SCAMS are everywhere these days and small business owners are continuously being targeted. Listen to this episode if you don’t want to fall victim to an unscrupulous company doing shady business tactics! 

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Welcome to The Business Animal podcast. Saddle up for a

gallop to the top of the animal industry, where you'll learn how

to tame your wild business beast with tips, techniques, and tools

that will take overwhelm to obedience school and have you

wagging your tail with joy. And now your hosts Kim Beer and Cara

Taylor Swift

Hey there business animals It's Kim with

Be More Business

and Cara with Fast Horse Photography. I have

to say Kim, I'm already annoyed about our topic today. What is

it about this topic that just makes everyone annoyed? Why No,

it's a really annoying topic. It's very frustrating.

Actually, I find it very intriguing and

interesting. I find it a completely and totally

fascinating subject and I have got to say I have really enjoyed

our wrap for this episode because we have a favorite list

coming up that I think that our listeners are just gonna

absolutely love. So what are we talking about today Cara that

you're annoyed with and I'm fascinated by

Well, I'm I'm actually a little disturbed that

you're fascinated by this. But can we were talking about scams,

scams s c a m s that target small business owners like the

bane of my existence. Raise your hand if you've ever been like a

victim of scam of a scam. I'm raising my hands I've been

scammed before. Have you ever been scammed before? Are you too

too smart for that? No,

I've been scammed. I've been scammed. And

I think everybody out there in the world has been scammed. I've

even had my identity stolen. So how's that for that? That was a

fun adventure in understanding how identity theft works, which

we're not going to get into here because the laundry list of

scams that we have is incredible when I opened the document and I

saw one of Kara's famous lists of the most common scams. Oh, my

word and for 2022. Yeah, for 2022. Oh my gosh. So these are

only current scams. These are past scams, or current scams. So

here's the thing, here's what happens in my world, I get

probably, I would say at least four to five times a week, not

me getting them but I have clients that will email me

saying I just got this email for this with this bill for like

$290 or $180. And what do I do with it? What is this for and

I'm like that is a scam, do not pay it. People have a hard time

recognizing these scams out there. And it is one of my pet

peeves. I hate it when people fall victim to them. Because

they are costly. Some of them are costly in money. Others of

them are costly in business exposure. And they're all costly

in our time. So they really need to be stopped. So our mission in

this episode today is to give you some tools to understand

what scams are out there, what you can do to avoid them. And

then some things that you can do if you have been a victim of a

scam. So our big three for today and I love my number one so if

it feels fishy, it's probably fishy. So the spelling is

different on the fishy just because we're in audio you don't

see it, but I love my if it feels fishy, it probably is

fishy.

I think they get it though. I think they get

it. All right. And number Yeah, I think they I think they get

it.

Number two is to have tips to avoid scams. And

number three is what to do if you are scammed. So we're gonna

start out with if it feels fishy, it's probably fishy. I

had to get that in there one more time. And here's gonna give

you a laundry list of the most common scams that are out there

and see if you can recognize where these have shown up in

your inbox and your social media in your mailbox.

Yeah. So when I sat down to do the research

for this episode, I was thinking I would kind of have an idea of

what I was going to be putting here because first of all, I've

been a victim of a scam before. Secondly, I feel like every day

someone sending me some kind of their identity has been stolen

and then they're there. Someone has hacked into their account.

They're sending me something. So that's like every day. The sad

part is is it's like this is so incredibly common that it's

almost like the norm for us on a daily basis to manage scams to

defend ourselves from scams. So what I started putting this list

together. I got a little overwhelmed. So what I'm going

to do is I'm going to overwhelm you guys by just reading down

the list and then Kim and I are going to talk about our favorite

scams or we're going to call them our favorite scams are we

going to say calm or scam hotlist? I don't know. Our

favorite, favorite scam. So

our favorite scams to avoid There

you go. So according to the Federal Trade

Commission, and some of these were also pulled from the Better

Business Bureau. Here is the list of the most common scams

out there for 2022 Just 2022. Guys, I mean, some of these, you

know, have spans multiple years but this is 2022 favorites are

most common scams. There's the fake check scam, there's fake

invoices, there's the registration imposters brand

building scams, threatening legal action scams, reputation

fixing scams, directory listing scams, utility scams, credit

card processing deals, scams, business license scams, phishing

email scams, followed by spear phishing email scams, charity

scams, stolen identity scams, vanity award scams and blog

scams. That's the first list that we pulled together. Y'all

were dealing with this every day all day, it's so much more time

consuming than I even thought it would be everywhere we open an

inbox, we open our email, we open our mailbox we're at, we

answer a phone call, we're at risk of being scammed. I am I'm

thinking about just like hiding right now.

