The Scams People Ask Me About Most Often

The Scams People Ask Me About Most Often

I get asked about a lot of specific incidents, a strange text, an odd phone call, a message from someone who claims to know a relative. But underneath the specifics, most of what people bring me falls into a small handful of repeating patterns. Scammers don't need a thousand different tricks, they just need five or six that work often enough, dressed up slightly differently each time. Once I started noticing the patterns instead of the surface details, spotting a new variation got a lot easier. Here are the five I'm asked about most, and what actually gives each one away.

The Courier Text About a Parcel I'm Not Expecting

This is the single most common one people forward me, a text claiming a delivery couldn't be completed, with a link to "reschedule" or pay a small redelivery fee. The trick works because most of us are expecting a parcel from somewhere at any given time, so the message lands as plausible rather than suspicious. The tell isn't usually the spelling or the logo, both can look convincing now, it's the link itself. Real couriers direct you to track a parcel using a tracking number you already have, through their own app or the retailer's order page, not through a fresh link texted to you out of nowhere. If I'm not sure, I go directly to the retailer's own order history or the courier's official app rather than tapping anything in the message, and nine times out of ten there's simply no delivery in progress to check on.

The "Bank Security Team" Call That Won't Let Me Hang Up and Check

This one worries people more than any other, because it comes with a voice on the line applying pressure in real time rather than a message you can sit with. Someone calls claiming to be from your bank's fraud team, tells you your account has been compromised, and needs to "verify" you or move your money to a "safe account" right now. The number can even show up as your real bank's on caller ID, since that detail is trivial to fake. The one thing every genuine bank will always let you do is hang up and call them back on the number printed on your card, and a legitimate fraud team will never object to that or rush you past it. I tell people to treat any resistance to hanging up and calling back independently as the clearest signal in the entire call, more telling than anything the caller actually says.

The Romance That Escalates to a Money Request Within Weeks

I hear about this one less often than the others, mostly because people are understandably reluctant to bring it up, but it's one of the most financially damaging when it does happen. Someone connects on a dating app or social media, the conversation moves fast and feels genuinely warm, and then within weeks there's a reason money needs to move, a medical emergency, a stuck shipment, a visa fee to finally meet in person. The relationship itself can feel completely real to the person experiencing it, which is exactly what makes this pattern so effective and so hard to raise with someone from the outside. A person you've never met in real life asking for money, in almost any circumstance they describe, is the signal to pause and talk to someone you trust before sending anything, no matter how genuine the connection has felt up to that point.

The Investment Tip From Someone I've Never Met

This one's grown a lot recently, usually starting as an unsolicited message on social media or a messaging app, often from someone who seems to have accidentally messaged the wrong number and strikes up a friendly conversation before mentioning how well their investments are doing. It can also arrive as a slicker version, a fake trading platform showing impressive returns that you can watch grow, right up until you try to withdraw anything. Genuine investment opportunities don't arrive as unsolicited messages from strangers, and any platform that makes withdrawing difficult or asks for extra fees before you can access your own money has already told you what it actually is. I treat any investment introduced through a personal message from someone I've never met, however friendly or patient they seem, as something to walk away from entirely rather than research further.

The Prize Notification for a Competition I Never Entered

This is the oldest pattern on this list and it still works constantly, a message announcing you've won a prize, a gift card, a competition you don't remember entering, with a small fee or your card details required to release it. The logic should be obvious once you say it out loud, a genuine prize doesn't need payment or your card number to be handed over, but the excitement of "winning" something short-circuits that logic for a lot of people in the moment. I ask myself one simple question with these, did I actually enter anything recently, and if the honest answer is no, there's nothing further to consider regardless of how official the message looks.

Five very different situations, and the same thread running through every one of them, someone creating urgency or excitement specifically to stop you from pausing and checking independently. A courier link you didn't ask for, a caller who won't let you hang up, a stranger asking for money, an investment you can't withdraw from, a prize you never entered, none of these survive a moment's independent verification, which is exactly why the pressure to skip that step is always the actual point. I run my own passwords through NordPass so a compromised login on one of these fronts doesn't cascade into every account I own, and I've written separately about the ordinary mistakes that make people more exposed to all five of these in the first place, along with why bad grammar stopped being a reliable warning sign on its own. If you want to report something that's already happened, Action Fraud is the right place to start, and my free Safety Toolkit covers the rest of what I'd recommend if you want to build up your defences properly.