Money scams continue to victimize unsuspecting citizens all over the world. In the USA, many of these fraudulent schemes are advertised in classified sites and popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Even if the tactics and schemes that are used by the fraudsters who operate these Web crimes regularly change from time to time, their fundamental objective remains the same – They’re out to steal your money, and they want to do this by tricking you into believing false guarantees and empty promises.
After they steal your money, many of them also steal your financial account credentials, private information, personal details and other sensitive data. They do this by logging the details of the credit cards, debit cards, e-wallet accounts, online bank accounts and the like that you used to send them cash for their money scams. Some of them are just out for your cash, so they use money transmitters and other irreversible and untraceable cash transfer methods.
What you initially need to do to avoid money scams is to learn about the most recent tactics and schemes that they use to victimize users like you for their fraudulent online schemes. This will allow you to quickly recognize potential scams on the Internet, enabling you to steer clear from them before it’s too late. So, how exactly can you do this with as little pain and effort as possible?
Learn About the Newest Online Money Scams This Year
Online communities that are dedicated to fighting money scams on the Internet among other types of cyber fraud provide helpful resources and user-generated content. For example, BigScammers.Com offers a publicly viewable user-generated content repository where users can freely post their scam complaints and file Web crime reports anonymously against the Web scams that they’ve fallen for. This allows other users to learn the newest types of online scams and Internet crimes at the moment.
Organizations like the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), Action Fraud (national online crime reporting center of the UK) and RSA Fraud-action among others also publish updates, reminders, alerts and announcements about the money scams and Internet crimes that get caught up in their radar. You’ll be able to access these alerts in their websites and social media pages.
To start you out on the right foot, found below are some of the newest forms of money scams in the USA this year. By learning each of these common online scams, you’ll be able to quickly recognize potential Internet scams that are similar to these Web crimes:
Recent Money Scams in the USA
- Money Flipping Fraud – This is where scammers try to trick you into believing that you can get ten-fold returns of your investment in just a matter of days, practically without doing anything (except give them money). What they tell their intended victims is that they have contacts in the upper executive levels of the largest financial institutions of the world who can help them exploit a bug in the global financial system to add one zero to the value of your investment. For example, if you invest $100 in these money scams, then they promise to give you back $1,000 less a 15% cut (just to make their story more believable).
To make these money scams even more believable, they tell their target victims that they won’t be asking for credit card details, private information and other sensitive credentials. What they tell unsuspecting users to do is to use prepaid debit cards, gift cards and money packs to send over their investments for processing.
In fact, the main reason why they use these payment methods for these money scams is to provide themselves with layers of anonymity and security against possible traces, identification and exposure. These are also irreversible payment methods, which simply means victims won’t be able to recover their money when they use prepaid debit cards, gift cards or money packs to send over money to these fraudsters.
- Check-Cashing Fraud – This is among the oldest tricks in the book. Scammers convince unsuspecting users to accept checks on their behalf, and to cash out these checks for a lucrative cut from the value of the check. Many of these criminals target US-based users with checking accounts for these money scams.
That’s because in the USA, banks do not wait for checks to clear before they hand over the cash value of the check. Victims who unknowingly participate in these money scams are contacted by their banks several days or so after they cashed out these checks.
In that call, they learn about the bad news – The checks turn out to be fakes, and some have even undergone fraud investigations and legal complications because of this.
Victims of this money scam don’t usually have any way to recover the money that they sent to the scammer. That’s because they’re required to send over the fraudsters share from the money that’s handed by their banks through cash-only money transmitters.
- Bogus Business Partnership Offers – These money scams are often operated by organized crime syndicates. They pose as legitimate businesses that are offering fake partnership opportunities disguised as franchising arrangements. What they do is convince their intended victims to register businesses and get online merchant accounts in their countries.
They promise lucrative shares from all profits that are generated by the business, and the only role of their target victims is to manage the registration and taxes of the business, so they say. In reality, what they just do is cash out stolen credit cards and hacked financial accounts through the online merchant accounts of the newly registered businesses. Their victims are then left holding the bag, answering to fraud investigators and shouldering all charge-backs, disputes and unauthorized payment claims along with the exorbitant fees that come with these.
These are the most prevalent money scams in the USA this 2017. To learn more about the other types of fraudulent online moneymaking schemes that you might encounter during your day-to-day activities on the Web – You should consider signing up at BigScammers.Com. This online community offers a convenient way for you to receive instant alerts and real time notices about the newest forms of online scams and Web crimes at the moment, allowing you to quickly recognize and steer clear of potential money scams.
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