This Single Thing Is The Biggest Warning You're Being Scammed, And It's Information We All Need
This Single Thing Is The Biggest Warning You're Being Scammed, And It's Information We All Need
Noah Michelson Tue, September 16, 2025 BuzzFeed
Financial scams have exploded in recent years, and it’s not just banks and corporations getting screwed out of big bucks. U.S. consumers lost more than $10 billion to fraud in 2023 — more than any previous year, and a 14% increase from 2022 — and all signs point to even larger losses in 2024.
So how do we protect ourselves from bad actors who want to steal our money and our identities?
That’s what we — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, the hosts of HuffPost’s Am I Doing It Wrong? podcast ― asked Jeremiah Baker, a cybersecurity specialist who has spent the last 17 years growing a firm that hacks into its clients’ networks and web applications to identify the weaknesses in their online defenses and fortify them against future attacks.
Baker told us the biggest red flag that we might be getting scammed is someone asking for personal information, especially if they’re doing so with a heightened level of emotion or urgency.
“Your bank’s never going to call you and... ask you for your username and password, or any kind of identifiable information,” he said. “It’s usually a tee-up of someone asking you for something... an impersonation scam — pretending to be an institution when they’re not, [or pretending to be] a friend, a colleague, a relative.”
There’s also usually what Baker referred to as a “sob story” involved in the ask.
It’s “highly emotional, highly urgent — ‘You have to hurry!’ And those are the things that really should raise a red flag to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I need to hang up this phone and reach back out to the institution and make sure that it’s really them,’” Baker told us.
That can be difficult to do in the heat of the moment — especially if someone is claiming to be a representative from an institution we work with, and they’re warning us that we might lose everything if we don’t act quickly. However, trusting our guts and taking a step back to analyze the situation can save us a lot of agony — and money.
“Most everyone I speak to said, ‘Yeah, I didn’t really feel like I should be doing it, but I did it because they had all this other information on me ― like, they knew my address, they knew my name, birth date, they knew my Social Security number,’” Baker said. “All that information — with all these huge data breaches that we’ve seen over the last several years, bad guys get ahold of that information. So they use it to set trust and context, and then they get us to do something.”
Baker tells clients to “trust [their] intuition,” and to keep in mind that banks and other institutions are never going to ask for that kind of information over the phone or via email
TO READ MORE: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/single-thing-biggest-warning-youre-003104659.html