Phishing and other cyber crimes: How to avoid getting scammed

In 2001, when I was a new member of the California State Assembly, a newspaper reporter alerted me to a strange development on the web page from my 1997-2000 term on the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.

Visitors looking for my old Supervisorial site instead found themselves on something called “Tina’s Live Webcam.”

Let me just say I was not amused. The District Attorney’s office quickly determined that “Tina” was apparently located in New York, the company running the website was somewhere in Canada, and the server was in China. Fortunately, the whole thing was shut down within a matter of days.

That early brush with online scamming sparked my interest in privacy protection and data security. During my time in the State Legislature, I authored more than a dozen related laws and chaired the State Senate’s Select Committee on Privacy. After returning to the Board of Supervisors in 2013, I successfully pushed to create our County’s first Office of Privacy Protection — because all these years later, the problems, of course, have grown even more complex.

Which is why, earlier this year, as a member of the County’s Library Board, I was enthusiastic to help organize and moderate the Library District’s two-part series on protecting ourselves and our families from online and telephone scams.

To give some sense of the scope of the challenge, according to the FBI, recently there were more than 847,000 complaints in a single year to the agency’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.

Phishing — where criminals find crafty ways to get us to reveal passwords, credit card numbers, and personal information — is one of the top three online crimes, along with nonpayment/non-delivery schemes and personal data breaches. The FBI also recently reported an uptick in romance scams, which often target people with fake crypto investments. In 2021, losses from suspected online crimes approached $7 billion. Many cases go unreported, with victims embarrassed or ashamed to admit that they were deceived, or unsure of where to turn for help.

But remember this: Any of us can fall prey to these scams, regardless of age, gender, education, or economic background. Every demographic is vulnerable, but older folks — typically more trusting, often retired, more likely to have a nest egg, and who may have access to substantial home equity — are known to be specifically targeted. For an older person on a fixed income, these scams can have a particularly devastating financial and emotional impact.

At the Cupertino Library’s “Protect Yourself from Scammers” event, Riana Pfefferkorn, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, talked about a number of common schemes to bilk victims by phone, email, text, and online marketplaces.

Scammers, she said, come up with new tactics all the time – software to impersonate your bank, fake cryptocurrency platforms, stories that build trust or sound like a family emergency. All prey on people’s vulnerabilities, compassion, or fears. Her commonsense tips for spotting a scam included:

• The domain of an email or web address that seems to be coming from your bank or credit union but doesn’t match — check carefully.
• Messages that have misspellings, typos, poor grammar, or are in all caps.
• The “accidental misdial” caller who strikes up a conversation.
• The tone is off — a message from a family member or colleague saying they’re in trouble that doesn’t sound quite right.
• An urgent call to action, often with a threat for not complying.
• Being asked to pay in advance, in an unusual way – gift card code, cryptocurrency, a payment app (e.g., Zelle, Venmo), or a wire transfer.

Pfefferkorn offered additional advice on keeping personal information safe, being proactive about protecting your finances, and what to do if you do get scammed. (Step one, as I learned all those years ago: don’t be reluctant to ask for help.)

Financially literate consumers are folks who have the skills to assess the credibility and detect the fraud at the earliest opportunity. I hope you’ll check out Pfefferkorn’s full video presentation, as well as the Library District’s “Protect Yourself from Scammers” event featuring Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Erin West, both available online.

With a little effort, you can keep yourself safe!

Joe Simitian
Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors

This article was originally published in Los Gatos Living and Saratoga Spotlight in August 2023.