AI | Online Security | Scamwatch
Scamwatch: Scams Are Easy to Pick, Right?
Scams are becoming more sophisticated, and the net cast is wider than ever. This is why even people who work in tech can get scammed…
How do you pick a scam? It’s obvious, you just read it and you can immediately tell, right?
Well that is increasingly not the case as I’m sure many readers probably know now. And there is little we can do to stop the tide of scams coming our way at the moment. So for this edition of Scamwatch, we tackle the mindset you need to have in order to be prepared for the ever more sophisticated scams coming our way.
It used to go like this:
You’d get an email, text or call claiming to be from a company or agency you have an account with, but something is off. Maybe the spelling was wrong, the link was a pile of jargon, or perhaps even the call came out of business hours.
While many people can of course still be scammed by these types of communications, it was generally a little bit easier to recognise that something wasn’t quite right.
Let me be blunt, this is no longer the case.
Many scams are now exponentially better at fooling us, and no one is entirely safe from it.
From buy and sell, to card fraud and phishing scams, they’re not going away and they will keep moving the goalposts. In 2024-25, the ABS reported that one in seven Australians experienced personal fraud, and while Scams were slightly down from the last year, the trend up has been stable over a decade.
With the advent of AI, this is poised to supercharge.
So what are we meant to do?
The answer isn’t just to get the right information about how the scams work, because expecting everyone to stay on top of that is simply unreasonable.
Our proposal is to change your mindset and habits on your devices, alter your pace and strategy to dealing with any kind of online interaction.
The first step is to:
Introduce or embrace slowness!
There’s nothing wrong with navigating slowly, and taking the time to really think before you make any kind of action at all. Why should an online communication or transaction be any different? It is your prerogative as a customer or client to take your time before handing over any information or currency to anyone at all.
This is one of the main psychological drivers any scam will try to exploit, they will so often pressure you into feeling that you must act hastily to prevent some type of apocalypse or other. In fact, this can often be a dead giveaway! Because any reasonable company or agency will not try to pressure you to act immediately or threaten you in any meaningful way.
At the end of the day, if you’re late on a bill, the company will always try to reach you several times before they do anything drastic, they just want their bill paid.
The next step is annoying, but it is unfortunately the way of the world now:
You need to verify everything!
If you get a call from someone claiming to be from a company, ask to call them back on their official number so you can be sure.
If you receive an urgent demand bill in your email or in a text message, call the institution or log into your account to double check.
If you want to buy from a website, don’t just click on the link, search the company in google, and read their lowest reviews.
In fact, if possible, just don’t click on links at all! Navigate to as many things yourself as possible, rather than trusting the links people send you.
Because if they are legitimate, they won’t care how you get in contact with them!
Final step, and this one can come with some baggage:
Lose your pride and ask someone else what they think!
Digital literacy is not about who knows the most or who is the best, it’s about equity in online communities.
If we can’t ask for help, or help each other to avoid scams and navigate the online world safely together, then it will take us so much longer to improve our online communities.
So learn to check with others, take a screenshot of the culprit and send it to your friend, your mother, your colleague or your cousin and ask them what they think.
We hope that these mindset and habit changes will help you to spot scams a mile off, and maybe even help with other more subtle forms of online manipulation too!
Let us know if you have any personal experiences you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you.
