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How We're Enticed to Fall Victim to Cyber-Fraud

Many emails and text messages contain links that, if clicked on, will lead to the theft of our personal information.
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We’ve all seen reports about the growth of cyber-fraud schemes.

One common technique is phishing, where bad guys entice you to click on a link in an email or text message and then proceed to steal your personal information.

While 48% of consumers in a global survey said they are confident they can recognize a scam, 73% admitted that they typically respond to terms or phrases scammers commonly use in emails or text messages. The poll was conducted by Visa and Wakefield Research.

So where are we negligent? A total of 81% of respondents check the wrong details to determine the authenticity of a communication.

That can mean focusing on features scammers can easily fake, including 46% who focus on the company’s name or logo, 45% on an order number, 38% on an account number, and 27% on personalization of the first line of a salutation.

A total of 40% said they don’t even check to ensure that a communication is sent from a valid email address. And only 47% make sure words are spelled properly.

Cybersecurity Traps

Enticements that we frequently fall for are:

  •  Win online gift card, cited by 48% of respondents;
  •  Free/giveaway, cited by 32%
  •  Exclusive deal, cited by 30%;
  •  Act now, cited by 25%;
  •  Limited time offer, cited by 25%;
  •  Urgent, cited by 22%;
  •  Click here, cited by 21%;
  •  Action needed, cited by 21%.

As for demographics, those most likely to fall victim to a scam are Millennials (born 1981-1996), with 39% succumbing; Generation Z (born 1997-2004), with 38% falling victim; Generation X (born 1965-80), with 33% succumbing; and Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964), with 29% getting suckered.

It’s easy to be victimized by cybercrooks.

“From a spoofed service notification from your electric company to an email alerting you that you’ve won products from your favorite store, or even job postings that make it seem like you’ve been hired by a top-tier company, scams hit almost every touchpoint in our digital lives,” the report said.

Language of Fraud

“Understanding the language of fraud is increasingly essential in our digital-first world. Scammers have reached new heights of sophistication in both language and variety: no one is immune,” said Paul Fabara, chief risk officer at Visa.

“Education around the language of scams is an integral part of our consumer protection, and highlighting the commonalities in the language of fraud helps prevent crime globally.”

Visa and the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics put out a report detailing the kind of language that often appears in U.K. scams so that you can avoid them.

The top two-word combinations appearing in e-mail and text message scams are: click here, account information, gift card, email address, 48 hours, now available, billing information, withdrawn account, winning prize, can’t send.

The basic rule of thumb, of course, is that any time you receive a text or e-mail from someone you don’t know, check very carefully to make sure it’s legitimate before you click on anything inside it.