Sorry. You Didn’t Win the Publisher’s Clearinghouse. Learn How to Avoid Common Scams.
Updated: Sep 21
Three clients, three scams, and one uncomfortable truth: all of them were, to some degree, avoidable.
Last month, three of my clients got scammed—not through complex cybercrimes, but “old fashioned” scams that still cause big pain. One mailed money to claim a prize she never won through “Publisher’s Clearinghouse”; one had a check intercepted from her mailbox; and one had her pocketbook lifted at a restaurant. Being targeted was not something any of them could have prevented. Succumbing to the trick may have been.
Change your passwords! Use security tokens! Lock your phone! We’re repeatedly warned. And, indeed, we should do all of these things. But we should also not lose focus of the more old fashioned tricks, which are still prevalent and equally painful.
The architecture of the con is older than the internet by a century. In the early 1900s, a classified ad appeared in several American newspapers from a “Prince Bil Morrison” of Nigeria, seeking pen pals. After a warm exchange of letters with his new American acquaintances, the prince made his ask: just four dollars and an old pair of pants, in exchange for which he would send ivory, diamonds, and emeralds — mere trinkets to a man of his station. The money and the pants poured in, and the jewels, predictably, never arrived. When authorities eventually tracked down the prince, they discovered not a Nigerian noble but an 14 year old American teenager whose age protected him from legal consequence.
How to avoid common scams?
What unites all three of last month’s scams is that each one required something from the victim: The Publisher’s Clearinghouse fraud required the victim to take affirmative action and send money — criminals impersonate the sweepstakes company and convince targets they’ve won a prize, but must first pay taxes or fees to collect it. Check washing required a paper check to enter the mail stream in the first place — thieves steal checks from mailboxes, erase the ink with common household chemicals, and rewrite them to themselves for much larger amounts. Pocketbook theft required a lapse in attention in a public space — opportunists watch for the moment a bag is set down, hung on a chair, or left unattended, and move quickly and quietly before the victim notices anything is wrong. These are real criminals doing real harm, and the psychological levers they pull are deliberately engineered to bypass our better judgment. But if you are vigilant, you may be able to avoid common scams before you’re harmed:
Keep one form of ID at home and never carry your passport and your driver’s license at the same time.
Never write your PIN or passwords on anything you carry on your person — use a password manager instead.
Switch to online bill pay and stop mailing paper checks entirely.
And when someone is trying to give you something or help you in a way that seems unusually urgent or unusually generous, run it through three questions: Does it seem too good to be true? Are they making you feel as though you must act immediately or the opportunity disappears? Are they discouraging you from telling your spouse, your family, or your financial advisor? If any one of those is true, the answer is no — because legitimate opportunities can withstand scrutiny, and anyone who is genuinely trying to help you will have no problem waiting while you make a phone call.
Scams are engineered to make you feel like there is no time for a second opinion, but there is always time, and the people in your life who will talk you out of a bad decision are exactly the resource these criminals are trying to isolate you from.
We have built an entire cottage industry around cyber anxiety — VPNs, dark web monitoring, identity theft insurance — while continuing to mail paper checks and carry our PINs in our wallets, and the gap between those two things is where a lot of people lose real money. So, yes, continue encrypting your emails and monitoring your cyber-life. But also stay aware of simpler scams, which can be just as dangerous.
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