Doctorow pointed out that just as the Internet has made everyday tasks easier, it has also made fraud much easier to commit. Imagine an old-fashioned boiler room, he says, where fast-talking scammers make hundreds of phone calls trying to extort strangers' savings. Now he fast forwards to 2024 and scammers will be able to send millions of phishing texts and emails with the help of bots.
“If we can automate some of it, we can cast a wider net,” Doctorow said.
The Federal Trade Commission reported that Americans were defrauded of $300 million through text scams in 2022. In the same year, Americans received 225 billion spam texts, an increase of 157 percent from the previous year, according to a report by Robokiller, a company that sells spam blocker apps.
Although Doctorow is digitally savvy and cautious, he is not immune to phishing.
In December, while vacationing in New Orleans with his family, he received a call from his bank asking if he had spent $1,000 at an Apple store in New York. In fact, the caller was a scammer who obtained Mr. Doctorow's phone number and the name of his credit union (presumably from one of the many data brokers that collect personal information and sell it to third parties). and used spoofing software. Make it appear as your bank on your caller ID.
During the call, Mr. Doctorow provided the last seven digits of his debit card number. This is enough information for the scammer to charge his account.
Advanced technology makes this type of deception possible. However, Doctorow argued that, thanks to outsourcing and automation, typical communications sent by the customer service departments of many large companies have become “indistinguishable from phishing scams.”
The prevalence of online fraud can also add unwanted drama to your daily routine. When Rutledge, a psychologist, recently received a letter from a government agency written on “the worst letterhead I've ever seen,” he thought he might have been scammed.