There are many types of fraud in the cyberspace and scammers could easily steal our money by using different kinds of tricks. Monetary damages could bring multiple negative effects. Victims could lose a significant amount of money and have the personal details distributed in the Internet. As the result, they can become repeated victims of email frauds and other types of frauds.
1. Don’t provide Personal Details
Email scams could happen simply because we provide people with personal details unnecessarily. We could have also provided email address to people that shouldn’t know them. This could put our email address in multiple mailing lists. Inevitably, the result is incoming spam messages that could arrive to our inbox every a couple of minutes, 24/7. Phishing scams may also occur when we inadvertently provide personal details to malicious individuals. They could do this by sending us fake requests from out bank, using our name, account number and bank name. By sending millions of fake requests to consumers, it is quite likely that more than a few dozen people will visit the fake website and input their username and passwords.
2. Watch for Bad Spelling and Grammar
Often bad spelling and grammar are a good giveaway of scam attempt. Sometimes, their grammar can be so bad that we have difficulty understanding their intention. This could happen when scammers come from specific regions, such as from Africa and East Asia. It is impossible for people who can’t even string a good English sentence to come from our national bank.
3. Watch for Free Web-based Email Address
Many scammers don’t have the resources to set up dedicated email address and they often use popular free emails services, such Yahoo and Gmail. Fraudsters often change their email address and they could even create new email address everyday to cover their tracks. Legitimate businesses usually have email addresses that are based on their official domain.
4. Find out their sense of urgency
Many scammers take advantage of sense of urgency and often urge us to do specific things quickly. They do this so we have little time to determine whether it is a scam attempt. Their email addresses usually have relatively short useful time, because people could flag them as spam email. Therefore, they need to complete their scam attempts before their account get shut down by the email provider.
5. Watch for unexpected Fees
Some scammers know realistically enough that they won’t be able to ask us to transfer a large amount of money to their account, so they may simply ask us for fees as a payment for their “service”. Release bond and security fee are common forms of fake fees they want to charge us.
6. Find out whether they ask for our Sympathy
Scammers may try to create a sad story, telling us stories about cruel rulers or family members with serious health problems. They may ask us to help them by sending some amount of money. It is sometimes easy to feel sorry when reading their email, so we need to be careful.