How online scams target teenagers

Financially Inclined September 27, 2024 Transcript

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Yanely Espinal: What’s up everybody, I’m Yanely Espinal, and welcome to Financially Inclined from Marketplace. We’re sharing money lessons for living life your own way. Today, we’re tackling a real problem that I know a lot of you are facing: online scams. I’ve traveled around the country, visiting many schools, and I always hear some wild stories about teens getting scammed out of their hard earned money. And it breaks my heart, and it makes me want to know, how are these scammers getting away with this? So today, I’m talking to Selena Larsen, a threat researcher, who shares more about how scams can target teenagers and what to look out for, but most importantly, how you can protect yourself. All right, let’s get into it. 

Yanely Espinal: We know that there’s a lot of different types of scams that happen online in general, but a lot of them are starting to target younger audiences. Can you tell us, like, what are some of the techniques that they’re starting to use to target teenagers specifically?

Selena Larson: Yeah, so there are a few types of scams that might be common to see. For example, on social media, somebody reaching out to ask you to send compromising photos of yourselves. Those then can be used for blackmail. There’s also things like job scams or scholarship scams, where someone might reach out and offer you something like a work from home job that you don’t have to do very much hourly work to get a very high payment. There’s also things like cracked game advertisements that can lead to malware. So those of you who like to play Fortnite might be looking for skins on YouTube, and the link there actually leads to something bad on your computer. There’s things like online shopping or business imposter scams: they’ll set themselves up, try to get people to buy stuff off of them, and then they disappear after you pay for an item? There’s free stuff scams, so anytime that something says it’s free, but you have to pay for shipping, that is a little bit suspicious.

Yanely Espinal: Yeah, definitely seen a lot of those online.

Selena Larson: There’s also, of course, general phishing. This can happen on email, text messages, phone calls or social media. Basically a phishing attack tries to trick you into falling for the phisher’s desired action. They want you to reveal financial information, give them your login credentials or other sensitive information. And finally, we have things like payment scams, so things like Venmo, Cash App or cryptocurrency. Someone might ask you for a small fee to get a lot of money in return, but those just aren’t true. 

Yanely Espinal: Now, what are some of the red flags that you would say teens should look out for across all of these different types of scams?

Selena Larson: Of course. So if we think about how they’re scamming people, it really comes down to something called social engineering. When you think about social engineering, it’s a bit like a con artist. This typically starts as a friendly conversation. Someone might pretend to be in a position of authority, like a boss or a relative, they might ask you to do something like purchase gift cards. Another example is someone pretending to be an attractive person to try and get you to send them money or compromising information. Something else could be a social media offering you a part time modeling job if you first send money to cover the shipping or clothing to wear. Social Engineering comes in a lot of different forms, and really, this is just the bad guys trying to hack your brain. They want to make you feel a certain way, like happy, stressed, excited, to make decisions that you otherwise wouldn’t. They have prolonged conversations. They try and make you trust them to really draw it out. Other things like isolating you from your friends or your peers, or say, “Oh, don’t tell your mom and dad about this conversation. Don’t tell your friends about this conversation.” If you’re having that type of interaction and someone tells you to keep it a secret, that is an indication that this could be malicious. 

Yanely Espinal: That makes a lot of sense. If you feel like you are hearing this now and then, you’re like, “Wait, it sounds like something I’m familiar with…” Like, maybe you’re already involved in a scam. What can you do if you feel like you’re already deep in or you’re already involved? 

Selena Larson: Well, the most important thing that you can do is to tell somebody. Talk to somebody, whether it’s your friend. You can say, “Hey, I had this weird interaction. Can you gut check this with me.” Whether it’s your parent, your mom or dad, a school counselor, um somebody that you can go to say, “Can you help me out with this? I think I might have gotten myself in a little bit of a pickle here.” It’s also very important to just kind of cut off that access. If you don’t know or you don’t trust this conversation, cut off the access, stop the conversation, don’t let them continue contacting you or engaging with that potentially malicious person. It’s really, really important to talk about this because it happens to a lot of people, and they feel ashamed or like they did something wrong because they were a victim of a scammer. And that’s just not true. It happens to a lot of people. I always like to say there’s a social engineering lure for anyone, and anyone can become a victim of a scam. So it’s best to talk about it, and the more that we talk about it, the more people can be aware of this and hopefully prevent them from falling them in the future. 

Yanely Espinal: Yeah,I one time had my sister send me a photo of a letter that came in the mail, and she was like, “What is this? Oh my gosh, is this real?” Immediately, I just looked it up. Like I just did a web search for the exact words that were in the letter, and immediately the top results were like, “This is a scam. Don’t… like this letter is being sent out to people. It’s not real.” So so if you’re not sure, oftentimes, even just searching the exact wording that’s being used, because other people will be posting about it and saying, flagging, this is, this is a scam. 

