As it was with every other round of coronavirus relief checks, scammers are already targeting how to figure out to defraud Americans. Kevin Campbell is CEO of Syniti and a cybersecurity expert - he joined Newell on the show Friday morning to explain how to protect yourself against those who’d like to separate you from your money.
“There's no end as to what folks will do to try and scam people out of their money,” Newell began. “We’re doing all of this over the internet, and while we're relying completely and totally dependent upon cybersecurity, they sit around figuring out how to defeat these systems. Can we ever really protect ourselves?”
“The bad guys keep getting better at being bad,” Campbell said. “While everybody's at home during the pandemic, they're at home too, working twice as hard. And we've gone from the kid who was hacking from the basement to these sophisticated rings. They're hiring talented people and they're working really hard on it, figuring out how to be more clever and clever. And of course they work at targeting the vulnerable populations. Remember what your Mom taught you, which is that if it's too good to be true, it's probably too good to be true.”
“That probably may be the best advice ever!” Newell laughed. “Just trust your instincts more than anything else, right?”
“Yep. And I think the key thing they're doing right now is making things look like they're real ads,” Campbell said. “Real ads from banks, from Microsoft, from Google, from anything else, they're just trying to get you to click on a link. It takes a little bit more work, but don't ever click on a link - and if you're gonna, you gotta really make sure you know who it's from, and that the name and email match. But the big thing is don't click on a link. If you're really interested in a site, go type it into your browser and go directly to it. Don't use the links, because most of these scams right now are all based on some fancy ad. It could even be real pictures that they've cut and pasted in there. It looks just like something from Microsoft and you can't tell the difference, but you click on it and all of a sudden, it grabs your password, along with your email and then you're compromised.
“One of the most recent scams that has been uncovered is folks sending emails trying to trick Americans into filling out a phony form to apply for the American Rescue Plan checks. But we know that that's not the process, that there's not an application for that, right?”
“Correct, and I always tell people - the government will never contact you,” Campbell said. “If you've contacted them and asked them to contact you, do you have a hard time getting them to contact you? They will never proactively reach out and say, here's how to get this check. It's not ever going to happen in our lifetime. So those are all things that should trigger you right away. And if they ask you for your social security number, it will be the last four digits because they presume we know it. But the scammers just ask you for the whole thing, you type it in and they got your ID, or they've got your banking. But the other thing I tell people about banking that's hugely important is that all the banks use two factor authentication. And two factor authentication is like just putting a second lock on your door, right? And so you should sign up for that, but they count on the fact that we're going to want to make it easier to login. But that extra step really provides a lot of extra protection.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.
