Scammers Love Christmas Too: Stay Safe This Holiday Season (and ever after)

You may love or hate the holiday season. Most of us enjoy receiving or giving gifts, and we have to admit that holiday is a time to rest, to be jolly, more generous and usually to receive some extra money to spend!

But we should not forget scammers, they are people too. Right?

(image created in Bing)

They also want to earn more money, and they know that our mind is not always focused as we have a lot of things to do and gifts to choose. They always take the time to be more creative and original. Perhaps they plan their new scam actions all year long until they get the chance to scam us.

There are many tricks that scammers do, to get our attention in order to achieve their roles.

In this post I will try to post a few different ways that they may attempt to scam you.

Rule number 1 - Be vigilant and extra cautious to ANYONE who contacts you first and asks you to perform any action. Even your friends - brothers - mothers account could be hacked so ALWAYS, ALWAYS VERIFY!

How can you verify?

It is not enough if a number is in your contact list or among your social media friends, this could well be a scam.

1. If a strange message seems to come from a trusted sender

This is probably SCAM

I was reading about a method called SMS SPOOFING

SMS spoofing is a technology which uses the short message service (SMS), available on most mobile phones and personal digital assistants, to set who the message appears to come from by replacing the originating mobile number (Sender ID) with alphanumeric text. Spoofing has both legitimate uses (setting the company name from which the message is being sent, setting your own mobile number, or a product name) and illegitimate uses (such as impersonating another person, company, product). This can also send "mysterious" messages that look like they are from legitimate numbers or contacts.

source

For instance, you may receive a message by a Bank (that you may or may not have an account) asking you to call someone or sending you a link to sign in and change your password. They may have used sms spoofing to make this sms seem as if it came from that account.

I was reading a post by Binance recently, that was asking its users to stay vigilant because of some messages that appear to be sent by them (in reality they are not) and mention something like

You have linked Ledger Live to your Binance API. If you did not do this, reach out to this number XXX or You logged in from a new device in... France, Bucharest etc...
THIS IS SCAM!

Especially for Binance, you may use this link: https://www.binance.com/en-GB/official-verification

2. Fake ads for very cheap products or for super competitions that seem to easy and with super prizes

Not all of them will be ads, but some of them will definitely be.
Make sure to visit the official site and check if they indeed have a promotion at their website or their social media. Unfortunately Facebook and other platforms allow many many ads without checking them.

3. Fake Airdrops

As prices rise, so do the crypto scammers! Fake airdrops, fake websites, fake tokens... they can be everywhere!

Be very vigilant about where to enter your personal information or to connect your wallets.

4. Fake opportunities

This can be a job opportunity, a trading opportunity or anything of that kind.
Usually scammers send their messages to many random people and the more people reply to them, the more chances they have.

Be careful when unknown people contact you via social media. Their first question usually is

• How are you? I found your profile very interesting and wanted to ask you - or to know you better or .. anything else!

5. Fake delivery notifications

You may receive sms or emails about undelivered packages where you need to pay a small amount or the package will be returned. The scammers usually send a link that seems to be legitimate.

ALWAYS, ALWAYS check with the official website if you are expecting a package.

How to be safe...

We will never be 100% safe, because scammers do their job and they always thinking of how to be one step (or more ahead of us).

Many users lack basic knowledge about cryptocurrency, yet they create wallets without proper research. They often trust too easily, and their eagerness combined with naivety can make them vulnerable to scams and theft. Then, they believe that blockchain is scam and they just go back to getting scammed by everyone else.

We need always to

• Be Skeptical
• Dont Trust, always Verify
• Make a Quick Search for everything, before ANY action
• Activate Two Factor Authentication EVERYWHERE
• Be Educated

And dont hesitate to ask and inform the community if you see something that seems suspicious.

I hope that you will have a chance to take a nice holiday and rest this upcoming holiday season - but always keep in mind that scammers dont have holidays!

Let me know any strange scams that came your way - lets spread the word and keep everyone safe!

Posted Using InLeo Alpha