Am collecting a list of common scams you want to avoid.
Common characteristics of telephone scams
12 common phone scams and how to avoid them – Android Authority
- Loved one in need – claims to be an extended family number who needs your urgent help, please send money
- Government agent – caller claims to be from the local law enforcement, FBI, IRS, etc
- Bank or credit card company – caller may have partial info about you or your account and claims to be from your bank protecting you from fraud – and needs you to act urgently.
- Virtual kidnapping – caller claims to have kidnapped a family number, complete with someone screaming in the background
- Online accounts – claims to be from Amazon or other online vendor
- Jackpot – claim you just won a prize, please provide us with your personal information
- Tech support – caller claims to be from Microsoft or other well known company and says your computer has been hacked but they can fix it if you give them your credit card and or remote access to your computer
- Job offer – offers contract work, sends you a check for payment, but asks that you send part of it to a 3rd party. Then the check bounces and you are out the money that was sent to the 3rd party
- Money-making schemes – all of them
- One-ring call – you get a “one ringer”, don’t recognize, so you call it back – but its actually a premium number that bills you for calling it. Never return a call from unknown numbers. Similar: you may get random text messages with things like “Long time no see, how about we get together?” or “I’m in town, how about we get together for lunch?” These are “phishing”. Do not reply, mark them as spam and block the number.
- Donation request – never respond to an unsolicited donation request over the phone or online. Charity scams are huge.
- Can you hear me? – supposedly the caller is trying to get you to say “Yes” and then use that to authorize other charges. Not sure this is real, but it is a meme. I’ve received scam calls like this myself.
- How not to get scammed – generally do not answer unrecognized inbound calls, do not respond to text messages from random strangers that are “phishing” to get you to respond.
- How to report phone scams
Another good list: 12 Common Phone Scams People Fall For — And How to Outsmart Them
Random Stranger Asks for Charity Donation
Random stranger accosts you while walking up to a store or metro station and says they are collecting donations for a charity. They ask you to donate – and conveniently scan your ATM or credit card right there, and thank you for your donation. Except its all fake – and the $20 you told them to credit is secretly changed to $200 or $2000. Never donate to random solicitations.
Similarly, you may receive inbound phone calls from a “charitable organization” seeking donations. It sounds great – to serve the homeless, to help widows or family members of fallen firefighters or police officers, to raise money for treatment of cancer, etc.
Unfortunately, many of these are scams too. A former manager of mine uncovered an organization that raised millions for breast cancer issues – except, about 98% of the funds raised went to fund raising and the executives – one of whom lived in a $4 million water front property funded by his sky high salary from his personal non-profit. After my boss got the media involved in covering this story, the state finally shut down this charity. I had had calls from them seeking donations too. They used volunteers or minimum wage paid women who sincerely believe they were helping to address breast cancer issues – instead, they too were victims of the non-profit scammer.
Random Stranger Has a Personal Emergency and Can You Help?
You are grocery shopping and head out to your car. Some one tells you they need a few dollars – the story is typically something like “My mother in Seattle just got hospitalized and I need some money to travel to her. Could you give me $20?”. These are scams. I have personally encountered these scammers many times. The newer form now has the scammer using a credit card swiper, like the above, and stealing your money: Police Warn Drivers About a New Grocery Store Parking Lot Scam That Can Drain Your Bank Account in Seconds
“My Car Broke Down”
A related form occurs at road side rest areas – “My car broke down” or “I’m almost out of gas and have no money” – could you spare $20? I have personally run into these scams many times. In one example, a guy walked up holding a broken fan belt and said his car broke down right there, conveniently at the rest stop and he needed money to buy a new fan belt. (The closest auto parts store was 20 miles away so that made little sense – how would he get there?)
In another example, there was a guy with his truck hood propped up, next to my car. As I returned from the rest room, my looking at his truck was the cause for him to start a conversation. He said he had been camping by himself in Yellowstone when his truck was broken into and they stole his camping gear and wallet. He’d driven this far but still had 150 miles to go. Only problem with that explanation? Assuming his truck gas tank was completely full when this occurred in Yellowstone, he’s somehow managed to drive a fuel inefficient truck over 550 miles on one tank of gas. This was a scammer.
Your Credit Card Has Been Compromised Scam
You receive a phone call saying this is your bank calling and they have identified fraudulent activity on your card. They read you the first 8 digits of the card and ask you to read the remaining digits and the expiration date … this makes it sound legit! They have half your card number! Except – the first 8 digits of the credit card number are a publicly available bank identification number. If your credit card is with, say, Chase Bank, everyone who has a Chase Bank credit card has the same 8 digit number. They know nothing about your card that is private – but they use that to trick you in to giving them the rest of the information.
If you receive a call like the above, hang up and contact your bank directly.
Endless Invoices in Email for Things You Did Not Order
These are 100% scams – they send you an invoice for a subscription renewal or product purchase – that you never made. If any problems, you are to call their phone number – which is a scam call center in India, Pakistan, Malaysia or elsewhere – which will say they need your billing information, credit card account or bank information to issue a refund. Except once they have it, they then steal from your account.
Smishing Scam – You Receive 2FA Request on Your Phone
Here is Grok AI’s explanation:
Attacker has your password, attempts login on real site which triggers a legit SMS code to your phone.
But the scammer then sends a fake SMS mimicking the service: “Suspicious activity—reply with the code we sent to confirm it’s you.”
