prevent viruses

Scammers are aware that technology can be overwhelming and sometimes confusing to the average user. Unfortunately, they take full advantage of this and often pray on those who don’t use technology frequently enough to catch on to their sneaky tactics. Technology scams can happen in different ways but the most common are through emails, social media, and what I consider to be “bad advertisements” or bad links found on the internet. Knowledge is power! Continue reading to learn more about the different types of scams and how you can spot them so that you don’t fall victim.

Email Scams often come in the form of phishing or presenting information as if they are a company or organization when they are not. An example of this would be if you received an email receipt from “Amazon” for a product you know you didn’t purchase. The idea behind this type of email is to get you to click on a link somewhere in the email to “log in to your account” when really the link that you click on will be for a website that might LOOK like Amazon but isn’t. This happens most frequently for big-name companies that scammers know many users would actually do business with making the emails more believable. There are a few things that you can do to point out that these emails are not coming from who they say they are. First, check the actual email address, not the “name”, the address. Sometimes you will need to hover over the name for example, “Amazon customer service” to see the actual email address which should be from an amazon.com email address. If the email address revealed is from something else like a gmail.com address or anything else then it’s not legitimate and the email should be ignored and deleted.

Social Media Scams typically arise when you receive a message or friend request from someone that you are already Facebook Friends with. Scammers will sometimes concoct a story either asking for help in some way or telling you about some special government assistance or way to get financial support. You should avoid filling out any forms with your personal information from a social media link or message, often the goal is to gain and sell your personal information. Duplicate friend requests, especially if you are already Facebook friends with the person, could be from a scammer who has infiltrated the original Facebook account, duplicated it, and is now using a new account to impersonate the user for malicious purposes. If you receive a suspicious message or friend request, you should try to reach out to the person in some other way to ask them if they created the new account and to let them know that their account might be compromised. One way you can protect your social media account is to set up additional security such as two-step verification which will require an additional code each time you log in from a new device.

Bad Links which I like to call “bad advertisements” are the leading way in which people have their devices compromised.  I call them bad advertisements because often they come in from news articles or social media links. When you end up on a page with a bad link you might have your entire screen taken over demanding that you call Microsoft or another “support number” to have your device unlocked. The problem is this is not real and can be closed by accessing your task manager and forcing the application you are using to close. If you follow the directions on the screen or listen to what the voice is saying you will let a scammer into your computer who will either try to access your bank accounts, steal personal data or both. You should never believe a pop-up on your computer if it tells you not to shut it down or restart and to call a number instead, they are telling you that because if you do restart your computer it might get rid of their fake ad and resolve your problem. If you end up having an issue like this you can access task manager by pressing Control+Shift+Escape on the left side of your keyboard at the same time. From Task Manager you can find and click on the web browser you are using and then click on end task to close the browser. If you relaunch the browser, make sure you don’t click on “reload pages” or you will end up right back on the same screen. If you go back to the same website and the issue occurs again, the website you visited may be infected and you should avoid it until they have had a chance to clean and resolve their website issues.