Yeah, I mean, cuz it we are inundated with it

every single day. And yes, a certain amount of it is even

buffered from us. Because things that are commonly pointed out as

scams go directly to our spam box in our email. But the end,

boy, you don't want to look in there. Oh, good, Lord, there's a

lot of scams in your spam box. So the ones that get through the

spam box and get to you. But these things are dangerous to

people, I've had clients fall victim to them and pay out a lot

of money. I have fallen victim to them on occasion. And it has

it's costly. And it's problematic. There's one type of

scam though, that's my one on my top 10 favorite list that you

didn't mention in this list. And that's the legal scam, the one

that's actually legal for them to scam your money, these domain

registry people that I was telling you about. So here's

here's the scam that I favorite one, I hate the worst. I guess

that's what what I want to do. This is a letter you'll get in

the mail. And it comes from this organization called domain

registry. And I'm going to tell you, this is a legitimate

company. This is a legitimate bill. And it looks super

legitimate and threatening. But it's there's nothing that

legally is wrong with it. It is this letter that says that your

domain is up for renewal, which is probably true, because domain

records are a lot of times public. Sometimes you if you pay

extra to the domain registrar, you can keep them private and

properly avoid this letter. But a lot of us don't want to pay

that extra fee every single month, especially for domain

hoarders and have like a lot of them. So it comes to you. And

it'll say you must renew your domain name to maintain

exclusive rights to it on the web. And that is very much true.

But then it goes on to say And now is the time to transfer and

renew your name from your current registrar to the domain

registry. So it assumes that you want to move your domain from

wherever you registered it GoDaddy, Bluehost, wherever to

them. And the thing is, is that it costs owe so much more here

than it does on your regular registrar. And people will pay

this and then their domain name gets moved so they can no longer

find it because where they registered, it was on GoDaddy or

Bluehost. And now it's on this weird thing where they wrote

their number on this bill that came to them. So this is legal.

I mean, there's nothing illegal about what this company is

doing. But people fall for this. And they end up spending me way

more money than they need to on something that they already had

done. And that irritates me no end because there's no way to

stop this. Like, I don't care who you report this to. There's

nothing anybody can do about it. It is such a hideous thing, in

my opinion for this company to do even if they're doing

something illegal. It's still wrong. And please do not pay

these. Always, always, always double check and we're gonna

give you tips on how to do that. But that's one of mine. What's

What's one of yours, Cara?

Well, they get you because you don't renew

your domain listing on a regular like monthly basis. So it's not

something you're used to paying. So when that letter comes in the

mail, it's usually that time of year when it's time to renew and

you're thinking to yourself, oh crap, I need to figure out where

I need to renew that you have to actually take the extra steps to

go do that. So yeah, in terms of some of my favors I'm gonna pick

a few that I've had actually recently come my direction. The

first one that last week, the charity scam, I had a charity in

quotation marks contact me saying that I had made a

donation to them last year and they wanted to know if they

could have my support again this year. And they were ready to

take my payment right away on the phone my donation. As a

small business owner, I do make donations. And I do support

local charities and organizations, however, because

it's just me, I know exactly who I support every year. And I have

a budget for that. And I knew that this was not a company I

had donated to so that was a scam, the vanity award scam, I

think lots of people can fall for this one, they contact you

and say me too, that's on my list. If you've been nominated

for an award or you've been nominated, you know, best in

your community or something along those lines. And they want

you then to pay to receive a plaque or a registration

somewhere. Have you had that one recently to you were just saying

that's on your list?