You reply – but the code was sent to the scammer, who then enters the code at the real login screen.
A couple of times I have received a random 2FA request that I did not initiate. I did not respond. I did log in to my own account later, and changed the password. It is unclear that anyone had the password, however.
Voter Registration Scam
I walked up to a US Post Office to mail a package. A couple of weeks before a local election, a guy with a clipboard was telling people that if they had not voted in the last local election, their voter registration had been canceled and needed to re-register. Conveniently, he had forms you could use – which collected A LOT more personal data than was necessary. This was a scam ring that rode light rail around the area and scammed people out of personal data that was used for identify theft. The news reported the scammers had shown up all over the area, always within 1 block of a light rail station – so they could come and go without anyone seeing an identifying vehicle to track them. After the news publicity, this scam died out.
Inbound Telephone Scams
I assume that all incoming phone calls – if not already in my approved contacts list – are scam calls and I no longer answer calls from unrecognized numbers. Unfortunately, even caller ID is forged – thus, you can still be tricked into picking up a scam call. The safest thing to do is NEVER give out information over the phone to an inbound stranger calling you; avoid answering the calls, if you can.
Text Message Scams
About once per week I received a text like “Hi, haven’t heard from you in a while, are you okay?” Or, “Hey, I’ll be in the area, want to get together?”, or, “I just found your number in my contacts list – do you remember why we talked previously?” – always from phone numbers I do not recognize. These are scammers looking for potentially 2 things: (1) if you respond, you confirm your phone number is real, and (2) they may then engage in conversation to try and become your friend, and trick you into giving out something they use against you.
Never reply to text messages from random people. Period. Report the # as “phishing” or “spam” and block the number.
Email Attachments
Be very careful about opening email attachments, even from people you know. Due to some issues with Windows, it is possible for someone to send you an attached file that appears to be a PDF file but actually contains a script that runs upon opening – and installs malware on your computer.
Email “You left something in your cart”
This is a new scam – they send realistic looking emails from alleged vendors saying you left something in your online shopping cart – click here to finish your purchase (or may be even delete it). These are “phishing” attacks that are designed to grab your account information and password and possibly other personal data.
Immediately mark such emails as spam and delete them. Do not “unsubscribe” as that gives confirmation that they reached a real email address.
These email attacks appear to very common with GMail accounts – Spam “You left items at checkout” not from here | Overclockers UK Forums
My GMail account is so consumed with garbage and other people mistyping their own email addresses that I no longer use my GMail account for anything.
Social Security Related Scams
Protect Yourself from Social Security Scams | SSA
Door to Door Magazine Subscriptions
These do not happen so much anymore since people no longer subscribe to many magazines.
They are not exactly scams – but – a young person knocks on your door, selling magazine subscriptions to help raise money to go to college. In reality, most of these young people are themselves being scammed. They’ve been given a “summer job” to help earn money – they are bussed to a remote city, put up in shared room housing, and sent out on the streets to do door-to-door sales. Many are told they cannot back out until they meet their sales quotas and may not even get paid until they meet quotas. Basically, they are victims too – and cannot back out or lack the funds to return home. That’s part of the scam – these young people have been sent to distant cities making it harder to quit and return home.
We personally encountered this about 20 years ago.
Random Contractor Stops at Your House
A paving company contractor shows up at 4 pm in the afternoon and says they just finished a job in your neighborhood and have some left over materials – we can resurface your driveway for a really good price right now. Except it’s not a good price, the materials are substandard, and their application of the materials is poor quality. We actually had one of these show up at our house years ago – this scam was running rampant at the time.
The Roof Inspection Scam
Knock on the door – says they are doing a project in your neighborhood and offers to do a quick free roof inspection. You can guarantee they will find something wrong – even if they fake it or damage the roof themselves! See BBB Scam Alert: Watch out for “free roof inspections”
BBB Scam Alert: Need a new driveway? Look out for asphalt paving scams
Another one is the random contractor knocking on your door offering to update your roof, windows or something else. Last year, we had a local vendor knock on the door – and we did have a project (bathroom floor needing to be replaced) – and gave them contact info. After that, we got a lot of pressure to move forward with the project – but when we looked online for reviews, we found only poor reviews of this contractor.
If you are hiring a project, call several vendors yourself and get more than one quote.
Related: NEVER give a contractor full payment until the project is completed. There may be an appropriate level of payment, up front, to purchase supplies. But always make sure the money received is less than needed – the contractor should not be paid in full until the project is fully completed.
Note – nearly all contractors we have hired have been superb professionals. I do not wish to imply that contractors are shady – they definitely are not! Just be smart about selecting a contractor, sign appropriate contracts and if necessary use a “pay as you go” model.
The BBB Scam
The BBB, linked above, fashions itself as promoting good business practices and urges you to hire BBB certified businesses. Unfortunately, some of the BBB organizations are themselves scams. The moment you take out a business license they solicit you to become a member (which is not cheap) and use the BBB emblem in your business.
We had a bad experience with a moving company which was eventually settled by our own insurance company, investigated by the State, led to changes in moving company regulations in the state. the moving company driver was fired, and an employee of the insurance company was also fired.
But the moving company itself did nothing to resolve the issue.. We filed a complaint with the BBB which then, falsely put in their files that the moving company settled the issues to the customer’s satisfaction. They had settled nothing and the BBB made that up -which was completely false. I then learned that others had similar experiences with their local or state BBB. Be aware of these scams too!
