In the 21st century, protecting yourself from bank fraud no longer means what it once did — being on the lookout for face-to-face grifters and charlatans — and instead it means a fundamental rethinking of your relationship to your money. The story, or perhaps legend, of Roswell Steffen, kicked off the era we live in now, in which the convenience of computerized accounting and financial services paradoxically makes security both more necessary than ever, and harder than ever.
In 2021 (the most recent year with sufficient available data) fraud in general was on the rise. According to a report by the Federal Trade Commission, there were 2.8 million official fraud reports and $5.8 billion in losses, which amounts to a mind-bending 70 percent increase from 2020. And much of that fraud is online. According to one more recent report, malware email scams alone increased by 217 percent year-over-year in the third quarter of 2022.
And lest you think this is a problem exclusively among the elderly, when it comes to financial scams, victims of every age are affected with comparable frequency. The FTC’s 2021 numbers show that the 60-69 age decile was the most victimized that year, with 249,597 reported cases, but that group was followed by the 30-39 decile, at 221,870 such reports.
So no matter who you are, you really do need to wise up and take some precautions against bank fraud. Here are the basics:
