There Are A Lot More Scams Than You May Realize

How many scams and spam messages do you receive on a daily basis? We bet it’s more than you think. Scams affect countless individuals and can cost a pretty penny if they are not handled appropriately. Let’s go over why some individuals might be more likely to fall for scams than others, as well as what you can do to keep your employees from inadvertently costing your company

More Scams, More Exposure

First, we need to establish just how many scams people are falling for. One great example is the classic lottery scam, something which created losses of up to $200 million dollars, with the modern costs having been doubled. The reason for this is simple: the more scams that are out there, the more people will fall for them, and the Internet has allowed these scams even more exposure than ever before. Another example is real estate scams and the Bernie Madoff scam, something which defrauded investors over $64 billion dollars.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that there are plenty of companies out there that are in the business of scamming people, and with the costs of running these types of scams decreasing, more people are using this business model to scam others out of their house and home.

It is also often difficult to find those responsible for these scams, as they tend to operate out of nations where there is no law enforcement infrastructure to tackle them. You might pick up a phone call from your local area code only to find someone on the other end of the phone trying to sell you on your car’s extended warranty. They are using a routing program to spoof the number, making it more likely to appear to be from a local phone number.

Scammers Target Specific Organizations 

People are also falling victim to scams in large part due to their increasing levels of complexity. These days, scams use the name of popular brands to try to leverage them against users, and some might even take on the guise of someone within your organization (perhaps even your C-suite employees). If someone asks one of your employees to fork over sensitive information, they might ignore the warning signs and fulfill the request, even if it doesn’t make sense from a security standpoint.

People are more likely to fall victim to these scams if the person on the other end of the scam is friendly, personable, and familiar (or familiar enough to get them to act). Young people are more likely to fall victim to these scams, and with the workplace made up of more millennials than ever before, the odds of them falling for scams are higher than ever. Older employees, on the other hand, tend to interact only with their direct colleagues or coworkers, so they are not targeted as often as younger employees. That said, there were over 1.2 trillion phishing emails sent in 2020, and that number continues to rise every year, so everyone remains a target. 

What You Can Do

You’ll need to take all the appropriate steps to protect your business from scams, much of which entails educating your employees on the telltale signs of scams. Here are some tips and tricks to keep an eye on:

• Be alert: Interact with each and every message you receive with a baseline level of scrutiny.
• Verify: When in doubt, consider using external methods to verify the identity of the sender, such as calling them on their office line or even visiting their office. Consider doing the same for vendors or others outside of your organization.
• Look for telltale phishing signs: If the message makes unreasonable demands or those that don’t make sense, complete with spelling and grammar errors, or if it has unrecognized contact information or attachments that the message expects you to interact with, then there is a solid chance that it is a scam.
• Use security software: A key part of any email security solution is spam protection. A solid enterprise spam filter will catch most scams, but it might not catch all of them. If you do see one, send it to your spam folder immediately.
• Keep one (or more) backups: To mitigate the damage caused by scams, you should always have a backup of your data ready to go at all times. We at Microtechs recommend that you implement a backup and disaster recovery solution utilizing both on-site data storage and off-site data centers to optimize redundancy.

Get started protecting your business today with a security solution from Microtechs. To get started, give us a call at (415) 246-0101.