Most of the people in the world are just good, normal people, who do an honest day's work, go home, have their evening meal with their family, and then go to bed, only to repeat the same thing the next day. Unfortunately though, not all people in the world are honest.

Unfortunately, it's fairly common for well-meaning people to erroneously believe that everyone they meet, holds themselves to the same high moral standards that they do, but sadly, not everyone does, and this is one reason why so many people fall victim to the same old tricks used by scammers. It's not that they are particularly naive, only that they are unsuspecting, because they wouldn't scam people themselves, so they simply don't suspect, or even imagine that there might be people trying to scam people. These people are reasonably easy prey for scammers, but hopefully, with a little guidance, they can learn some of the tricks that scammers might use to steal from them.

Let's try to explore some of the motivations behind why people scam.

It might be pretty obvious that greed is a major reason behind why people scam, and whilst certainly some of the scamming that's taking place, is done out of sheer desperation, sometimes by people in much poorer countries, who may not be able to find other ways to pay the bills or keep food on the table, it's certainly not the case that all of the scammers would fall into that demographic. It has been demonstrated that some of the scams are perpetrated by relatively wealthy individuals, groups or organizations, some of which apparently have no moral compass whatsoever, and would quite happily send an elderly person out into the freezing cold, to wait 45 minutes for a bus to take them to the bank, to withdraw their life savings, fully knowing that they, the scammer, are going to steal it all, even if they have already made millions from scamming people, with little to no regard for those people's wellbeing.

That is a dangerous kind of person, and If I was a judge, I would lock them up, throw away the key, and I'd never lose a wink of sleep over it.

So, I guess the big question is, why do so many scams exist, and why are the governments of the world so apparently impotent when it comes to tackling the individuals or groups that are perpetrating these crimes. It's a very good question, and I'm not certain I am the person who can answer that, but what I will say, is that they could definitely do more, but what's important, is that they don't use scamming as a narrative to remove freedoms from us, or force us to (or force corporations to) install some black-box program on our computers, that we have no idea how it works or how much data it is gathering. That kind of approach won't stop scammers, as scammers will find a way around that, which seems more like yet another punishment for the good, hardworking average Joe, because it would then seem that it is us that are being punished, for the crimes of others, and whilst all of that is important, it's not the focus of what I'm trying to write about today. Perhaps in the future, I might outline some of my ideas that governments might use to tackle some of these issues, whilst still preserving some degree of privacy, but for today, I will try to keep to keep things on track.

Instead of trying to point fingers, and blame certain groups, or nations, I instead want to attempt to outline some of the methods that scammers may use to secure your hard-earned cash, and tell you some of the ways that you can make things much harder for the scammer.

One of the most common scams that I see are phishing scams, this is one of many methods a scammer uses to steal your money. What they are after is your personal data, or your password(s). They may have a list of known active email addresses, literally tens of thousands, or even millions of them, and they might send emails to all of these addresses, claiming to be from every company they can imagine, very commonly claiming to be from companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Ebay, or whichever supermarkets they can think of. The main goal is to get your password. That would be one of the best things they could get, so they may direct you to a website that appears exactly like the website it claims to be, but as soon as someone 'logs in', the scammer has their password. This has become known as 'Phishing'. They might use something that would seem to be inconsequential, such as getting your Neopets password from 20 years ago, but then they can feed that password into a computer program that will use that password to make guesses as to what your other passwords might look like, such as your email accounts, bank accounts, Amazon account and so on, and if they get into those, you'd best buckle-up, because you're likely to be in for a rough ride.

Let's be clear here, some people are still trying to use their brain to remember their passwords for them, but in today's world, these are the people that the scammers are targetting. If you're one of those people, then I urge you, please use a password manager, and don't worry, this isn't a sneaky and lengthy advert for a specific password manager, in fact, I won't even recommend one over the other, but I do HIGHLY recommend using one (a reputable one), as it will allow you to use a different password with every single site you visit, and I imagine it will be 50 or more different sites that you use. It only takes for one of the scammers to work at any single one of these companies or websites you visit (some of which employ tens of thousands of people from all different kinds of backgrounds), and if you are trying to use your brain to remember your 'super secret' algorithm to remember your passwords, the scammer is going to have a field day, because they will just brute-force their way into your other accounts, there's no easy way to say it, it's just the reality of the situation. It's a dog-eat-dog world, and if you make it easy for them, they will rinse you for everything you've got.

