The Problem of Scams

Welcome to The Safety Net, a newsletter that profiles scams and helps you protect your family from them. If you like this issue, please share it with anyone who might like it. Thanks!

The Problem of Scams

We all get them. Unexpected messages that seem odd, asking for help or information or money. Sometimes it’s a text message from the government telling us we owe money. Sometimes it’s an email from our boss asking us to run out and buy gift cards. All of them are criminals trying to steal our money or identity or both. All of them are scams. 

Scams are growing at an alarming rate, targeting more consumers for more money every year. In the US alone, $8.8B was lost to scams in 2022 which is up 44% from just 2021! Even worse, scams increasingly target the most vulnerable members of our families as people over 70 years old lose 2-3 times more to scams than people younger. (source: ftc.gov)

Even worse, since most scams go unreported the FTC estimates that these statistics vastly underestimate the real numbers. The FTC’s estimates are that older consumers lose as much as $48B a year to scams! (source: ftc.gov)

That’s why we are starting The Safety Net. Everyone on our team has family members that have been targets of scams, and we’ve seen firsthand the damage they can do. With scams becoming such a high risk, we realized that we all needed better tools to protect ourselves.

The first step is educating ourselves about scams and the tactics they use to fool us, so that we are ready for them. Scams rely on our ignorance or inexperience to trick us into trusting them, so if we are prepared they lose their danger. 

We will cover a lot in our weekly issues including:

• New and common scams, describing how they work and how to spot them.

• Advice and tips on how to protect yourself from scams. 

• Stories from people who have fallen for scams, and what they learned. 

If you have questions about scams, or specific kinds of dangers you’d like to learn more about, let us know! You can reply to this email or find us at [email protected]

We see The Safety Net as a service to the community, helping all of us get safer in the digital world. 

Cheers,

Bjorn Cooley & the Sanctum Team