One of the most common scams out there is your bank or financial institution calling you. But it's not really your bank. It's a scammer, essentially impersonating your bank. The gadgets are able to convince people who have peeked into the phone to share their personal information, including passwords, Social Security numbers, all kinds of personal details that they then use to steal your money or steal your identity.
And so you want to be so careful when you get a phone call from someone or a text message or an email you want to verify who it is. So actually, even though it feels rude, you want to say I'm going to hang up and call my bank myself, and then you get the verified number on the back of your bank card or wherever you have it and call yourself.
You want to be regularly looking for anything you don't recognize, so you want to be regularly reviewing your credit card statements, your banking statements, and most importantly, to find out what you don't recognize. And if there's something that's out of place, you want to call and investigate, because then you can shut down. You can shut down a scam if you think it's going to happen. And then you also want to know that you have strong passwords across all of your accounts.
If it's good, too good to be true in any sense. It is always the one thing, and I wonder if it fits here. I experienced this lesson a week ago, and I am determined to do it again this year. I was selling some stuff on Facebook Marketplace and there are like the cash app scams, whether it be Venmo or Zelle, where people will comment on your post right away message you and then they are trying to get you.
It's a crazy swapping of information like they want your, you know, anything email or phone number you use with your cash app account. And then there's I had to look into this whole thing because it happened multiple times and I was like, what the hell is going on? If you really have your personal information, then the first thing you want to do is to immediately alert your bank. You might your bank might suggest that you change your bank account just to keep that money safe. If you have shared anything with anyone who has contacted you and then you want to report it, then it makes it easier for the authorities to track them, to find patterns and, of course, to track down these scam artists.