Lesson 12
The Con at the Front Door
Recognise the pressure, spoofed numbers and cloned voices that scams use, and beat them with one habit: checking through a route you already know.
The request is the attack
A text arrives: “Your parcel couldn’t be delivered. Pay the £1.45 redelivery fee by 6pm or it will be returned.” There’s a courier’s logo and a link. Picture a stranger in a hi-vis jacket at your front door asking to come in and read the meter. The jacket is the costume; the con is the request. Online, the request is to type your card details, sign in, install something, approve something or send money.
This is phishing: a message or website that pretends to be someone you trust to get you to hand something over. As the last lesson showed, the fake page can have a perfect padlock. So the useful question is never “does this look real?” but “what is it asking me to do, and how can I check without using anything it gave me?”