With more consumers conducting business online – roughly $11.6 trillion in activity in 2024 – protecting your identity, financial data, and whatever your email holds has become critical. Regardless of your position, retiree, employee, business owner, or living in the C-suite, preparing for heightened scam activity is necessary when your identity, financial data, and emails are valuable to cybercriminals.
Last year, more than $10 billion was lost in online financial scams, $1 billion more than in 2022. This suggests that losses will only continue to grow, particularly with artificial intelligence tools providing scammers with new skills to dig up personal data, imitate voices, and manipulate video images.
This article dives into how these internet villains are infiltrating your virtual world and how you can protect yourself from cyberattacks.
The Value of Education
Internet criminals will enter your vision through four typical ways, known as the four “P’s.” By understanding the four ways scammers will enter your virtual world, you can better protect yourself against cyberattacks. The four P’s are:
- Pretend: A scammer pretends to be someone you know or from an organization you recognize. These “imposter” scams took the top spot on the fraud list of 2023.
- Problem/Prize: A cybercriminal might try to trick you into believing you are either in trouble or have a problem that needs fixing or tell you that you have something to win, but you will have to act “right now.”
- Pressure: A fraudster might put some heat on you, pressuring you to act before you can even research to see or stop and think about whether they are telling the truth
- Pay: Scammers will often try to get you to pay in an irreversible way, such as using a prepaid gift card or bank transfer to an untraceable account.
Cyberattacks to Watch for
The 18 types of crimes routinely tracked by the FBI, but the four most common include fake charities, romance scams, fake emails, and business email compromise. Scammers will often try to appeal to your emotions, using major health events, natural disasters, and donation sites for fake victims to motivate you to give your hard-earned money to them. They also do this by building online relationships with you to earn your trust and then pressure you to “invest” in their “business” or “opportunity.”
While fake emails try to get you to share your personal information to steal your money or identity (or both!), business email compromise is when scammers use slight variations on real email addresses to trick you into thinking you are dealing with a known business partner (like a bank, credit card company, or even the IRS).
How to Protect Yourself
There are many ways to protect yourself in the digital world. One way is to turn on multifactor authentication (MFA or two-factor authentication). This is an extra step that trusted and reputable websites use to confirm that you are trying to log into your accounts. It usually asks for two forms of information: something you know, like a PIN or a confirmation number texted or called to your phone.
Updating your software and operating systems is also essential to protect yourself from technology’s quick advancement. Scam artists are skilled in finding vulnerable points in the system, so you must ensure your operating system is up to date on your mobile phone, tablet, and laptop.
A simple way to protect your money and identity is to think before you click a link. Trust your instincts if you see an email or web page that seems fishy. These links are a tactic of a cybercriminal looking for you to reveal passwords, Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, or other private information.
Lastly, use strong, unique passwords for accounts that combine upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols. Experts suggest using at least 15 characters and a different password across other apps or websites.
