So I'm laying on the couch the other night and this text comes through.
I have to pay a toll from New York State or face a $50 fine.
And I, the former Apple employee and iPhone expert, fell for the scam.
In this video, I'll start by telling you about the kinds of scams people are falling for,
and then show you how to set up your iPhone to be as scam-proof as possible.
Back to the scam I fell for, and it's a new one. The late fee scam.
They sent it late at night, so I was tired and I reacted impulsively.
I didn't realize what had happened until after I entered my credit card number
and saw a really terrible-looking confirmation page.
And that's where they blew it. But they already had my information.
Whose fault is this, really? I'm all about personal
accountability, and yes, I fell for it. The scammers did a lot of things right here,
but New York did a lot of things wrong. How about making the website a .gov
website, you dum-dums? Next up, phishing scams.
And here's how they work. The scammer creates a fake
website that looks like a real one, sends you an email that looks
something like this real one that got through my Gmail spam
protection a couple of weeks ago. In this case, they're saying I'm
about to be charged over $400 to renew my Norton subscription.
Which of course I don't have, but a lot of people do.
Unless I log in within the next 24 hours to cancel it.
These kinds of emails used to be a lot easier to spot
because they'd have obvious spelling or grammatical errors.
Nowadays, thanks to AI like ChatGPT, spammers can polish up those crappy old emails
to make them look like the real thing. I know it's an extra step, but if you're concerned
about your Norton subscription or anything else, don't click a link in the email, go to Google,
type in Norton subscription login, and go through their website.
Back to the scam I fell for on the couch, that was a type of phishing scam that
the experts now call smishing, AKA a phishing scam that goes
through an SMS text message. But it's the same thing.
You get the text message, you click a link, they steal my credit card information.
Next, advance fee scams, which have been on the rise,
especially on social media platforms like X, or until recently, right here on YouTube.
And a couple of our subscribers actually fell for one of these scams
from people who were pretending to be us. These loyal, trusting, wonderful, innocent
people who trust us, I said that,
got a message saying that they want an iPhone, but that we needed them to cover the shipping,
which apparently we were charging $100 for. Now it's easy to judge
these people after the fact, but they thought it was us, and they trusted us,
and they sent us the money, except they didn't. We only found out about the whole
thing after they messaged us, asking where their phone was.
And we said, what phone? And they said, uh-oh.
These advance fee scams usually ask for a small fee
in exchange for something very valuable. Not too much to really set off alarm bells,
but enough to make it worth their while. Usually the scammer will also ask you to pay
in a way where you can't get your money back if something goes wrong.
In our case, they asked to be paid with PayPal friends
and family, not regular PayPal, which would have had purchase protection.
This is the red flag. Most people aren't going to ask you to pay
for something like shipping with PayPal friends and family,
or Bitcoin, or a non-refundable money order. Next, a new scam that exclusively
targets iPhone users. Quick background on this.
When you go to reset your Apple ID password, you might get an alert on your phone asking you
to enter a six-digit verification code. It's a security feature
that scammers have figured out how to hijack, and it's quite brilliant.
Here's how it works. First, you'll see a ton of alerts on your phone
asking for permission to reset your Apple ID password.
A few minutes later, you'll get a phone call from what looks like a real Apple support number.
And the scammer, pretending to be Apple support, will try to trick you into giving them
that one-time passcode they need to get into your account.
Of course, Apple says in those text messages to share that code with no one,
but you think it's them on the phone, so you share it.
And that six-digit one-time passcode is the key the scammers need to steal your account,
and there's nothing you can do to get it back. The lesson here is that if you get a notification
about resetting your passcode from Apple or anybody else,
and you didn't request to do that, don't do anything at all.
The second lesson here is not to trust caller ID, which we talked about in our last video
about the privacy settings you need to change to keep yourself safe online.
We'll drop a link at the end of this video. Next up, a new hot and steamy scam
taking over the online dating scene, and it's called a romance scam.
It's basically catfishing. And if you haven't heard of catfishing before,
it's when a beautiful woman or man that you're talking to
is actually a 45-year-old man living in his mom's basement.
A friend of a friend recently fell for one of these
and sent thousands of dollars to someone in another country.
It was sad because the person was lonely, and the scammer took advantage of that.
Other times, let's just say if you get a DM on a dating app
from someone offering to come to your house in exchange for gas money,
don't send them the money. They're not coming to your house.
Next, another scam that's on the rise, the investment scam.
These typically target wealthy individuals that don't really know what Bitcoin is,
except that a lot of people made a lot of money really fast from it.
I myself made $17,000 in three months back in 2020 before I quit the game for good
because I was staring at it all day, every day, and going crazy.
In one popular investment scam, a scammer invites you to join
their elite group of investors in order to make, let's say,
anywhere between 1,000 and 5,000 pounds per day. If it was that easy to make money,
we'd all be doing it. Don't fall for it.
Join our YouTube channel instead, where you can get free PDF guides
of all the settings we talk about in this video, and we're gonna talk about some,
and those other essential privacy settings. And you can support what we do for $5.
The PDFs are real, and so is your hard-earned cash.
Click that Join button below if you're interested in this very non-scammy offer.
Next up, the job scam. Here's how it works.
You apply for a remote job that looks real on the surface
and even go through an interview. After you get this job, they'll send you a package
with everything you need to get started. Thousands of dollars of stuff.
And ask you just to pay for shipping. Well, the package isn't real.
They're just trying to steal your money. But there's more to this scam.
Even if you don't give them the money, chances are they've already stolen
your personal information from when you applied for the job.
