About this video
Sal shares real scam messages he receives, like fake Amazon or bank alerts, and shows how to spot red flags: misspelled or odd links, requests for passwords or personal information, and a sense of urgency (good or bad). He explains how to check if a website is really legitimate, why he calls his bank back himself, and why requests to pay with Bitcoin or immediate wire transfers are a warning sign.
You'll be able to
- check a link or URL to tell if a message is likely a scam.
- explain how scammers use urgency, both fear and excitement.
- describe safe steps, like calling back on a known number, when contacted about my accounts.
- recognize hard-to-track payment requests as a red flag.
Key words
- URL
- The web address a link actually goes to, which may differ from the words you see.
- red flag
- A warning sign that you should pay closer attention because something might be a scam.
- spoofed
- Faked to look like it's from someone else, such as a phone number.
- sense of urgency
- Pressure to act right now, used by scammers to stop you thinking carefully.
- wire transfer
- A fast electronic money transfer that is hard to reverse.
Transcript
- I think we all have a sense that many people online are trying to scam us and sometimes not online as well. And the main question is how can you tell when you're being scammed? Or at least what are the red flags where you should pay a little bit closer attention?
So just from personal experience, every, I would say couple of weeks, I get a text message on my phone that says, "Your Amazon account has been hacked. Click here in order to verify your information and see if fraud has occurred." Well, that seems like some good guy is contacting me, until I look closely at the link, and it might have some type of misspelling of Amazon or it might say AMZN18.com.
And then I realize that I am being scammed. It is trying to use that fear of being scammed in order to scam me. Probably, when I click on that link, all sorts of shady things might get downloaded on my computer. But even then, it might say, "Hey, type in your," it might look just like Amazon, it might ask me to confirm my password, type my username and my password.
And guess what? When you do that, now all of a sudden they know your username and your password. And they might be trying to do other things based on that. So I get that message a lot. I get a lot from my bank that, "We have identified unusual transactions on your credit card.
Click here in order to verify these transactions." And I'm like, "Well, I haven't used my credit card. This must be some type of fraud." And sometimes you actually do get legitimate texts or emails from your bank on that point. So you don't ignore it, but you need to look on whether it's a legitimate website or not.
If they're making you call some random number or if the website just looks a little bit off, instead of Bank of America, it's Bank of America Z dot, you know, something else, then you know that that's probably, in fact, almost for sure, it's a scam. But if it's literally your bank's website, and it really is, it's not just the words, but when you see what the URL is, what the link is, it's actually going to your bank's website, or it's actually going to Amazon, et cetera, that's probably more legit.
But even then, be very, very, very careful if it's asking you to type in your username, your password, giving other forms of personally-identifiable information, like your date of birth and your social security, you have to triple check that this is really a legitimate website, especially with that type of information.
So they're going to create this sense of urgency. Sometimes it might be a positive sense of urgency, like, "You've won a prize, come here and claim it. You just have to give us your social security number, your birthdate and log in," be very skeptical of that.
But also, be skeptical of the ones where it's like, "An emergency has occurred. Someone is using your stuff." But if you're careful, and I would say the biggest ones are really make sure, and once or twice my actual bank did call me, but I was so suspicious that I said, "Can I call you back?"
Because I didn't know who this person was calling me. Maybe they spoofed the phone number somehow. So it's always better to err on the side of safety. Oh, and another thing to watch out for. I haven't gotten this one personally yet, but if people are asking you to pay with things that are hard to track, like Bitcoin, or they want you to immediately wire some money or transfer some money on some digital mechanism, that's another sign, especially if there's urgency to it, that something is fishy.
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