Some scams make a telltale sound—rinnng, rinnng! Yup, the dreaded robocall. But you can beat them at their game.
Maybe it’s a call about renewing an extended warranty on your car (one you don’t have). Or maybe the robocaller offers up a debt relief service with a shockingly low rate. Calls like these can get annoying real quick. And they can also be scams.
In the U.S., unwanted calls rank as the top consumer complaint reported to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Partly because scammers have made good use of spoofing technologies that serve up phony caller ID numbers. As a result, that innocent-looking phone number might not be innocent at all.
Whether the voice on the other end of the smartphone is recorded or an actual person, the intent behind the call is likely the same—to scam you out of your personal information, money, or both. Callers such as these might impersonate banks, government agencies, insurance companies, along with any number of other organizations. Anything that gives them an excuse to demand payment, financial information, or ID numbers.
And some of those callers can sound rather convincing. Others, well, they’ll just get downright aggressive or threatening. One of the most effective tools these scam calls use is a sense of urgency and fear, telling you that there’s a problem right now and they need your information immediately to resolve whatever bogus issue they’ve come up with. That right there is a sign you should take pause and determine what’s really happening before responding or taking any action.
Whatever form these unwanted calls take, there are things you can do to protect yourself and even keep you from getting them in the first place. These tips will get you started:
This straightforward piece of advice can actually get a little tricky. We mentioned spoofing, and certain forms of it can get rather exact. Sophisticated spoofing can make a call appear to come from someone you know. Yet more run-of-the-mill spoofing will often use a form of “neighbor spoofing.” The scammers will use a local area code or the same prefix of your phone number to make it seem more familiar. In short, you might answer one of these calls by mistake. If you do answer, never say “yes.” Similarly sophisticated scammers will record a victim’s voice for use in other scams. That can include trying to hack into credit card accounts by using the company’s phone tree. Recordings of slightly longer lengths can also lead to voice cloning using AI-driven tools. In fact, three seconds of audio is all it takes in some cases to clone a voice with up to 70% accuracy.
Apple and Android phones have features you can enable to silence calls from unknown numbers. Apple explains call silencing here, and Android users can silence spam calls as well. Note that these settings might silence calls you otherwise might want to take. Think about when your doctor’s office calls or the shop rings you with word that your car is ready. Cell phone carriers offer blocking and filtering services as well. Carriers often offer this as a basic service by default. Yet if you’re unsure if you’re covered, contact your carrier.
So, let’s say you let an unknown call go through to voicemail. The call sounds like it’s from a bank or business with news of an urgent matter. If you feel the need to confirm, get a legitimate customer service number from a statement, bill, or website of the bank or business in question so you can verify the situation for yourself. Calling back the number captured by your phone or left in a voicemail can play right into the hands of a scammer.
As you can see, scammers love to play the role of an imposter and will tell you there’s something wrong with your taxes, your account, or your bank statement. Some of them can be quite convincing, so if you find yourself in a conversation where you don’t feel comfortable with what’s being said or how it’s being said, hang up and follow up the bank or business as called out above. In all, look out for pressure or scare tactics and keep your info to yourself.
Several nations provide such a service, effectively a list that legitimate businesses and telemarketers will reference before making their calls. While this might not prevent scammers from ringing you up, it can cut down on unsolicited calls in general. For example, the U.S., Canada, and the UK each offer do not call registries.
Scammers and spammers got your number somehow. Good chance they got it from a data broker site. Data brokers collect and sell personal information of thousands and even millions of individuals. They gather them from public sources, public records, and from third parties as well—like data gathered from smartphone apps and shopping habits from supermarket club cards. And for certain, phone numbers are often in that mix. Our Personal Data Cleanup can help. It scans some of the riskiest data broker sites and shows you which ones are selling your personal info. From there, it guides you through the removal process and can even manage the removal for you in select plans.
Hop onto the app stores out there and you’ll find several call blocking apps, for free or at low cost. While these apps can indeed block spam calls, they might have privacy issues. Which is ironic when you’re basically trying to protect your privacy with these apps in the first place.
These apps might collect information, such as your contact list, usage data, and other information about your phone. As with any app, the key resides in the user agreement. It should tell you what information the app might collect and why. It should also tell you if this information is shared with or sold to third parties.
What’s at risk? Should the app developers get hit with a data breach, that information could end up in the wild. In cases where information is sold to analytics companies, the information might end up with online data brokers.
Pay particularly close attention to free apps. How are they making their money? There’s a fine chance that data collection and sale might generate their profits. At some expense to your privacy.
Given that your privacy is at stake, proceed with caution if you consider this route.
A quieter phone is a happy phone, at least when it comes to annoying robocalls.
While blocking 100% of them remains an elusive goal, you can reduce them greatly with the steps mentioned here. Thankfully, businesses, legislators, and regulatory agencies have taken steps to make it tougher for scammers to make their calls. A combination of technology and stiffer penalties has seen to that. Taken all together, these things work in your favor and can help you beat robocallers at their game.
The post How to Beat Robocallers at Their Game appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Social engineering. It’s a con game. And a con game by any other name stings just as badly.
Like any form of con, social engineering dupes their victims by playing on their emotions. Fear, excitement, and surprise. And they prey on human nature as well. The desire to help others, recognizing authority, and even the dream of hitting it big in the lottery. All of this comes into play in social engineering.
