Tips for Avoiding Scammers

[Applause] [Music] good morning and welcome to Rose Red Homestead micr moment Monday where today we're going to focus on something that has directly to do with self-reliance and that is we're going to be sharing some tips on how we can avoid scammers it is well known that um older people are um very rich targets for people who would like to scam us out of our money and um property and other things and so uh we need to be especially Vigilant and um more so than we were in our younger years even I'm really lucky because Jim has um several long suits you know in a marriage it's great when um we have a distributed expertise I guess we could say and he is especially m a great stickler on safety issues and also um managing our finances he's Vigilant about checking things I'm not so Vigilant I'm not even very Vigilant about checking the gas gauge in my truck so sometimes he has to tell me Pam you're down to under a quarter of a tank so um anyway it's great to be married to somebody who's Vigilant in that regard um we are members of AARP and as such we get their magazine and this month or last month they had an article on how to avoid scammers and I thought that it had some really good things not just for those of us who are considered to be older but for everyone to be vigilant in safeguarding their private information so I just thought we would take a few minutes and go over over these things there are seven things that I want to share with you they call this an updated list because they have put out lists before and there are other places where you can get lists um so it uh first one is and I had no clue about this and it's a great one um you know Jim and I very often in on our phones we will get um text messages from people claiming to be UPS or even the US Post office we have a package here um that the address is messed up we need for you to call this number right away so we can get your package delivered to you well we recognize those as scams immediately first of all we didn't order anything and second of all that's not how those entities would have contacted us UPS knows where I live they have my address well that's true he goes up and down our dirt road delivering to all of us all the time on this street when you live in a little bit of a rural area you do more ordering online probably than if you live in the city so I did not know this about iPhone and I checked in Android phones also have the same um thing that you can do to help with this now if scammers don't know how to get or if they cannot get in touch with you directly then um it is more difficult for them to contact you and so what the first recommendation is is to open up your contact list and get rid of all contacts that you no longer use I was astounded when I went to my contact list I have people listed in my contact list who I don't even remember and I know it's from my time at three previous universities and so I will be taking some time to go through and just clean out my contact list family friends people that I know I will leave in and then here's the thing and I just did this to my phone recently you go into um the um oh what's it called settings you go into the settings and select phone and then you scroll down to where uh there is an option for silence unknown callers so I turned that on and what happens when your phone receives a call that is not from someone in your contact list list it goes directly to voicemail and leaves you a voicemail so you still have the option of checking voic mail to see who may have contacted you but it will not ring through for you to answer so that I thought was just a great tip the next one is to make sure you are signed out of any financial apps on your phone credit cards financial institutions peer-to-peer apps such as venmo cash app or zel and also make sure your account settings require security measures such as a pin a fingerprint or a facial recognition this ensures that if your phone is stolen the thief will not have access to your money on my iPhone I have um a feature that is called wallet it comes with iPhone and I do keep some of my credit cards numbered and with a picture of that card there so I can use Apple pay in stores if I want to but even with that being the case having the picture of the face of my credit card even if I am in my phone that I've gone through the first level of security which is my password which is a pretty strong password even to get into my phone um then it takes it takes um facial recognition before it will allow me to use that card and so it is protected that way as well um so then it says audit your wallet or your purse and and these are the physical wallets and purses that we may carry with us now this was one that we mentioned in a previous video some months ago and it is really really important so I'm going to read you what they say remove cards and information you don't need to carry such as your social security or Medicare card and make copies of anything you do need to carry front and back and store in a safe place at home and um we don't need to carry our social security card we do not need to carry our Medicare card for those of us that have one of those and so don't carry anything that you do not need I have even removed pictures from my wallet because I have pictures on my phone that I can access of my loved ones and um I don't want if my purse were stolen I don't want anyone um having access to pictures of in my wallet of my family then um number four is to routinely monitor your credit report some banks or credit cards offer this as a free service you can also go to annualcreditreport.com to get free reports from the big three credit bureaus watch for unusual activity if you see any reported immediately to all three bureaus and appropriate financial institutions so that is one thing we need to add to our monitoring list do you do that Jim do you no yeah I don't do that either but we probably should start doing that every few months this is number five revise the passwords on your financial accounts your best bet is to use a passphrase