The categories don't change even when the tricks do
Here is a fact that will make the rest of this course easier. There are, in practice, only a handful of scams. Four, perhaps five, if you look closely.
Fake authority. Fake prize. Fake emergency. Fake romance. Fake tech problem. That accounts for most of it. The IRS call, the lottery text, the "your grandson's in jail" call, the online sweetheart who needs money, the pop-up announcing your computer has a virus. Different costume, same handful of underlying shapes.
I keep a notebook of every scam message my family forwards to me. I began it years ago, simply to keep them organized in my own mind. By the time I had roughly thirty recorded, I noticed I was no longer writing new categories. I was writing new outfits on the same five figures. That bothered me initially, because I had expected to learn something new each week. I did not. I was learning the same five things in progressively better disguises.
That is good news for you, not bad. It means you need not memorize every scam circulating this month. You only need to learn to recognize the shape.
The five shapes, quick version
Fake authority. Someone claims to represent the IRS, Social Security, your bank's fraud department, the police. They want you frightened and compliant fast.
Fake prize or opportunity. You have won something, or a deal is too good to decline, or an investment only works if you act today.
Fake emergency. A family member is in trouble and needs money right now, and you are told not to inform anyone else.
Fake romance or friendship. Someone online is fond of you a great deal, very quickly, and eventually needs help with money.
Fake tech problem. A pop-up or a call reports that your computer is infected, and they require remote access to repair it.
Every scam I have ever recorded in that notebook fits one of those five buckets. The AI voice-cloning method circulating right now, in which a "grandchild" calls sounding exactly like the real one, is fake emergency. Same bucket, new tool. I will state plainly that I am still catching up on how quickly that technology is advancing. But the bucket has not changed, and that is the part I can teach you regardless of which tool they adopt next year.
What to actually do with this at home
The practical part. When something arrives in your inbox, your texts, or your phone call, run it through these buckets before you do anything else.
- Name the bucket aloud, even privately. "This is trying to be a fake authority call." Naming it breaks the spell somewhat.
- Determine who benefits if you act fast. All five want you moving before you think. This is the position I hold most firmly in the entire course: slow down and you win. If a message makes you feel rushed, that is the tell, not the content of the message.
- Verify through a channel they do not control. Do not call the number in the text. Look up your bank's number yourself and call that one. Call your grandson's actual cell phone, the one saved in your contacts, not the one that just called you.
- Tell someone before you act, not after. State it aloud to a spouse, a child, a neighbor. Scammers depend on isolation. That is the part people overlook.
I want to remain on that last point for a moment.
A woman in our ward, a widow, was drawn into an online relationship over roughly a month. A pleasant man, attentive, saying all the correct things, requiring a little help here and there on account of one crisis or another. No one in her family knew until they noticed the details were not adding up. By then it had continued for some time.
I do not tell that story for a laugh, because there is none in it. I tell it because it is the clearest example I have of what occurs when the emotional hook succeeds and no one is present to say "wait, does this seem odd to you." She was not foolish. She was lonely, and someone professionally skilled at exploiting that located her. That is fake romance and fake emergency operating together, which is frankly the most dangerous combination, because it strikes you twice.
If you have a parent, a widow, or a widower in your life who spends a great deal of time alone online, the kindest thing you can do is not to lecture them about scams. It is to check in frequently enough that, if something goes sideways, they have someone to run it past. Not from distrust. Because everyone needs a second set of eyes sometimes, including me, including you.
Before next time
Try this on the next suspicious message you receive, whenever it appears. Do not act on it yet. Simply name which of the five buckets it is attempting to be, and observe how quickly that resolves it.
~kenneth