With more people staying home and carrying out more online transactions this year, there are also more bad guys using the Internet to scam people. In fact, more than $157 million has been lost to scammers in the first 8 months of 2020, with the most common being e-commerce scams, social media impersonation scams and loan scams. I nearly fell prey to one such scam myself last week when a friend sent me this:
The scammers managed to replicate her tone of voice, her style of writing and emojis...so well that I had no reason to suspect her account had been hacked. Given this and her urgency, it sounded legitimate.
This was the SMS I received.
I've helped a friend change his account to a WhatsApp Business version before, and recalled the process involved such a verification code. The funny thing is, her number looks...