With technology advancing quicker than we can keep up, there are more and more warnings about staying safe online. However, it’s not just on the World Wide Web where you have to keep your wits about you.
We’ve all seen those warnings about text scams, and while you sometimes wonder how someone can be gullible enough to send their bank details to some unknown, scammers have become a lot more advanced in recent times.
Before you know it, you could be giving away important information without even knowing it.
Apparently, there are three little words that could alert you to a text message being a scam.
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Speaking to Reader’s Digest, Tim Bajarin, chairman of Creative Strategies - a market research company based in San Jose, California - explained this singular phrase is a massive red flag.
Bajarin says that if you see ‘would you kindly,’ you should immediately delete the text. The reason is because ‘kindly’ isn’t a word used in the US vernacular.
“The word ‘kindly’ is simply something we don’t use in our common vernacular in the U.S.,” said Bajarin. “You’ll often hear it used in countries with British influence, perhaps once a colonial country, where English isn’t their mother tongue [such as Nigeria, India and Pakistan].”
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Up there with poor spelling and grammar, these three words are the biggest clue that someone is contacting you from a foreign ‘boiler room.’
The phrase ‘would you kindly’ will mean a lot to fans of 2007’s BioShock, with those three words being used as a trigger for the post-hypnotic suggestions that were placed into the mind of the game’s protagonist, Jack.
This isn’t the only thing to be looking out for, though.
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Doug Shadel, founder of the Fraud Prevention Strategies and former Fraud Investigator and Special Assistant to Attorney General’s Office in Washington State, added that any unsolicited messages should have you questioning their intentions.
Shadel says we need to look out for messages like “Did I miss you today?”, “Hi, how are you?”, and “I’ll be late for the meeting.”
When you contact them saying they’ve got the wrong person, the sender might try to defraud you.
If you befriend these scammers, the next step is likely to try and get you to send them gifts or cryptocurrency.
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The (seemingly) obvious one is to never click a link from someone pretending to be your bank.
Basically, if something seems a little off, chances are it might be.