Protect yourself from scams, online and off
Scams these days are a little more sophisticated than receiving an email from someone claiming to be a Nigerian prince. It’s more difficult than ever to avoid potential scams, on the Internet and in person.
Just last week I was approached by a scammer in the University Centre, claiming to be soliciting donations on behalf of a charity for Asian children. What immediately alerted me to the fact that he was a scammer was that he had already approached me on campus twice in the last two years. The first time, I stopped to hear his pitch. He instantly made me feel uncomfortable when he asked me what ethnicity I am, and tried to speak to me in Mandarin (I speak Cantonese). I left without donating.
Since then, I’ve seen reports of scammers claiming to be part of this organization targeting East Asian women on campus.
On Facebook groups like Overheard at Guelph, community members warn potential victims of these scammers who appear yearly. “It’s almost like an annual tradition,” commented Duo Cheng, a member of Overheard at Guelph.
I spoke to my friends and coworkers to see if they’d experienced anything similar. Recently, one of my friends, Linda Ebeid (name changed to protect privacy), fell victim to a Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) phone scam, losing $5,000. She detailed the events of the five-hour phone call in which the first scammer posed as a CRA agent and the other scammer was added to the line midway through the call to pose as her accountant’s assistant. She noted that she could hear ambient noise from their end of the phone call that sounded like they were located in a call centre. The caller ID of the scammer posing as her accountant’s assistant matched her actual accountant office’s phone number, and at the time, he earned her trust by arguing with the first scammer that she should be given a chance to pay the taxes properly and not be arrested. It’s unclear whether the scammers hacked into her email account to access her personal information or if they made dozens of cold calls before finding their victim.
In their call with her, the first scammer addressed her by name and stated that he had four arrest warrants on her for tax evasion and threatened to deport her from the country. Having just filed her taxes due to studying abroad during the last few months, and being a Canadian permanent resident, but not yet an official citizen, my coworker became fearful that the threats were real. The scammers took advantage of her fear, giving her strict deadlines and asking her to withdraw as much cash as possible and transfer it to them by purchasing bitcoin at an ATM in Guelph. She eventually went to the police when the scammer tried to convince her to pawn her laptop for more cash, threatened to revoke her student visa (she didn’t have one or need one), addressed her as “honey” to try to get her to calm down, and even threatened that a “surprise would be waiting at home” if she tried to get help.
“I panicked in the moment,” she said. “I would advise people to take a breath and reassess the situation.”
I also spoke to one of my other colleagues, Connor Watson, about a time that he almost fell victim to a scam. In his case, he paid an $80 fee to someone claiming to be a representative of Microsoft when his laptop suddenly froze and a pop-up window advised him to call the provided number. When he realized it was a scam, he called his bank to freeze his accounts and requested a refund from VISA after providing proof of the transaction and evidence as to why it was part of a scam. He encourages others to report phone scammers by blocking their number immediately after you end the call; some phones have features to report a phone number as a known scammer, which means that when that scammer calls someone else, their caller ID will indicate that the phone number belongs to a scammer. You can also report scams on the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre’s website.
You can recognize a potential phone or email scam if the scammer claims that they require your personal information such as your banking information or social insurance number (SIN), in addition to an urgent deadline with vicious consequences or a loss of a too-good-to-be-true prize. Always check the sender’s email address — often, a scam will originate from an email address with a slightly misspelled domain name that is designed to fool you.
Currently, the University of Guelph’s email system is serviced by Office 365 by Microsoft, and any spam or phishing is filtered by their service.
Resources
- CCS (Computing & Communication Services) have a number of blog posts to help recognize popular scams and how to protect yourself from them: https://www.uoguelph.ca/ccs/infosec
- You can report scams at the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre: http://www.antifraudcentre-centreantifraude.ca/index-eng.htm
Feature image obtained from Facebook via CC0