There are so many scams going around these days! I think we barely avoided becoming a victim of fraud today and it was all my fault (and I knew better!).
I checked my email today and got an email from Netflix saying that hubby's credit card on the account expired and we needed to add a new card for payment. Stupidly, I clicked the link in the email and entered the new card info and the second I hit 'submit' I thought "something is not right here". While it was true that hubby's card had expired (he had just got the new card in the mail), I did several things wrong...
#1, never click through a link in an email to enter personal information. Close out the email, go online to the business website, and provide the information that way.
#2, even though the email looks legit, it may not be. This scam email said Netflix Service but other email from Netflix just says 'Netflix'.
#3, click on the email name and check it out. When I clicked on the email name 'Netflix Service' it showed the email link as some woman's name @ hotrod something .com. Definitely not Netflix.
#4, when in doubt, Google and see if this is a scam. Apparently it is and there was even a reddit thread about this exact scam.
So after a moment of panic, I closed the email and "account" I had logged into and called the bank immediately. We had the bank cancel and reissue the card with a new number and cancel any pending charges. Then I logged into our Netflix account and changed the password then logged out (I entered the email and password through the email link so not only did the scammer get the credit card info, they got the Netflix user name and password). Next I logged into the account with the new password and put in a new credit card for them to charge.
Whew! I hoped that fixed any potential scam we could have become a victim of but we will definitely be watching our credit card accounts in the next couple of weeks. I have all of my credit reports frozen to avoid fraud so we will be freezing hubby's credit reports as well. I also haven't pulled our free annual credit reports in quite a while so I will do that too. Aaarrggg
Wow! Glad you avoided that one. It's amazing how much effort some of these scammers are making.
ReplyDeleteSomeone called us and claimed that we still owe money for a cell phone that we bought in 2015 and never finished making payments for. They had the actual street address of a place where we used to live - *however*, we did not live at that place in 2015, and neither of us owned the model of cell phone that they were talking about. You can search online for people's names and see possible past addresses from various years. The person claimed that, if we did not make a payment, someone would be arriving at our home to serve us with court papers. I searched online and found out that this is known as the "process server" scam.
I've got similar process server calls. Now I don't even answer when my phone rings unless I know the person!
DeleteWow! Yeah, never click on links in emails. Sometimes I think we do it on autopilot without thinking. I recently got an "invitation" to an event from my cousin. I knew it was fake, so I deleted it and a few days later, she announced she was indeed hacked. I wish our email providers had better filters to catch these fake and dangerous emails.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like phones, texts, and emails can all be hacked these days. Scary stuff!
Delete