Front page edit: need to learn how to avoid losing money

This is a bit of a rant, but I just went through a comment thread on an artist’s post on Instagram. This artist was detailing a scammer and their methods on her Instagram stories to warn other artists. The scammer was even using her own name, and client reviews, to get work from other people. She went through and put up screenshots of this scammer’s messages, and the emails getting sent from this scammer, a few other details, and some of the comments came up with things like “but how did they get into your DMs” and “why are you sharing this” and “I don’t get it. What did they do to you?”. <br><br>This is exactly the problem. If you don’t know what a scam is and how they work you’re probably going to get scammed. The artist’s thieves are in the comments of her post asking her how to do this and she’s being attacked by people who don’t even understand what’s going on. <br><br>I’ve run across about 4-5 other instances where people are openly sharing the details of these scams and are being attacked by the people they are trying to help! <br><br>Recently I received a scam message myself, it was one of the funny “you won money” scams. It was very obvious but I decided to play along. The scammer started sending me emails and went through and did everything right, except for one thing, and that one think killed the whole scam. Everything looked perfect and I actually thought it was real for a second, until I looked at the emails. <br><br>The emails had “GOOG” instead of “GOOGLE” in the domain. It was the one red flag in the whole entire thing and the moment I saw it I was pretty sure I had figured out what was going on. <br><br>I played along for a bit and I sent them my “information” and they sent me my “claim” link and it was even a very good fake of a google link. The only exception was that instead of “GOOGLE” it said “GOOG”. <br><br>This is what made me realize that there’s a ton of people out there that don’t know what a scam is. <br><br>Recently I had to teach my dad how to tell if a website is real or fake. He had no idea about getting a “domain verified” tag if you go to a real website, or that you check for the word “Secure” in the address bar. <br><br>I have never been scammed, mainly because I am kind of paranoid about sending money and giving out information. <br><br>I also learned a lot of scams from a lot of different sources, and I was homeschooled by my mom who taught me how to do all this stuff. <br><br>But there are a ton of people out there that don’t know what a scam is and they don’t know what to even look for. <br><br>I wish someone would make this a topic of discussion and share all the things to do to learn about scams and share examples of scams and things to look for. <br><br>Front page edit 2: even if I knew exactly what to do, I still would have played along with the scammer. It’s actually fun to play with them a little and I have heard that if you keep up a long enough you can get them to send you money. <br><br>I also don’t know if you’ve ever done this but it’s actually fun.