And they're going to sell that to other scammers. Next up, the government impersonation scam.
This one's pretty straightforward. Someone pretends to be a government official
and says something like, if you don't pay your outstanding parking tickets,
you're going to go to jail. According to the FTC,
government agencies will never call, email, text,
or message you on social media to ask for money or personal information.
They will always send you a letter in the mail, like physical mail in the mailbox.
But it's not like you can always trust that either.
If you think there might be a warrant out for your arrest,
my suggestion is to search Google for the agency's phone number, call them,
ask them if you really are about to go to jail. Chances are you're not.
Next, we've all heard of identity theft, but it has evolved.
A brand new kind of identity theft scam, which is kind of brilliant in an evil sort of way,
uses AI as powerful as chat GPT to steal recordings of your own voice
that they later use against you. Here's how it works.
The scammer leaves a voicemail saying your computer has been hacked
and they're here to help. When you call them back,
you end up speaking with a very real sounding AI powered robo assistant.
Shortly thereafter, the real scammer joins the phone call
and asks you a bunch of questions to get recordings of you saying
things like your name and your address.
Next, they'll apologize and admit that it was their fault
your computer got hacked and they want to give you a refund
for their crappy software. All they need from you is
your credit card information. Then, and this is the key,
they'll ask if they have permission to initiate the refund.
When you say yes, surprise, there's no refund. Instead, they charge your card
for an expensive subscription service that you didn't sign up for.
We'll use Blue Apron as an example. So you go on your merry way expecting a refund,
but one day this box of food shows up on your doorstep.
You call Blue Apron. They say you signed up for them.
You call your credit card company to dispute the charge,
but they won't give you your money back either because when they do their investigation,
the scammer has the recording of you saying yes. What's evilly brilliant about this scam,
which Zek learned about by watching KitBoga, is how the scammer gets paid.
They use their affiliate link to sign you up for Blue Apron,
and then Blue Apron pays them a commission for what they think is a legitimate new customer.
So in this example, both you and the legitimate business,
Blue Apron, are the victims. How do we protect ourselves
from these kinds of scams? There are a bunch of settings we
can change on your phone. Let's dive in.
First up, spammers hate live voicemail. Apple introduced live voicemail in iOS 17,
which lets you see a text version of a voicemail as the caller leaves it on your phone
so you can decide whether to pick up. But for reasons we don't fully understand,
spam callers don't like the Siri prompt the caller hears
when you tap the live voicemail button. Instead, they hang up.
This works especially well with robocaller scams because the bots don't know how to react
to the live voicemail prompt. If you don't see the live voicemail button
when someone calls you, here's how to get it on your phone.
Go to settings, scroll all the way down to phone, tap on that, then scroll down
here to live voicemail, tap on that, and make sure the switch
next to live voicemail is turned on. If you've been getting a lot
of scam texts like me, our next setting is a great
way to filter them out. Open the settings app.
I'm already here, so I'm going to go back to the main page of settings,
then scroll down to messages right underneath phone,
tap on that, then scroll down to filter unknown senders,
and make sure the switch to the right hand side of it
is turned on. This will separate the messages you receive
from people in your contacts from the ones you receive from other numbers.
It doesn't actually block scam texts from coming through,
but there are ways to do that. There are a bunch of robocall and
robotext blocking apps in the app store.
A couple of popular ones are Truecaller and RoboKiller.
Truecaller has a free version that filters out spam texts.
I'm just going to install this app real quick. When you install one of these apps,
something magical happens in the settings app on your phone.
Before, we saw filter unknown senders in here,
but now we just see unknown and spam. Tap on that, filter unknown senders
has moved inside here along with SMS filtering. I can tap on Truecaller and then tap enable,
and now my text messages are being filtered by Truecaller.
Wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon also offer spam blocking apps,
but generally they're a rip off. So I recommend getting a third party app,
not just to save money, but also so that if you
switch carriers in the future, you don't have to set up a new app.
Recently, more and more scammers have been using iMessages
rather than text messages. Luckily, Apple has a way to report those Apple IDs
so they can never bother anybody again. Just swipe right to left to
delete one of those messages, then tap delete and report junk.
And as I like to say, not every spam is a scam because legitimate companies also will spam you
with lots of text messages. This is just a quick tip.
The next time you get an annoying text message from L.L.Bean,
reply with the word stop to opt out directly from your phone.
Next up, silence junk callers. Let's go back to the main page of settings.
I'm in messages. I'll swipe up from the bottom of the screen,
come back to settings and tap back to messages, back to settings, tap on phone again,
then scroll down here to call blocking and identification,
tap on that, and then silence junk callers you'll see here.
Make sure the switch next to that is turned on. When this is on,
calls identified by your carrier as spam are silenced and sent to voicemail for free.
If you don't see this though, your carrier doesn't support it.
Not all carriers do. If you really want to
make a scammer's life miserable, it's time to pull out the big
guns and report them to the FTC. And surprisingly, the FTC's website,
which was not created by the dum-dums at New York, makes it easy to report spam.
Click the big report now button on their website, answer a few questions, then submit your report.
We'll drop a link in the description section below.
And a quick helpful tip for everyone. When you sign up for an account online,
we all know how companies ask for your email, your phone number, and a bunch of
other personal information that they then can use to sell
you stuff in the future. But when those companies
get hacked, or in some cases, sell your information to data brokers,
it's spam city for you. So don't give your
phone number away if you don't have to. And if you choose to enter a fake number,
we won't judge you. Just don't enter mine.
Watch our video about the number one iPhone privacy setting
you need to change to stay safe next. And thank you for watching.