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As the economy falters and flails and the cost of living gets increasingly unmanageable, so hoards of scammers dig themselves out of the woodwork.

Banks may ramp up security measures, authentication requirements for email may reach factor nth degree, and it may soon take a number of steps before we can finally unlock our phones and computers, and still, enabled by ever-changing tech, hackers, fraudsters and scammers will find a way to get the goods.

None of us are immune to their savvy kind of desperation. I have rules about any kind of exchanges and I am aware of all the niggling red flags (when it is too good to be true, it damn well is), and yet, I got scammed by a vintage clothes seller on Instagram. Woe me. We live and we learn.

A friend of mine’s colleague also got woefully swindled by some smart-arses using an email address that looked like it was from his boss, asking him to go out and purchase several iTunes vouchers. Without a question, the dude used the company card to buy something like R40,000 worth of vouchers, which are apparently easily convertible into hard cash. His actual boss is making him pay it all back.

Another friend’s recently widowed and financially strapped mother also just got conned into sharing OTPs with some stranger on the internet who she thought was a Nedbank banker trying to sort out the ‘fraud emergency’ on her account. It turned out they were the fraudsters and managed to hack her account with the pin numbers she shared to steal R20,000.

There are also those terrible romance scams that we often write about that have become a scourge on decent humanity.

As you may well know, fraud comes in multiple packages, such as forged documents, and impersonations, such as identity theft, while scams are often when someone manages to successfully convince you to either provide your banking details, part with your money or help them access your funds.

“When we look at monetary values, however, the most money is lost to romance scams,” Manie van Schalkwyk, chief executive officer of the Southern African Fraud Prevention Society, said at a recent Daily Maverick Money Cents webinar.

“A recent case we dealt with involved a woman, who was interacting with a man supposedly in Italy. He told her that he was going to send her a bag filled with euros, and she started getting messages to say that she needed to pay customs into a particular account. Then there were taxes to be paid, and then a release fee, and package fees. She paid quite a bit of money over before realising it was a scam,” said Van Schalkwyk.

The Daily Maverick team had a conflab about fraud and scams in a webinar posted to YouTube.

Gerhard van Deventer, head of enforcement at the Financial Sector Conduct Authority, said digital media had become highly popular for scams and also fraudsters impersonating legitimate companies. “While investment companies might use social media for financial education, they are unlikely to ask you to invest via a social media platform,” he said.

Tune in for a discussion about the current scam trends, what to watch out for and most importantly – the red flags that should make you stop.

Maybe also share it with the older, less tech-familiar folks in your family and friend group, as they are most vulnerable to being taken for a ride, trusting an authoritative rushed presence on the other side of the phone without realising they’re being manipulated or sharing sensitive data because they’re non the wiser.

Thanks to Daily Maverick, here are a few concrete rules to follow and red flags to watch out for before anyone gets taken for a fool:

1. Deepfakes and AI: If there are images involved, do a Google reverse image search, which is easiest to do on a desktop computer. Simply go to images.google.com, click the camera icon to open Google Lens, and either paste in the image link (URL) for an image you’ve seen online, upload an image from your hard drive, or drag an image from another window. This should show you the original source of the image.

2. Impersonations: If your investment company, insurer, bank or anyone else is contacting you on the phone or social media for whatever reason, rather hang up and call them on a registered number yourself so that you can double check if they’re really trying to contact you for said reason.

Van Deventer says there has been an increase in fraudsters impersonating legitimate financial service providers on social media in particular. “You should always contact the company named directly using contact details that have been independently sourced by you, and not those provided via social media or the person contacting you,” he says.

3. A false sense of urgency: If the so-called company give you a short window and tries to insist that you must invest money within x number of days because otherwise you will “lose out”, raise the red flag. The short window means you don’t have time to do proper research to figure out if the “investment” or offer is legitimate or as good as they claim it is. Rather take your time to suss them out and stand your ground about when you’re ready.

4. Further payments required to recover your money: If you’ve put money into something for a set period, like five years, and need to pull it out early, you’ll probably get hit with a penalty fee. But don’t worry, that fee is usually a fixed amount and they tell you about it upfront. However,

“Repeated requests for you to put more money in to cover your losses or before you can access your money should be a sign to immediately cut your losses and report the company as suspicious,” Van Deventer says.

Similarly, if you’re being made to pay customs fees on top of tax, on top of a release fee, on top of package fees before you get whatever you were promised, ask yourself if you are spending money that is worth it in the end.

5. When it is too good to be true, it often is: that means, if the prices are excessively cheap or unrealistic compared to the product on sale, that should rouse some suspicion. Either you’re about to receive a fake or a shamefully cheap version of whatever you think you’re in for, otherwise, the goods won’t even as the images and sales platform is just a means to an end.

DM also talks about how unrealistic returns that are vastly in excess of what you could earn from a bank investment, that offer to double your money within a short period or seem like they are “too good to be true” are also often just that – too good to be true.

“Thirty years of experience has taught me that if it’s an unrealistic return, that’s a red flag,” Van Deventer warns.

6. Last but not least, if your phone suddenly stops working, there might be a problem. If you suddenly can’t receive or make any calls or messages, immediately contact your cellphone service provider as this could be a sign that someone has requested a SIM swap on your phone.

This means someone has fraudulently used your personal information to pretend to be you and then cancelled the sim card in your cellphone to switch it to a new sim card in a cellphone that they are using.  All your incoming calls and text messages (including your bank authorisations) are then routed to them.

The more you know…

[source:dm]