Oh, yes. So those are ones like you'll get this

thing that says you have been selected as one of the top 50

women executives in the state of Missouri. And we're making this

book that we're gonna highlight you in this book, and we're

gonna put your bio in there and your contact information and

they have they have all of this great thing that they're going

to do. And this is another one that's legal. I mean, they

probably actually do publish that book, but I don't think

anyone ever sees it, and they want exorbitant amounts of money

to be in it. This one happens to a lot of creative people too.

Because if you're a poet, or a writer, or an artist of some

kind, you're always getting selected for these random

awards. It just are you having to pay for somebody else's

wallet, you know, they're they're wanting to publish a

book and you're gonna get to pay for it and they're gonna make a

ton of money off of you doing it tisk tisk

in The Business Animal Instagram

messages right now we have four identical messages about this

just waiting to be deleted and banned from the page from

different people with the exact same wording asking about this

thing. So this is like every day I'm sure everyone that's

listening right now has this sitting in their inbox waiting

for it's so ridiculous.

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what else what else on this list we need to talk about.

So my other one that really irritates me no end

is whenever somebody sends me, particularly with PayPal, they

send me a thing that says this is coming from PayPal, your

account has been flagged or something like that. It's

something really disturbing or you know, your account is

overdrawn or something like that, especially PayPal, they

like to use pay pals logos, but I think they'll do it with banks

and stuff too. And there'll be a link in the email and you click

the link, but the link if you look at the URL, it'll be

something like Pay Pal number two.com Right. It's not actually

PayPal, what you've done is you've ended up going to another

page and now they're asking for your login information. And

because you clicked on the link in the email, you're gonna give

your login information to hackers and then the hackers can

go steal your identity or clean out your bank account or

whatever they need to do to get what you can and Pay Pal money

it's really easy to transfer it to somebody else so they get

into your account they can log in there and transfer the money

to a fake account somewhere and they're off with the money and

you're out the money and then you have months and months of of

having to clean up after that mess. I got an invoice for

Bitcoin. Bitcoin seems to be a popular scam these days as well.

I got an invoice saying that I had purchased 400 was $499 it

was just under 500 There must be some kind of a cut off for a

felony or something right around that $500 mark because it was

like $499 they invoiced me for $499 and I needed to pay it to

transfer my bitcoin that I had requested I hadn't requested any

bitcoin I'm not even sure any how any of this cryptocurrency

stuff even works I've tried to wrap my head around it I have no

clue and I'm like how can you send me this I reported those

people to directly to pay pal by the way and you know I mean

there's just the Norton anti virus one have you gotten that

one Cara? Yeah it's like the one where they say your Norton anti

viruses expired and listen toys to keep your computer safe. If I

were Norton, I would be extremely upset about the fact

that this company is running around scamming people for this

software that they didn't issue and now they're paying Norton i

Can you imagine being the poor person at Norton who has to get

the phone calls. Why paid you have our man email? No, you

didn't. You paid a scammer, unfortunately, and you don't

have Norton antivirus on your machine.

I'm sure they have a whole division dedicated

to

God, they do when your identity gets stolen.

There's a whole there's a whole corporate area that just

handles that. Alright, well, let's move on to

some tips to avoid scams because I think it's pretty clear that

you're at risk every single moment of every single day, just

letting folks you're at risk every single moment of every

single day from a scam. But I think if we move on to tips to

avoid scams that might be helpful at this point.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So the number

