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When the pandemic hit in 2020, our world became chaotic overnight. Throughout the nation, individuals were met with layoffs or stringent checks—pushing the financials of families to their breaking points. Simultaneously, business organizations faced similar issues; because fewer bodies were allowed in the same area, production trickled to a minimum, niche clients limited their spending, and small businesses counted the days until their doors closed.

Defeat the scammers by educating yourself and your employees about these increasingly common tax-related scams.

Scammers are increasingly resourceful when coming up with scam techniques. But they often rely on long-standing persuasion techniques for the scam to work. So, you may hear about a new scam that uses a novel narrative, but there is a good chance that the scam relies on proven scam techniques once the narrative is stripped away. These scam techniques often exploit our characteristics and heuristics, or things that make us human and fallible.

I recently read an article about a bright, sophisticated woman who fell victim to an unbelievable scam. By unbelievable, I mean most people reading or hearing about it could not believe it was successful. A group posing as an Amazon employee and various U.S. law enforcement agencies were able to convince a woman to take $50,000 out of her bank account in cash and hand it off to a complete stranger in the streets. It is a wild story and most of us would not be tricked into doing what happened to her.

What happened with a fake call purporting to be from Amazon tricked a financial advice columnist into handing over $50,000 to a stranger.

A widespread malvertising campaign is attempting to trick users into paying phony utility bills, according to researchers at Malwarebytes. “We discovered a prolific campaign of fraudulent ads shown to users via Google searches,” the researchers write. “To give an idea of scale, the number of ads we found exceeds what we have found in previous malvertising cases....The scam begins when a user searches for keywords related to their energy bill.

The first step in combating retail fraud is learning which forms it takes. That’s easy enough, because there are two main types of retail and eCommerce fraud today: The second step in stopping retail fraud from harming your business is to understand how each type of fraud works, then implement a strategy to protect against it.