Every new communication medium has been used to scam people. Anyone with a physical mailbox, e-mail inbox, text messaging app or social media account are well aware that scams abound. Legitimate messages are now routinely ignored because we think someone is scheming against us.
This is a sad reality of modern life. Just as trusting everyone isn’t realistic, neither is distrusting everyone. As Seth Godin notes, humans evolved to trust the people around us. If we didn’t we would all likely perish. It is this instinct that bad actors use to scam us. He writes:
Aided by AI, the thieves and scammers are now relentlessly working to hack this basic human instinct. They’re stealing more than money…People are going to be deceived, victimized and ripped off. And the sort of intimacy that marketers and institutions counted on will erode fairly quickly.
Everywhere you turn there are new scams: pig butchering scams, online shopping fraud, crypto ATMs, and chatfishing, i.e. wondering whether you are messaging with a person or AI on a dating app. The common denominator is technology.*
Johnathan Walton recently wrote a book, Anatomy of a Con Artist: The 14 Red Flags to Spot Scammers, Grifters, and Thieves. You can read five takeaways from the book at Next Big Idea Club. He is largely discussing in-person scams, but even then there is a technology component. He writes:
I’ve investigated many cases involving con artists. Technology is a common theme. They’ll show you their bank balance, but it’s actually a pop-up screen that only appears to be logged into their bank account. This page can show you millions of dollars, but it’s a fake graphic. So be suspicious if someone is always telling you a story through their phone screen.
Speaking of phones, never send a wire. There are legitimate reasons to send a wire, but Erik Barker notes they are few and far in between. Scammers love wires because they instantaneous. There is another red flag when it comes to scammers, urgency. Barker writes:
Urgency is the anesthesia they use to operate on your bank account. That ticking-clock, this-deal-dies-tonight, act-now-or-cry-later vibe slithers right under your logical defenses like a Trojan horse made of pure, concentrated FOMO.
When you are feeling greedy, or anxious, it is easy to put your natural skepticism on hold. Michael Wilson who writes about crime at the New York Times recounts a bank-related phone scam that had him going for a good while. The point is that everyone, young, old, skeptical, naive, rich, poor, are vulnerable. Ally Jane Ayers at Money Changes Everything writes:
Scammers don’t target “stupid” or “old” people. They target busy people. Stressed people. People who are trying to do the right thing under pressure. They target you when you’re in motion, not when you’re reading blog posts and patting yourself on the back for not clicking phishing links.
Ayers has other good tips including ‘Always talk to the person directly.’ Unfortunately there is no perfect defense against scams. We are human, and scammers are, if nothing else, experts in human psychology.
Think you’re getting scammed? Hit pause, step away from your phone or computer, and take some deep breaths. Let System 2 take over. Most of all never assume you are too smart to get scammed. That is what they want you think.
*AI is only going to make things worse. Scams will become more salient and personalized. With AI, scammers will be able to scale their efforts even more widely. A hope is that AI can also serve as a defense.