one tip I have to avoid a scam is never ever click on a link in

an email. If somebody requests a payment from you don't click on

the link like a company. It's different if you're getting an

individual invoice, but like Pay Pal, or if you're like the

Norton antivirus, or the domain registries or stuff like that,

if you click on the link that's in the email, then it can take

you somewhere unscrupulous. Whereas if you say okay, my

domain is due to be registered, like the expiration date is

coming up. If you go to wherever you registered your domain name,

and you log into that website with your login credentials,

then you know that you're legitimately getting your money

sent to the right place, since a lot of these scams are about

misdirection of making you think that there are legitimate entity

and then when you react to it, they take you to a place where

they're able to collect the money that the legitimate

company should really have. So just never ever take a sketchy

email link for granted. And I think that goes for messenger as

well. I know a friend of mine just fell victim to a Facebook

Messenger scam, where she thought the person was a

representative of Facebook and they had messaged her and when

all was said and done, they were able to hack her account and

actually take everything and make it so that Facebook banned

her. And it's it's a problem right? And that's a huge, huge

loss, Kara. I mean, imagine losing your Facebook and

Instagram communities, because of a hacker that's pure evil in

my opinion, especially a small business owner who spent years

and years building that following not only

losing it, but having your reputation

because who knows what they're gonna do with that account. You

know, like having a reputation as a business owner messed up

too because they're using it for whatever purposes they stole it

from you for so yeah, that's a real, a real pain. Okay, so of

course I have a whole list of tips. Do you want me to run

through those as well? Let's go ahead. Yeah, the first one I

have here is keep good records. So a lot of the scams that we

listed at the beginning, if you keep really good records, you

can help kind of figure it out before you fall victim so for

example, you'll know who your vendors are, you know who you

regularly pay for things or what you need to be paying so that

you don't unnecessarily fall victim to that domain

registration scam or the fake invoices scam because you know

what to expect and who you normally pay that's the biggest

thing you're not going to get sucked into like bogus accounts

that way another one is be careful with your payment

procedures anytime you can use and login procedures anytime you

can use a two factor authentication or have multiple

approval options like having them text you a code or

something. It's a pointless it is a pain in the butt. It's pain

in the butt to do it. We understand that I understand

that but I have found that if I just do it if I set it up, it's

there for a reason. And it does make a big difference on the

safety of your accounts, whether they be financial accounts or

social media accounts or, or whatever. Another recommendation

is to avoid untraceable payment methods. So if you are asked to

pay with Visa gift cards, do wire transfers, you know, that's

something you need to really consider. So you want to confirm

that any request for payment with untraceable methods that it

is verified by an authorized source, and you want to create a

paper trail. So if someone requests payment from it's a

business or something, I would actually recommend letting them

go contacting the actual business and verifying before

making any payments. If you have any concerns about vendors, you

know, double check the vendors that if you're unsure, they

should be willing to give you the name of the person, you're

speaking to the name of the company, the address of the

company and a phone number that you can then call and verify

they should be willing to do that for you. And then of

course, of course, this one goes without saying I feel like we

talked about all the time, be careful with what you share,

never gave your personal or financial information to someone

that you don't know, you know, easier said than done. A lot of

times, there's a lot of grooming that's happening there. And

they're asking questions slowly, you're giving information really

slowly, and they're piecing it together. But just you know, you

should have your radar up for that sort of thing. Also, you

know, like before, we talked about the two factor

authentication, protect your devices. So make sure in your

computer on your phone that you've got proper protection

software, and like him has said over and over again, don't click

those links inside of unsolicited emails. That's where

you're going to head down the wrong path down a rabbit trail.

And then my favorite way to identify scams is to literally

Google, is this a scam? And then type in what the issue is? And

I'll tell you that has helped me so many times and you ended up

yes, this is a scam. Yes, this is a scam, that's a great way to

just get you started.

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That's bemorebusiness.com. See you there. Absolutely. All of

those are great tips. One I might add to that that we talked

about was a lot of accounts. If you need help with something

inside one of your accounts, there's ways to give

administrator access to people and that administrators access

can be revoked at any particular point in time. Also, a lot of

them will have ways to give that access in stages. So for

example, if you have let's say you want to hire somebody to do

your social media, you can choose different roles for

individuals when you put them on your page and give them access

to things. So be careful with the access that you give to

people because here's another thing you may be wildly with

knowing what scams are out there. But your administrative

assistant may not be so they can fall victim for the same scams.

And a lot of times they don't even realize because they're not

being conscientious about that. In other words, it's not

something that they think about on a day to day basis in

relation to working for your business. So especially if you

have employees make sure that their role access does not allow

them to like take your accounts or anything like that. That's

just good safety practice. But that also helps with with these

scams. If the employee might fall victim to a scam. Are we

ready now to move on Kara to talk about what to do if you do

get scammed?

