Mendalla
Happy headbanging ape!!
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Google put out an alert that I am going to link here. It's about the major scams they are seeing right now in their world but it applies more generally, too. These are:
blog.google
Google does talk about what they do to try to deal with this crap but, in the end, the best thing is to be cautious online. Use only well-known apps from established stores (e.g. Google Play or Samsung Galaxy), take any promises made in an email or chat message with a whole shaker of salt, don't open attachments or click links in emails or other messages (chat is getting as bad as email nowadays) without knowing the sender and confirming the provenance, and remember that anything that sounds too good to be true probably is.
- Online job scams - basically fake job ads trying to trick job seekers. My employer has had issues with our jobs being spoofed so I know this one all too well.
- Negative Review Extortion - extorting money from businesses by threatening to review bomb them on Google, Yelp, etc.
- AI Product Impersonation - fake apps claiming to give free or special access to AI services
- Malicious (fake) VPNs - fake VPN apps that are actually a way to get remote access to user's devices
- Fraud recovery scams - scamming people who have already been scammed by claiming they can recover losses from the original scam (yeah, right)
- And, of course, the usual wave of scams capitalizing on the holiday season, both US Thanksgiving and Christmas-New Year's
Our latest fraud and scams advisory
An overview from Google’s Trust & Safety teams on the most recent online scam trends.
Google does talk about what they do to try to deal with this crap but, in the end, the best thing is to be cautious online. Use only well-known apps from established stores (e.g. Google Play or Samsung Galaxy), take any promises made in an email or chat message with a whole shaker of salt, don't open attachments or click links in emails or other messages (chat is getting as bad as email nowadays) without knowing the sender and confirming the provenance, and remember that anything that sounds too good to be true probably is.