Imagine you are a second-semester senior staring down the barrel of your impending future, wondering how on this green earth you are going to be in a place where you can start repaying your student loans in six months. On top of that, you have eaten through the last of your summer savings right as it finally gets warm enough to go out and do things with your friends. You are desperate for cash and just as you start researching if it’s possible to sell your kidney legally, you get an email. The email tells you that you are eligible for not only loan forgiveness but also an additional round of COVID relief money. You may be thinking it’s too good to be true.
That’s because it is. Emails like this are internet scams, like the Nigerian prince that your grandma keeps insisting she needs to wire money to. But unlike those scams, these prey on the young instead of the old, and they are frighteningly effective.
The Federal Trade Commission told the Wall Street Journal that 20- to 29-year-olds lost money in 41% of internet scams self-reported to the FTC. And that number is probably way smaller than the actual number of people losing money because the FTC relies on self-reporting to come up with those numbers. But despite student loan forgiveness and relief money, the number one scam exploiting young people is online shopping.
“If a stranger says, ‘I have a pair of jeans available through Facebook Marketplace,’ that can lead to scam-related financial loss. They take these chances because they don’t think about the potential consequences,” said John Buzzard, lead fraud and security analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, to the Wall Street Journal. In these types of scams, students buy something, it never shows up and when they go back to get a refund, the whole store has disappeared.
But the most hurtful scams are the emotional ones. In these scams, known as pig-butchering scams, someone will contact you with an innocent conversation starter. A match on a dating app, a wrong number text or even a LinkedIn message. After you respond, they start up a conversation with you and gain your trust. They seem interested in you and your thoughts, with the express purpose of becoming your friend and confidant. But things are not as they seem.
“These are large criminal organized networks, and they’re operating largely unscathed,” said John Griffin, a professor of finance at UT-Austin, in an interview with Time Magazine. After these fake profiles gain your trust, they use it against you. They convince you to invest in a new crypto trading app or an independent startup that works using Bitcoin. And it all looks perfect—you invest a certain amount, and you see your money grow.
However, as soon as you try to take out some of your invested money, you learn the dark truth. That money is no longer yours, and the app was completely fake. The app will even try to ask you for more money as a “withdrawal fee,” just to hit you while you’re down.
These scams are awful, but the best thing you can do is stay cautious. Make sure you only send money to people you know in real life. If you are shopping online, go through online retailers with good fraud policies, so if you get scammed, you have someone to help. But, beyond that, know that if this happens to you, you’re not alone and it happens to other people every day.
Abigail Spencer can be reached at [email protected] or on X @ABairdSpencer