Two Effective Scams That Minnesotans Need To Be Aware Of

My wife and I just got back from vacation late on Sunday. We were joined by our granddaughter and her mother on a Cruise out of Florida to Nassau Bahamas. We were celebrating our granddaughters' high school graduation. 

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On our visit to Nassau, we went to the famous straw market there. If you’ve never been, it’s a giant flea market. My wife and I went there 22 years ago, and the one thing we remembered was how crowded the market was. This caused us to take special precautions to protect our wallets and our IDs. We were told prior to our first visit that it was a popular place for pickpockets because of the number of people there in a sometimes rather confined space. 

The precautions that we had taken allowed us to shop with confidence with people bumping into us due to the crowd. 

Here's What You Should Know!

Tech Guru, Kim Komando, issued a warning yesterday in the daily email newsletter, about new scams that are being used with effectiveness duping people out of their money. The first is rather scary. 

Scammers have figured out how to use AI (artificial intelligence) to clone the voice of someone you know and use that to place a call to you stating they are in trouble and need money. Kim Komando says that she knows of a man in Los Angeles who fell victim to this and lost $25,000.  

If this happens to you, Kim suggests that you call or text the person who they’re claiming to be, or someone close to them if you are on the fence that the person you know could be in need. 

Scam #2

The second effective scam right now is folks getting an official looking text message that appears to be from their bank, claiming their account has been frozen. Those committing the fraud are trying to get you to click on a link and send your banking information to them. 

Kim Komando gave an instance of a man being separated from over $300,000 of his hard-earned money.  

The first way to protect yourself is to never click on links in your text messages claiming to involve your money or from your bank. The second tip is that if you feel like you need to verify the information, only click on the secure website or app from your bank. 

This is just a heads up, so you can take the special precautions like we had to take in the straw market to protect your personal and banking information.