- So Grace, you know,
and I'm asking both to protect all of us
but also I have a strange fascination of, of exotic scams.
What, what are the types of scams that you've seen?
How, how elaborate have, have these things become?
- Yeah, so unfortunately the attackers
are getting more creative.
Now, the good news is that
most major, you know, email platforms for example
are automatically blocking all kinds of spam that,
or scams and spam that you never see on a regular basis.
For example, during the Covid Pandemic,
Google blocked 18 million Covid impersonation
emails per day.
And that is something that never made it
to people's inboxes.
- What is a Covid impersonation email?
- So unfortunately, one thing to look out for
with these scams is folks impersonating
what you might think of as a trusted source.
So maybe a hospital or health organization
reaching out with Covid information,
kind of trying to beat people in with something timely.
So we do really recommend that folks
go directly to the trusted website of that organization
as opposed to clicking into a link
that may look a little bit suspicious
or may not be something they were expected to hear.
Another flag is if a email or a call or a text
is really trying to rush you
into providing personal information,
such as your bank account information,
your password, or otherwise.
So we, we were seeing trends of attempts
to kind of reach out and say, help now or
please send money here.
We, we are also seeing impersonation attempts
around special offers.
So, you know, if it looks too good to be true
it probably is, if you're being offered free items
that are high monetary value,
but you're being asked to immediately, you know,
put your credit card information down
and that's definitely another red flag to look out for.
- Wow. It, it is a dangerous world
but I'm glad there are folks like you who are,
are helping keep dragging.
It feels like it's a never ending arms race
so we have to stay vigilant.
- Definitely. I think that's our biggest tip
is to be proactive and definitely
take a bit before clicking on something suspicious
and, and, and verify, you know
if there's a, you receive something
you think it looks like it's from someone you know
or something you're familiar with,
go ahead and find another way to confirm
that that's actually the case.
- And always check the link you're about to click on
and before you type in a password,
think three times are my takeaways.
And two step verification.
- Absolutely.
- Thanks so much, Grace, that was really useful.
- Thank you Sal.