Scammers use a variety of popular platforms to try and lure you into any number of scams.
Advanced Fee Fraud – i.e. scams that trick you into believing you’re going to inherit a large amount of money as soon as you pay out a fee or charge – is more popularly initiated by unsolicited emails. That is to say, Spam email.
But scammers are increasingly using a number of other methods of initiating contact, like the below screenshot, which shows an invitation on Skype.
You can see from the invitation that scammers are using the optional “personal message” feature you can send with an invitation to get their initiation spiel across to the victim.
Despite being started with a Skype invitation, the template of the scam seems to remain the same. A stranger trying to sneak away a large amount of money, wanting to use your bank account as a conduit, whereupon you’re promised a substantial cut of the profit.
The same, tired old story.
People who take the hook are then instructed to pay the scammer a series of costs, what the victim assumes are costs that naturally accrue when completing such hefty financial transactions, but in reality are just made-up fees that are duly stolen from the victim.
The only difference in our example above is that in this case it has been initiated by a Skype invitation. Not an email.
Do you know anyone who could get tricked by this kind of scam?
Thanks for reading! But before you go… as part of our latest series of articles on how to earn a little extra cash using the Internet (without getting scammed) we have been looking into how you can earn gift vouchers (like Amazon vouchers) using reward-per-action websites such as SwagBucks. If you are interested we even have our own sign-up code to get you started. Want to learn more? We discuss it here. (Or you can just sign-up here and use code Nonsense70SB when registering.)
Become a Facebook Supporter. For 0.99p (~$1.30) a month you can become a Facebook fan, meaning you get an optional Supporter Badge when you comment on our Facebook posts, as well as discounts on our merchandise. You can subscribe here (cancel anytime.)