I love my 17 dogs and it's do o z and then with an exclamation point so that's a little phrase rather than one of those complicated things with all different kinds of symbols and everything in it that I can never remember and then you rely on your um uh automatic password um platform on your electronic device to feed that in well I don't know how to work that very well on mine and it always gives me the wrong password when I do it automatically and so I have started resorting to a passphrase and it is so much easier for me to remember and so much more difficult for a scammer to have any clue as to what my past phrase is because I use things that I'm very familiar with that are not very common like I know scientific names for plants and those are very familiar to me so I will sometimes slip in uh something like um my favorite flower is and then I'll give a scientific name and that's part of a passcode and that's something that I can remember easily um but something that that an outside person would never come up with and then it says um I love my 17 dogs exclamation point is much stronger than scruffy 23 keep track of passwords in a highly secure password manager or by writing them down and storing them safely so I I use that method of writing them down keeping them in a a secure format and hiding them so that they're not easily available then here's one that is um oh one more thing I want to say about revising our passwords both Jim and I have experienced and perhaps you have too um fairly recently we have received a fraud alert on some of our bank cards um on in my case someone had tried to run through a an amount of I think it was like a120 7 in one of my accounts and the fraud alert from the bank contacted me directly and I thought that their fraud notice to me directly was a scammer so I picked up the phone and called them in person and they verified that it was their scam people scam alert people that were notifying me that someone had gotten my password well one of the mistakes that I made early on was that I Ed the same password for a whole lot of things I know no longer do that but this was a relic of um throwback to when uh the days that I was doing that and so somehow they got my password and tried to access my account and what the I talked to the fraud people about it and one of the things that they said was that now what a lot of scammers try to do is they if they get a password however they do that and attempt to access accounts they'll do it with a very small amount and they'll give it a certain amount of data and if it if it U goes through then they will hit your account with a whole series of um not enough to alert people but like an amount that you might spend at a grocery store or that sort of thing repeatedly until they can drain your account and so um I got a new card and set up a new password and then with Jim um they gave him a dummy account so that if someone attempted to use that card that instead of hitting the account where some funds were kept it would hit this dummy account with a zero balance and it would discourage the scammers that way so you might check with your bank to see if such a thing is available where you do your banking one of the most important ones I think is this next one which is number six be skeptical many criminals use friendliness and compassion and kindness as their persuasion method rather than fear and intimidation likewise scammers create a sense of urgency to get you to act act out of emotion rather than logic if you feel pressured or manipulated walk away we have had friends who have been um victims of this kind of um a feeling of of um making you feel wanted making feel important and um using charm and compassion as a way to get to you and then um they've been scammed out of quite a lot of money and I just that just wrinkles me that people will try to trap other people through goodness and compassion and so we just need to be vigilant and very very skeptical uh thankfully I have a pretty skeptical approach to life I Come From The Sciences and that's what scientists do we're skeptical about everything and we require a lot more evidence than maybe someone else might so be skeptical of any new person that comes into your life check references just be very very cautious and make sure that they are who you really think that they are or who they claim to be or who they claim to be yeah then um for those of us who are on social media check your social media settings to make sure you have your accounts set to private this allows only people you choose to trust to view your pages and contact you now those of us who are in business have to um be a little cautious about that but perhaps we can set up private accounts just for family and others but our public business related uh social media efforts um Jim and I are very cautious even then about giving away too much information about our uh about our private lives for instance uh we love our community and as a whole we trust you but we have of course had um unsavory people who have made comments and who may be attempting to uh get to us as well so it is kind of a sad State of Affairs that we have to be so cautious but we can be smart about it this is something that we can be more diligent in in making sure that we make it extraordinarily difficult for scammers to actually get to us if you have additional ideas or additional lists for us that that you would like to uh share with our community please do so make comments on this you can share your own stories about how you've avoided ided being scammed and um some tricks that have been tried against you and uh we can make this video a source of good information for all of us who are concerned about helping each other stay safe so thanks so much for joining us and we appreciate you so very much and we will see you again very soon for more videos and especially next Monday for another micro moment a [Music]

Channel: RoseRed Homestead

Views: 8,295

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Id: wy94JvTg0HE

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2024