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The Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Sentinel Network collects and analyzes data from over 2,800 sources to identify emerging scam trends, including police, non-profits, and law enforcement. According totheir Feb. 2022 study, consumers reported losing nearly $8.8 billion to fraudsters— an increase of morethan 30% over the prior year.
How to spot spam emails.
Today, most of our inboxes arefilled with spam; however, sometimes, we spend too muchtime reading before we realize it’s trickery. Luckily, there are afew signs that can warn us.
Beware of odd characters and symbols:
If you get strangesubject lines like “ⲫCanvas Prints Promo! 9” or the emailsender is named “syaoemd-15468cacsy”, these offbeat textswith odd characters are probably spam.
Use a spam diverter:
Your spam filter will offer severalsettings, including low and high. The higher the filterselection, the less likely dangerous communications will landin your inbox. Triggers include excessive punctuation in thesubject line or key terms often discovered in past spamcampaigns.
Check the email details:
Always investigate any waywardemails before you open them. Scrutinize the sender’s emailaddress. Does it fit the email topic? Hover over links to see ifthe address is legitimate. Never click on them.
Phishing emails and other types of spam are on the rise,sometimes appearing suspicious due to odd characters. Thiscan result from text encoding errors, case-insensitive DNS translating domain names, or non-standard encoding by thesender.
Legitimate senders might use unusual capitalization to catchyour eye, and formatting marks may become visible uponreceipt. Additionally, Online banking alerts and familiarsounding subjects like "Hi, remember me? It’s Roger from highschool" often signal spam or phishing attempts.
What are the statistics?
Nobody wants to lose $650 to ascammer, yet according to the FTC, that's the averageamount lost per victim, with some losing thousands. Last year,investment scams generated $3.8 billion in losses, doublethat of 2021, while impersonator scams, the most reported,saw a 50% increase in incidents.
If you uncover a scam assault, share your discovery with the federal government. The FTC records emerging scams on itswebsite, and they want to hear from you!
How can IDShield help you protect yourself against email scams?
IDShield scans multiple email addresses our membersuse. Since we monitor around the clock for those addresses,we can spot one where it shouldn’t be. That triggers an alertthat thieves may have access to your emails. And rapiddetection can reduce or possibly eliminate damages.
IDShield protects sensitive personal information by monitoring critical areas where theft can occur and alerting youto potentially nefarious activity. If your identity is stolen, our onsite Licensed Private Investigators will assist you andwork to restore it to its pre-theft status.
If you are already enrolled, please add the accounts you want to protect.
If you still need to enroll, please consider doing so at your next opportunity.