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. And because they can be so convincing, they also convince people who have picked up the phone to share their personal information, share things like 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. Even though it's 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 reviewing your credit card statements, your banking statements, most importantly, to look for anything you don't recognize. And if there's something that appears out of place, you want to call and investigate, because then you can shut down. If you suspect a scam, you can shut it down. And you want to just be sure that you have strong passwords across all of your accounts.
If it's good, it's too good to be true in any sense. It always is the one thing, and I wonder if it fits here. I just experienced this lesson a week ago. I was selling some stuff on Facebook Marketplace and there are like the cash app scams, whether Venmo or Zelle, where people will comment on my post right away message you and then they are trying to get in.
It's a crazy swapping of information like they want your, you know, what email or phone number you use with your cash app account. And then there is I had to look into this whole thing because it happened repeatedly and I was like, what the hell is going on? If you share any of your personal information, it's the first thing you want to do, if you actually have shared any of your personal details, to immediately alert your bank. You might be told by your bank that you need to change your bank account, you know, shut down the old one or the new one just to keep that money safe. If you have shared something with anyone who has contacted you and then you want to report it, since if we report scams, it makes it easier for the authorities to track them, to find patterns and of course, to track down these scam artists.