Warning: How To Protect Yourself From Fraud

Fraudsters keep coming up with new ways to trick people into providing information they could use to separate people from their hardearned money.

We get calls on our house phone often. They want us to give them money to support police department widows and orphans. Or just “support” the police, highway patrol, etc. I have a quick response to those callers, either ask them to repeat who they represent, at which time they’ll hang up. Or I’ll start talking over them.

Basically, we make all of our contributions through our church, except for the fund raisers the grandchildren bring to us, and I don’t like going online to do that! Our church does support all law enforcement through prayers for their safety.

There’s one call we keep getting that simply starts “Hello” with a very British/Australian accent. With “her,” assuming it’s a human, I’ve just repeated the word “Hello” in my poor imitation of what she sounded like. Then they disconnect.

Then there are the people who call wanting to extend our automobile warranty, or some type of warranty for our 60-yearold home. I did listen to one auto extended-warranty call. Premiums would cost $3,500.00 per year. If I saved that amount annually, I’d have had enough to just buy a new car in ten years or so.

We’ve received text “threats” of loss of vehicle registration and suspension of our driver’s license. They claimed we had an outstanding ticket. The website link looks like it could be from the state, but there’s also things that just don’t look right - it didn’t end in “.gov”! The text wanted us to text back “yes,” then close the text, reopen it and follow the provided link. Complicated = suspicious.

I recently received two separate texts from different phone numbers. They claimed to be the job hunting site “Indeed,” saying that my “experience” is just what they need for an at-home job that only requires only two to three hours per day. My Indeed account hasn’t had any activity from me for seven or eight years. And my cell phone was NOT listed in the information. The other thing that made it suspicious was that the text was sent to a large number of other recipients!

Scammers may look like they’re from your bank, or other companies you may deal with.

So, even if someone calls claiming to be a company you deal with, if you hadn’t requested a call, hang up and contact the company using the information the known company provided for communication.

It seems to be easy to get a lot of information from entities or people trying to take advantage of those who are not cautious. So don’t help them out. Don’t provide your birth date, social security number, credit card numbers, any account numbers, your full name or any family members’ names.

Protect yourself.