Yeah, I think we do. I think there's people

right now that are like, Oh, I shouldn't have clicked on that

link. What do I do? So let's talk

about what do you do? The first thing that I would

like to say about this is that you need to be relentless in

pursuing getting things resolved. This is something that

happens on such a routine basis, that a lot of organizations and

companies they already know they know the score, they know how

things are going to go and if you report the scam to them and

say hey, I fell for this by accident. And I What can I do

now a lot of them are willing to work with you to get it

resolved. However, some organizations such as the larger

social media platforms, which will remain nameless, it's hard

to get through to the people that can help you because

there's so many automations and checks and balances that are put

into place that it's hard to get through to a human being that

will go oh wait a minute, so that wasn't You that was a

scammer or a hacker. So pursue this relentlessly until you get

it as solved. If you get a rejection the first time around,

or if you don't get heard, do not give up, you've got to keep

going. Especially if it's a place where you've lost a lot of

money or you've lost a lot of followers or audience or access

to an account. You have to be relentless in pursuing it. We

all know people, at least Kara and I do we all know people that

have had these really bad things happen to them. But over time,

they were able to rectify the situation it but it took a

while. I don't think anyone has ever easily gotten through to

the end of one of these scams. In other words, it's always

going to take more than one phone call. So just from the

very beginning, set yourself up to say I'm in it for the long

haul. I'm just going to keep at this and keep at this and keep

appealing and appealing until I can get whatever organization

that was legitimate to understand that this was a scam

and make sure that they place the blame and the punishment on

the appropriate people and not the person who accidentally fell

for this scam. Oh, yeah.

And don't be so hard on yourself. I mean

scammers, they're really good at what they do. So have your

little cry, throw your little temper tantrum, but then give

yourself a break because they're really good and they've just

gotten better and better and better over time. And you know,

like Kim said, we all know somebody but also most of us at

some point have fallen victim so my recommendation around that is

start with the platform that you got scammed on so start there.

So if you were scammed on Facebook or Instagram report it

they have procedures for reporting that if it was a I'm

looking at our list here, if it was a utility scam, go to your

utility company and let them know that this has happened

because a lot of times they want to know or they are aware and

they are they maybe have someone researching the issue I had a

Pay Pal scam similar to yours come through one time Kim and I

reported it to PayPal, it was the same thing with the

Bitcoins. I reported it to PayPal, so you know those kinds

of things. They're aware of it, so report it to them. So start

with the platform. And then you know, there are other places you

can report to so for example, you can report a scam to the

Better Business Bureau so if it's a business related one,

we'll leave links for these but it's bbb.org backslash scam

tracker, so we'll leave these links for you guys but that's if

it's a business related one and then if it's fraud, you can also

report fraud to the Federal Trade Commission at report

fraud.ftc.gov So both of these are great places and if you are

wondering if something's a scam, you can also go to the Better

Business Bureau or the Federal Trade Commission's website and

they have just lists and lists of scams there as well. And then

the last thing is you know, as hard as it is you need to talk

about the scam you need to tell people other business owners

other folks that might be victim especially your friends and

loved ones even though it might be embarrassing it's important

to tell people so if there's a scam that's going around a lot

or you're unsure if it's a scam check with those people in your

network and say hey have you been getting these i There's a

group of photographers that I chat with regularly and we're

constantly sending each other screenshots and stuff and saying

is this a scam This looks like a scam right? You know we're

constantly checking with each other is there anything else you

want to add to this Kim

the base things about keeping your passwords

safe and not sharing them and keeping them as hard to guess or

things which makes them incredibly a pain in the butt to

remember that all said, you know, scams are like you said

Cara, the scammers are really damn good at what they do. And

that's the unfortunate part of all of this is that I wish they

would turn their skills and their energy level to something

good. I mean, can you imagine if all of the scammers decided to

do something legitimate with the time and effort that they put

into this, you know, it would be so much better our world would

be so much better. So if you're a scammer out there listening to

this, please change your ways. And for the rest of you just

question everything.

Anyway, if you enjoyed this episode, let us

know. We're not going to ask you to go on and tell us if you've

been scammed or not because that would be weird. But we would

love to hear from you guys if you enjoyed the episode hit us

over on Instagram or Facebook at The Business Animal find us

online at the business animal.com And you all we really

are asking again please rate and review if you enjoyed the

episode. Thank you guys so much. Don't get scammed.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Business

Animal. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And

if you learned something today, leave us a review. To learn

more. Find us at thebusinessanimal.com We'd love

to hear from you. Until next time, keep your business well