Our phones have made us hyperconnected. You can use them to check your email, answer calls, respond to text messages, chat on any number of platforms, check your dating profile, and so on. All those means of communication are increasingly being taken over by online scams.
“The internet is a wonderful thing,” long-time cybersecurity analyst and independent journalist Graham Cluley told me in an email interview. “But it’s also home to many, many criminals and fraudsters.”
With that in mind, we’re here to walk you through some of the most common internet scams so you can avoid falling victim to them.
How Scams Find You
In a video call, Bogdan Botezatu, Bitdefender’s director of threat research, warned that despite the numerous ways scammers go after their targets, spam email remains the most prevalent. Using telemetry from Bitdefender customers, Botezatu was able to give me a high-level view of what email scams people are most likely to encounter.
“We have seen that roughly 96% of worldwide email traffic was spam,” said Botezatu, citing statistics from June 2020 to 2021. He explained to me that much of this was commercial spam—harmless, if irritating advertisements. Of the spam that was in some way malicious, the most common type was phishing messages, which aim to convince targets to simply hand over important information by pretending to be a company or authority figure. The least common type was spam that included malware. Extortion spam—where the attacker…
