Yes, It CAN Happen to You

In 2023, American consumers lost $10 billion to fraud, and by far the most common swindles were internet imposter schemes. According to a CNBC report, nearly 854,000 people filed complaints to the FTC about imposter scams in 2023, representing about a third the total consumer fraud reports that the agency received. Consumers lost $2.7 billion to such scams and the average loss was $800. How many such scams went unreported is anyone's guess.

An imposter scam is when someone pretends to be someone you trust to persuade you to send them money, or to give them information that they can use to steal your identity (any your money) later. A scammer may falsely claim to be a romantic interest, the government, the IRS, a relative in distress, a well-known business (Amazon is especially popular with scammers), or a customer or technical support expert. A particularly popular scam is to claim to be the "security department" at a company you do business with claiming that there is suspicious activity on your account and asking for you help to get to the bottom if it.

Surprisingly, Millennials, Gen X, GenY are about 30% more likely to fall for such schemes than are people over 60. But older people are much more likely to get in deeply and lose more money than younger ones. For example, victims age 80 and older had a median loss of $1,450. By comparison, the typical loss didn’t exceed $500 for those younger than 70.

Right about now you are congratulating yourself for being too skeptical, to well informed or just too smart to fall for any such nonsense. And yet hundreds of people just as skeptical, informed and smart as you are do fall for them every day.

Internet scams are carefully designed by scammers and criminals to manipulate your emotions and tap into your unconscious biases, so you are practically hardwired to fall for them, says cybersecurity expert and computer scientist Daniela Oliveira, an associate professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville. In one study a group of people who ranging in age from 18 to 89 were sent a variety of  so-called “spear-phishing emails,” that is, phishing emails that are somewhat tailored to the individual and targeting different approaches such as finances, health, ideological issues, legal issues, security and social issues. If the user took the bait and clicked on the link in the phishing email, they were sent to a fake, innocuous webpage, and the researchers recorded a hit. 

At the end of the study, the participants were asked to read a set of 21 phishing emails and rate how likely they would be to click on each one. People indicated a very low likelihood that they’d fall for them even though 43 percent of them took the bait during the study and clicked on the links at least once and 11.9 percent clicked more than once when they were not told in advance that the email was a scam.

So yes, even you can fall for it. 

Here is the rest of the CNBC report, including suggestions for how you can reduce the odds of getting caught up in an internet scam yourself.