#57 Watch Out for Scams

Today I want to talk to you about how you can scam people. Oh, wait a minute, that’s the wrong podcast. I don’t do podcasts like that.

So today I’m going to talk to you about how to not get scammed by other people.

There is a form of scamming, called phishing that is getting really popular. It’s been around for a while, but it’s getting extremely sophisticated these last couple of years, especially with COVID.

So many more people are getting online and purchasing things online.

And that form of scamming is fake websites.

I’m going to pick on AnyBankUSA since it doesn’t really exist. What the scammer will do is they will create a website that looks just like AnyBankUSA and then they’ll send you an email saying you’re overdrawn or something, and you’ll click on it.

And even the URL the title at the top, they’ll make it look as close to the real things as they can. Maybe they’ll change one or two letters or rather than.com It’ll be.eu or dot something else.

And it will be a complete scam, but you won’t know it because it will look just like the real thing. You click on login and the login screen even comes up and you type in your name and your password. And that name and password gets sent to the scammers.

Then you get forwarded to the real web site, to the login page. And it just makes it look like your login didn’t go through right the first time. That is a major scam and it’s happening a lot lately.

Here is one way that I found out about how to battle against that scam. Now, I am always leery about saving passwords online. But all the major browsers; Edge, Chrome, Firefox, I prefer Firefox myself, it’s one of the few fully independent browsers left. I know there’s a few others. But they allow you to save passwords. And like I said, I get a little leery about that. But I found a reason why to do it.

When you go to your bank website or whatever website that you’re going to and the login page pops up, when you’ve saved your password in your browser, then it will automatically populate that or you’ll get a little thing that says hey, do you want me to populate that?

And that way, you know you’re on the right site. If you have to type in your login and password, and you have it saved in your browser, then you know something’s off. So that is one way to make sure that you’re on the right website.

To start saving your passwords, type the browser, don’t click a link. Type the URL into your browser so you get to the right spot the first time. Put in your login and your password and save it to your browser.

And that way, the next time you go there, you’re going to know whether or not it’s a scamming site or the real site, because the scamming site won’t have your login information saved. It’s going to be a different URL. That’s how the system is going to know whether or not it’s a real site.

I noticed this a lot lately. In fact, I just had an email that said your monthly statement is available. So, I clicked the link. It was a scam. Even I didn’t catch that. It happens to everybody. But when it went to the bank website, my login information didn’t show up. So I thought, wait a minute, I’ve got this saved, why is it doing it? I took a close look at that URL and yep, it was wrong. It was not the real URL. It was some scammer trying to get my information.

And by the way, another thing that I’ve noticed is that it used to be you can never change your login name once you had it set. That’s changing for a lot of banks, you can change the login name.

In order for scammers to be able to get to any login page of yours, anything that has a password, they need to know not just the password, but the login as well.

So change the login. That’s another way to be able to stop scammers these days, change your login and your password. If it’s an email address, set up a new email address, set up an email address that is just for certain sites. Gmail is free, Hotmail is free. You can set up three or four different email addresses. Yeah, it can be a pain in the rear to manage it all. But remember, if you’re saving the logins and the passwords in your browser, you don’t have to manage it. It’s going to manage it for you including the login and the password.

Now as far as security goes for these free browsers don’t quote me on this but it seems like the security on these is pretty good because there’s a lot of people that are saving all their logins and their passwords on these browsers. And these browsers are free.

I don’t quite get this because banks are getting hacked into, stores are getting hacked into, we hear about, Home Depot, big hacks of their site, big hacks at Target and in other places.

And yet these browsers never get hacked. So these free services have password protection, things that seem to be pretty darn secure. And yet, these stores that make millions of dollars a year can’t figure out how to do it. That part I haven’t figured out. But that’s the way to do it. That’s one way to try to make sure that you don’t get duped by a fake website.