The number of phishing frauds has gone through the roof, and everybody is being targeted. The only way to protect yourself is to not trust anybody asking for money or offering something that seems too good to be true. Here are a few types of frauds I have come across recently.

Impersonating Govt officials and other higher authorities and asking for charitable donations or money for other things. Many folks on our team have received social media and WhatsApp messages saying I was in some urgent need of money from fake accounts.

Fake Instagram & social media profiles of well-known people are created by copying everything from the original profile. The followers of these fake accounts then get messages to buy paid courses, scammy penny stocks and crypto. Here’s an example of my ID being used.

Luring customers to share login credentials by using greed. Once the fraudster has access to the account, losses are created and money is transferred to other trading accounts by trading penny stocks, illiquid options or transferring stocks.

The craziest one is fraudsters advertising the customer support number of a large company on Google. When the customer calls up the number, the scamsters ask for a UPI transfer or send UPI pull requests from handles that seem like they belong to the main brand.

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