Robocalls have got to be one the most annoying inventions of the 21st century. Unfortunately, those phone calls can do a lot more than disrupt your dinner to send you running to the phone just to hear about an offer for an extended warranty on your car. Using sophisticated spoofing methods and dogged persistence, they can swindle unsuspecting targets out of hundreds, or even thousands of dollars, using nothing but a phone. In fact, according to data from Trucaller, Americans lost close to $30 billion to phone scams in 2020.

Technology has made it far too easy and cheap for scammers to place a huge number of robocalls in seconds. New robocall platforms can make up to 5,000 simultaneous calls a second for as little as a dollar. Even if only 10 of these phone calls have their desired effect on the targets, the scammers have pulled in a solid profit. 

Here’s what you need to know about phone scams and how to avoid them. 

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With many families still working and attending school online from their homes, we are using more and more data. While the flexibility of being able to do so much from home is an amazing leap in communication technology, it also increases the possibility of our personal information getting into the wrong hands. The last thing you want at the end of the day is to find out your information has been stolen.

To protect you and your family while online, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission offers these tips:

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With states continuing to work toward reopening, as usual, scammers aren’t far behind. Keep your finances safe and watch out for these trending scams as the country continues to reopen:

Account Takeovers

Shorter hours and percentage-capacity rules mean many consumers are still shopping remotely. This leads to an increase in online retail scams like account takeovers, where scammers hack a company’s database to break into a customer’s account. Using the customer’s remembered payment information, the scammer goes on to place large orders to their own address — all on the client’s dime.

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