If you have any money in your life, someone’s out there trying to get it. Many of those people aren’t nice, but instead of walking up to you and taking your money, they’re going to try to trick the money out of you.
Most scams seem pretty easy to spot by a lot of people, but if they didn’t work the scammers wouldn’t continue putting these things out there. Some scams look real, and these days they might copy what the actual business or organization is using to promote their businesses, but they can be easily missed and you could have all sorts of problems coming your way. Many come via email and phone calls, but some of these also comes through the mail.
Both individuals and businesses get caught up in these things. As always, if something looks dicey, your best bet is to look it up online because if it’s happening to you, it’s a sure bet it’s happened to someone before you. If something sounds too good, it’s probably some kind of scam, but it’s also possible that it’s legitimate and could help to improve your life.
Here’s a few types of scams that you need to be wary about:
1. The IRS will never contact you by email; it’s not their way. Yet, thousands of people get fooled by official looking emails saying that they owe large sums of money to the government. Those emails often have a link to click on to make payment arrangements, or ask you about how you generate income, or even your personal information like your social security number, or possibly give you a phone number to call to talk to someone about it.
Some of these emails will just take you to a website and load some malware or a virus on your computer, and as nasty as that is, you’d be considering yourself lucky. Some people are led to pages where payments are requested or you’ll get a phone number to call and whoever is on the other side will try to convince you to pay them something. Just ignore all of these emails because they’re fake.
2. You might get an email from your bank saying there’s some kind of problem and you should click on a link or call a phone number. Whereas it’s possible that you might receive email from your bank, if there are ever any problems they’re going to call you first, followed up by a regular letter. Also, if you’re paying attention, you’ll also be getting lots of these same emails from banks you don’t have accounts at. Send them to your trash bin.
Every once in a while you’ll get something in the mail without an address on the envelope, and it might reference your bank. That’s usually just a good guess, because sometimes we receive letters that tell us things are changing, but they’re not from our bank. We have to be wary when things happen that are out of our norm. If there’s a phone number on the letter and it’s not familiar to you, go to a search engine, find the phone number for your bank’s location and give them a call. If they tell you it’s legitimate, often they’ll help you do whatever the letter recommends. If not, be thankful that you saved yourself a lot of trouble.
3. Have you ever gotten a call from the Fraternal Order of Police, saying they’re raising money for charity? This is a scam, yet they collect hundreds of thousands every year across the country. There are unions with this name but there’s no such charity. You might think about trying to call the police but they’re no help in this instance because they don’t even know where to start. Just say “no thanks” and hang up before they get into their scam pitch.
They’re not the only organization that tries getting your money or information illegally. If you have the option it never hurts to let phone numbers you’re not familiar with to leave a message along with a phone number. Then you can go to a search engine and look that number up to see if they’re who they say they are. If they are, it’ll come up immediately; if you have to search for it it’s probably a scam. Even if you’re self employed, sometimes it’s better to let someone leave a message so you can get back to them at your leisure, especially if you want to do some research on them.
4. Every once in a while you might get an invoice in the mail for something that looks legitimate, tell you that you owe them some money, but it’s probably a scam if you’re not familiar with them. For instance, if you have a website, you might receive something telling you that your domain is being shut down unless you pay a big amount of money, or tell you that there’s a breach and to type in the link they’ve sent you. Unless you know the company, never do that!
If you really want to know, put the email address in a search engine, and if it’s legitimate it’ll come up and then you’ll know whether it’s real or not. These days, search engines give you a bit more information than you used to get, telling you the business name and giving you an indication that it’s either real or fake.
5. There are a lot of smart and educated scammers creating new ways to try to harm you in some way. For instance, if you have a website, that means you have a domain name. You should know who you purchased your domain name from, even if you don’t remember when it might be time to make the next payment. If it didn’t come from that company you know it’s fake.
However, just because they got the name of your domain company correct doesn’t always mean that the email you received came from your hosting company or the site that you bought your domain name from. If you ever get an email that’s being sent from your domain and you didn’t do it, it’s a scam; sent it to spam or just delete it. There’s unlimited ways for scammers to find certain information on you, and you need to be wary unless you know the sender really well.
In closing, don’t take everything for granted unless you’re totally in control of what’s going on. Even people who know a lot about computers, social media, web issues and the like get scammed sometimes. If you ever have any questions about your own property, your bank, an organization you don’t know anything about asking for donations, do your research, call or send someone an email and always protect yourself.
TL Wall Accounting
