In recent weeks two new types of scams are circulating on the Net. Both involve fake deposits to our bank account
The world of online scams is constantly evolving and never stops. Cyber criminals do nothing but invent a scam every day, to try to get from unsuspecting users a little bit of everything: often it’s personal data, sometimes it’s bank data to steal money and, in some cases, scammers try to steal money directly by making fun of the unlucky ones.
Caution is never too much, and it can save us only the knowledge of scams that are already in place and that have been going around for a while. Because, after all, the same scams are attempted over and over again against thousands and thousands of people. So there’s a good chance someone has already fallen for it and told about it online. Two scams, for example, have been in the news for some time: the incoming deposit scam, which is passed on to a third party, and the wrong deposit scam. Both have the same (unhappy) ending: whoever falls for this scam loses a lot of money and will never get it back.
The Incoming Deposit Scam
It can happen that you are contacted by someone you don’t know, for business purposes. This person claims to have a project and needs our services. If a relationship is established, at some point a third person who is part of the project pops up. The first person says that they are having difficulty sending them money, which is needed to keep the whole project going and, therefore, our work as well. The proposal, at this point, is always the same: the person who contacted us sends us what he owes us, plus the amount he owes the other person. Asking us to turn it over to him to close the account. If we do this, however, we have been fooled: the payment to us is made with a prepaid card, which after a few days is stolen. As a result, the amount paid to us is blocked and we will never see it. But in the meantime, we will have turned over part of that amount to the other person. And our payment, being perfectly regular, will never come back.
The wrong deposit scam
A second type of scam is the “wrong” deposit. At some point, without warning, we receive a sum of money in our account. Usually it is a small amount of money. Shortly afterwards we are contacted by a stranger who claims to have made the deposit by mistake, and asks us to give him the money back. If we do, we are screwed again. Because the mechanism is always the same: the original amount comes from a stolen card, so the money soon disappears from our account.