself and your loved ones from today's ever more sophisticated online scams.
with information about me, including my name, address, telephone number, and most disturbingly, a picture of my house. The writer of the email goes on to say that they’ve hacked all the information on my phone and they have compromising videos of me they’ve recorded by taking control of the phone’s camera. They are going to release all of this sensitive information to my contacts unless I send them $2,000 in Bitcoin. They also threaten to come “back” to my house if I don’t comply.
What makes this email more alarming than previous scams is how sophisticated it is. It’s well presented. The grammar is perfect. In fact, the artful language reflects a writer who is highly skilled at manipulating people by evokingThe scammers are using the psychology of fear as a tool to direct our neurological processes. By fomenting fear, they hope to create a fight-or-flight response in the reader.
This massive figure would not be possible if not for the negligence or even tacit complicity of large corporations that should be protecting us. Telecommunications companies do little to prevent “spoofed” calls that appear to consumers to be coming from legitimate institutions, such as banks or government agencies. In fact, companies that explicitly enable this tacticare regularly criticized by fraud professionals for their woefully inadequate scam prevention.
Until these scams are shut down, we must take it upon ourselves to counter these fear tactics. One of the best remedies is simply raising awareness and helping to spread information. The FTC has ademonstrate to their millions of subscribers how these scams work and how we can protect ourselves and our loved ones. In fact, Kitboga has recently released a free scam protection application called Seraph Secure that blocks many common scam tactics from working on your computer.
Scammers know a lot about psychology, and they use this knowledge to turn our fears against us. But we can beat them by knowing more.is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, holding a Master's degree in Counseling Psychology and a Ph.D. in Human Development.It’s increasingly common for someone to be diagnosed with a condition such as ADHD or autism as an adult. A diagnosis often brings relief, but it can also come with as many questions as answers.
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