One of the things that, for so long, deterred me from getting a password manager, was the idea that there could be a malicious actor working for the company that offers the password manager (and this is why you should do some research and use a reputable one), and for the longest time, I continued using variations of the same old passwords, on basically all of the sites I visited, and now, I look back, and I am glad I made the commitment to use a password manager. Now, literally every single one of my passwords vary from one another, with no two passwords alike, and I never have to click the 'I forgot my password' link, and reset my account, and what's more, even if the password manager company gets hacked, or there is a malicious actor working for them, they won't be able to do much, because I have multi-factor authentication on ALL of my accounts. This is important too, because it is what gave me the confidence to step-away from my old way of doing things (trying to remember my passwords, or having an algorithm that 'only I know about' to remember them), and to move towards the vastly superior system of having a computer remember them for me, in an encrypted system, that even the password manager company claim to be unable to access. This makes me a much harder target for scammers, though it doesn't stop me from getting tens of phishing emails a day, claiming to be from every company or organization under the Sun, including some pretending to be the government, the IRS, DVLA, ABCDEFG, or the Police, etc.

Anyway, the real point of me writing this article today, is because I want try to teach people some of the things that I have learned over the years, that will give the scammers a much harder time stealing your money. Basically, just assume that every unsolicited email that you get is a scam, and you won't go far wrong. There can be other ways to determine if an email is a scam, for example, it may have bad spelling, or grammatical errors that you would expect not to find in an email from a large corporation, company, governmental department or similar.

Spelling mistakes can be a really good indicator that an email isn't from whom it claims to be, but it doesn't mean that an email that seems to be almost perfect, is not a scam. Even an email or webpage with the highest level of spelling and grammar, could still be a scam. You have to be aware of these things, as it will make it much more difficult for them to profit from these activities.

Another good way that can help you to determine that an email isn't from whom it says it is, is to understand that, emails use 2 different names, one is the actual email address, and the other is the display name, or what's called an alias name.

Some email providers (ahem, Microsoft) don't display the actual email address in your inbox, but instead display the alias name, which can be anything that the sender wishes it to be, none of which is checked by most email providers, which makes it ridiculously easy for scammers to claim they are someone else, and get you to open their emails instead of discarding them, or simply ignoring them. It used to be that Microsoft would display the actual email address in the inbox, and this was the superior way of doing things, as the average Joe could easily see that that email is from an obviously fake email account, with a list of letters, or numbers, or from 4mas0n . com, for example. Now, however, Microsoft (and some other email providers) only display alias names in the inbox,  and remember that the sender of an email can choose any alias name they want. This way of displaying names in the inbox is so backwards, and I do have problems believing that this has simply been overlooked, but the main point I'm trying to make is that it forces the recipient to actually click into the email to see that it is not from whom the alias name says it is from, but is from a completely different email address.

I would argue that this goes a few miles beyond incompetency, and starts entering into other realms, but for now, I will keep those thoughts to myself, and, Microsoft, you should change that right away.

One thing I should tell you though, before I move on from this topic, is that even if you click the email, and the actual email says it is from the domain that you expect it to be from, it still might not be authentic, as it is fairly trivial for someone who is tech-savvy, to 'spoof' an email, which makes it appear as though the email came from an url which it didn't. You have to be mindful of this, and try to always keep in mind that the best policy is to refrain from clicking links in emails entirely, and never ever enter your passwords or personal information in, after following a link in an email. If you ever feel like you have fallen for a phishing scam, change your passwords immediately, inform your bank or credit card company that it's happened, and do everything you can to make it hard for the scammer. Don't give them an easy ride. What they are doing is wrong, and they know it.

It happened to me once, I got an email claiming to be from a website that I happen to use, and it said something along the lines of my account being suspended because they need further information, anyway, I must have been sleepy that day, because I fell for it, but luckily I realised that something was phishy, but it was only *after* entering my credit card information and password that I realised that the site was inauthentic, so I called up my bank first, and whilst I was in the queue to speak to the person at the bank, I was simultaneously logging into the potentially compromised account, and I changed the password. Luckily for me, at that point, I was already using a password manager, so all my accounts had a different password, and, I acted quickly, and dealt with it before the scammer had done anything malicious, but you have to realise that, they're pretty on-the-ball when they get someone's info. They are ready to spring into action, and in some cases, have an entire room full of people, just waiting to take advantage of you. If that had happened before I used a password manager, the story might very well have been different. If you think that changing all your passwords is too much work to bother getting a password manager in the first place, just imagine what it will be like trying to secure your accounts if something bad happens before you get one.

I've only scratched the surface on the things I wish to say about scams and scamming, but this article is already quite long, and I think I would do well to cover the rest in subsequent articles, so if you want to see more of this kind of content, then you can follow me here on publish0x, or follow me on Twitter, for Tweets when I post a new article: My Twitter 

I want to take the time to thank you for reading, and I welcome your feedback in the comments.

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