By design, the scammers who employ social engineering do so in an attempt to bilk people out of their personal information, their money, or both. More broadly, they’re designed to give scammers access—to a credit card, bank account, proprietary company information, and even physical access to a building or restricted space in the case of tailgating attacks. In this way, social engineering is an attack technique rather than a specific type of attack.
Several types of attacks employ social engineering:
The list goes on. Yet those are among the top attacks that use social engineering as a means of hoodwinking their victims. It’s a scammer’s secret weapon. Time and time again, we’ve seen just how effective it can be.
So while many bad actors turn to social engineering tricks to do their dirty work, they share several common characteristics. That makes them easy to spot. If you know what you’re looking for.
An overexcited or aggressive tone in an email, text, DM, or any kind of message you receive should put up a big red flag. Scammers use these scare tactics to get you to act without thinking things through first.
Common examples include imposter scams. The scammer will send a text or email that looks like it comes from someone you know. And they’ll say they’re in a jam of some sort, like their car has broken down in the middle of nowhere, or that they have a medical emergency and to go to urgent care. In many of these cases, scammers will quickly ask for money.
Another classic is the tax scam, where a scammer poses as a tax agent or representative. From there, they bully money out of their victims with threats of legal action or even arrest. Dealing with an actual tax issue might be uncomfortable, but a legitimate tax agent won’t threaten you like that.
You’ve won a sweepstakes! (That you never entered.) Get a great deal on this hard-to-find item! (That will never ship after you’ve paid for it.) Scammers will concoct all kinds of stories to separate you from your personal information.
The scammers behind bogus prizes and sweepstakes will ask you for banking information or sometimes even your tax ID number to pay out your winnings. Winnings you’ll never receive, of course. The scammer wants that information to raid your accounts and commit all kinds of identity theft.
Those great deals? The scammers might not ship them at all. They’ll drain your credit or debit card instead and leave you tapping your foot by your mailbox. Sometimes, the scammers might indeed ship you something after all—a knock-off item. One possibly made with child labor.
Scammers will often pose as people you know. That can include friends, family members, co-workers, bosses, vendors or clients at work, and so on. And when they do, something about the message you get will seem a bit strange.
For starters, the message might not sound like it came from them. What they say and how they say it seems off or out of character. It might include links or attachments you didn’t expect to get. Or the message might come to you via a DM sent from a “new” account they set up. In the workplace, you might get a message from your boss instructing you to pay someone a large sum from the company account.
These are all signs that something scammy might be afoot. You’ll want to follow up with these people in person or with a quick phone call just to confirm. Reach them in any way other than by replying to the message you received. Even if it looks like a legitimate account. There’s the chance their account was hacked.
How do scammers know how to reach you in the first place? And how do they seem to know just enough about you to cook up a convincing story? Clever scammers have resources, and they’ll do their homework. You can give them far less to work with by taking the following steps.
Online data brokers hoard all kinds of personal information about individuals. And they’ll sell it to anyone. That includes scammers. Data brokers gather it from multiple sources, such as public records and third parties that have further information like browsing histories and shopping histories (think your supermarket club card). With that information, a scammer can sound quite convincing—like they know you in some way or where your interests lie. You can get this information removed so scammers can’t get their hands on it. Our Personal Data Cleanup scans some of the riskiest data broker sites and shows you which ones are selling your personal info. It also provides guidance on how you can remove your data from those sites and with select products, it can even manage the removal for you.
Needless to say, social media says a lot about you and what you’re into. You already know that because you put a part of yourself out there with each post—not to mention a record of the groups, pages, and things that you follow or like. All this provides yet more grist for a scammer’s mill when it comes time for them to concoct their stories. Setting your accounts to private takes your posts out of the public eye, and the eye of potential scammers too. This can help reduce your risk of getting conned.
Scammers throw all kinds of bogus links at people in the hope they’ll click and wind up on their scammy websites. They’ll also send attachments loaded with malware—a payload that contains ransomware, spyware, or viruses. If you get a message about one of your accounts, a shipment, or anything that involves your personal or financial info, confirm the sender. Did the message come from a legitimate address or account? Or was the address spoofed or the account a fake? For example, some scammers create social media accounts to pose as the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The IRS doesn’t contact people through social media. If you have a concern about a message or account, visit the site in question by typing it in directly instead of clicking on the link in the message. Access your information from there or call their customer service line.
The combination of these two things makes it tough for scammers to crack your accounts. Even if they somehow get hold of your password, they can’t get into your account without the multifactor authentication number (usually sent to your phone in some form). A password manager as part of comprehensive online protection software can help you create and securely store those strong, unique passwords. Also, never give your authentication number to anyone after you receive it. Another common scammer trick is to masquerade as a customer service rep and ask you to send that number to them.
This is the one piece of advice scammers don’t want you to have, let alone follow. They count on you getting caught up in the moment—the emotion of it all. Once again, emotions, urgency, and human nature are all key components in any social engineering con. The moment you stop and think about the message, what it’s asking of you, and the way it’s asking you for it, will often quickly let you know that something is not quite right. Follow up. A quick phone call or face-to-face chat can help you from getting conned.
The post Social Engineering—The Scammer’s Secret Weapon appeared first on McAfee Blog.