You receive an email telling you a payment is being processed, and the invoice is attached – you have 24 hours to respond and cancel. You maybe get a phone call saying the same – you’re being charged 900$ to an Apple account for an Apple 16 Pro, and if you want to cancel you have to call back now. Angry phone calls insisting you’ve missed a jury date or emails suggesting you’ve somehow missed a debt payment are also picking up. The worst part is that if you answer, even if you don’t say anything, you get more, because these are scams.
The exact wording of the scam varies, but the jist is the same: you’re suddenly in trouble, you have a very tight deadline to be out of trouble, and the consequences will be severe. Why? Rushed people think less clearly! Ever tried to catch a falling knife, even though you know that you shouldn’t? It’s because the danger of a falling sharp thing is overriding the part of your brain capable of rational thought. The easiest way to get data on someone is to make them panic and give it to you. The threat of jailtime when jail can now mean disappearing somewhere far, far away from your home state is more terrifying than ever.
What can you do? Firstly, it’s very unfortunate that we’ve gotten to the point where unnamed callers must be treated as scammers first and anything else second, but the reality is that phone numbers are sold between legitimate and illegitimate vendors all the time. Give your phone number to a valid, real subscription service, and it’ll end up on a list somewhere either because the data was stolen in a breach or because that subscription service sold the access to the data, which might have been in the TOS. If you don’t recognize the contact information, and if your carrier has the number flagged as a spam risk, don’t pick up. You will miss real calls this way, but ideally, the places reminding you that you have an appointment will leave a voicemail for you, and you can call them back with the number that you have for them.
Secondly, take a minute! Does what’s being told to you make sense? For example, the jury duty scam. Occasionally, a letter will go missing even when the post office is trying its best, so you will generally receive more than one letter before anyone ever tries to call you. Other examples – Apple is allegedly going to charge you for a phone you didn’t order? Does Apple call to confirm for any other sort of order? Did they call you for the first phone you ordered from them? You have a debt you didn’t pay, and somehow nobody told you before this extremely threatening phone call today?
When they push you to panic, take a second, put them on hold, and breathe.
Today, any call or email could be a scam. It’s an exhausting way to navigate the world, and there isn’t any one foolproof solution aside from taking a second to verify with some other source that the phone call or email you’re receiving is legit.