Selena Larson: And oftentimes these scammers work off of playbooks. So they use the same language, they use the same conversation tactics, they use the same, oftentimes, email addresses or usernames or things like that. That’s a really, really great point. Yeah, stop what you’re doing. Look it up. Say, is someone else seeing this? If you’re… Yeah, even like a Google search or looking up on social media, if other people are talking about it, that’s definitely a great way of validating, for sure.

Yanely Espinal: So what can you do if you feel like you want to be a little bit more proactive, like you don’t want to wait until some of these scams are coming your way, and then you’re like, “Aaa! I have to try to get myself out of it.” What can you do to proactively, like, protect yourself against these online scams?

Selena Larson: So one thing I think helps a lot is making sure that you’re kind of private, you know, like you’re not putting a lot of information out there, because oftentimes these scammers will build a profile of you based off of the things that you’re sharing on the internet. So they really want to get to know who you are, to be able to write a good lure for you and something that you might be likely to engage with. So really being mindful about what information you’re sharing on the internet as well as who you’re talking to can be very, very important. If someone asks you for money or you’re making a financial transaction, make sure that they are the legitimate account – somebody that you know on Venmo or square cache, or whatever application that you’re using. Make sure there’s a way for them to validate their identity, and you’re able to know for sure that they’re a legitimate person receiving your information. It’s also just try and be educated, you know, like think about it. See how some of these things are popping up in the media, what experiences other people are having? I know that there’s a lot of great information from people who’re sharing their own experience on getting scammed on things like Instagram or Tiktok or other social platforms and saying, “Hey, this happened to me. Like, watch out!” So trying to educate yourself about what’s out there can be very, very helpful, too. And then, of course, again, if you are targeted by something like this, ask a friend. Talk to somebody. This idea of, Oh, don’t share this with people, or, you know, trying to isolate you from your friends and family – that is not good. And if that is happening to you, that’s a sign that you probably should be sharing this with someone else.

Yanely Espinal: Yeah, especially nowadays, because we’re spending more and more and more time on our devices more than ever before. So it definitely feels like it’s getting harder, not easier, to avoid them.

Selena Larson: Well, one thing I do think is super helpful is if you receive something that makes you go, huh? Step away from your computer, from your laptop, from your phone, take a minute. Take a breath. I actually tell people to breathe because the psychological and physiological reaction in your body when someone tells you something that makes you feel bad, that’s part of social engineering. That’s hacking your brain to make a decision. Also having good in-person social circles is so, so so helpful, because you can know each other online, of course, but then you see each other in person, builds trust, you know who you’re talking to. There’s this authenticity that you build with your friends and your family and people in real life, that once you have that solid knowledge of your friends, then you know that you’re going to be able to trust them when they are in your social circles on social media as well. 

Yanely Espinal: Yeah, I love that. We gotta step away sometimes and enjoy real life in the real world sometimes.

Selena Larson: Yes, absolutely, completely agree. Yes!

Yanely Espinal: All right, you heard Selena: there are some basic steps that you can take to keep yourself safe from scammers who are out here trying to trick you and manipulate you. First of all, keep your personal information private and consider setting your social media accounts to private, too. Second, educate yourself about scams and talk about what you know and what you’re learning with your family and your friends. Lastly, if there’s a company or a person asking you for money, double-check or even triple-check that they really are who they say they are, before taking the conversation further. If you have any questions for us, or you want to share your own story, our email is financiallyinclined@marketplace.org 

Financially Inclined is brought to you by Marketplace from American Public Media, in collaboration with Next Gen Personal Finance. I’m your host, Yanely Espinal. Our Senior Producer is Zoë Saunders. Our Video Editor is Francesca Manto, and our Graphics Artist is Mallory Brangan. Our producer is Hannah Harris Green. And our intern is Marika Proctor. The podcast was edited by Courtney Bergsieker. Gary O’Keefe is our Sound engineer. Bridget Bodnar is the Director of Podcasts. Caitlin Esch is Supervising Producer. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director. Neal Scarbrough is the VP & General Manager of Marketplace. Our theme music is by Wonderly. Catch you next time!

Financially Inclined is funded in part by the Sy Syms Foundation, partnering with organizations and people working for a better and more just future since 1985. And special thanks to the Ranzetta Family Charitable Fund and Next Gen Personal Finance for continuing to support Marketplace in its work to make younger audiences smarter about the economy.