Most of us won’t remember 2020 fondly, for a number of reasons — one of which is the dramatic uptick in scams reported to the FTC : over 2 million of them in total (representing over $3 billion in losses!). That’s in addition to the millions more who have fallen victim to various types of scams over the preceding years.
Add those numbers up and it’s clear that a great many of us either have fallen victim to a scam already or are likely to at some point in our lives. While ideally we’d all be well-informed enough and vigilant enough to see through the scammers’ tricks, the reality is that many of us — to our cost — will be fooled. Knowing how to recover from being scammed is simply another life skill.
What Are the Big Scams Right Now?
The FTC broke out the broad trends from its 2020 fraud data in a blog post. The biggest single category was what the FTC calls “imposter” scams, where the criminal pretends to be someone else: a police officer, the IRS or Social Security Administration, a bank or credit card company, a business you deal with or in some cases even a friend or family member. The pandemic played a role in this, with a lot of scams taking advantage of the confusion over new programs like the stimulus payments.
Another pandemic-fueled category was fraudulent online sales. A lot of complaints to the FTC involved products that were misrepresented or just plain failed to arrive after being paid for. With so many consumers shopping from home during the lockdowns, the sudden boom in e-commerce was a gold rush for scammers.
Aside from those growth categories, all of the perennial favorites continued strong as well: payment-app scams, romance scams, social-media scams and phishing — to name just a few — haven’t gone away and won’t anytime soon.
Recognizing You’ve Been Scammed
The first step in recovery, proverbially, is recognizing that you have a problem. Everyone’s situation is different, so there’s no universal point where you’ll realize you’ve been scammed. In a best-case scenario, you might hang up from a scam phone call and immediately say to yourself, “Wait, what?” More often, you won’t realize you’ve been had until the repercussions begin to show up financially.
There are a lot of reliable signs that scammers have your personal information and are using it to your detriment, some glaring (your card being refused, collection calls over debts that are completely news to you) and some subtler, like some of your mail not showing up.
Often you’ll first realize you’ve been scammed when you see inexplicable changes to your credit score, or mysterious charges and withdrawals on your account statements. Scrutinizing your statements or checking your accounts online and pulling credit reports from the Big Three reporting agencies (you’re entitled to a free one every year from each agency) will quickly show if there’s anything shady going on.
How (and Where) to Report a Scam
If you realize or even strongly suspect you’ve been the victim of a scam, the next step is to report it. A good starting point is the FTC’s IdentityTheft.gov website or ReportFraud website, depending on the type of scam you’ve fallen victim to. Neither actively investigates fraud, but both act as a central information repository for consumers and law enforcement alike.
On the law-enforcement side, you can (and probably should) file a report with local law enforcement, as well as the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Unlike the FTC, the FBI very much does investigate fraud. Other professional bodies and agencies have their own industry-specific complaint mechanisms as well: if the scam you fell for was investment-related, for example, you might opt to file a complaint with the SEC.
Reporting the scam to any companies involved — whether the scammer hit them for credit or merchandise or impersonated them to carry out the scam — might be necessary to get the charges reversed, and at the very least it’s a useful courtesy (it helps them improve their own defenses against fraud). Finally, spreading the word through social media, or resources like the Better Business Bureau’s Scam Tracker, can help spread awareness and maybe prevent someone else from falling for the same scam.
How to Recover From Being Scammed
There are 12-step programs in place to help you recover from a lot of things, but fraud isn’t one of them. Until you start, it’s hard to know how many steps will actually be required. One advantage of reporting your scammers to the FTC is that both the IdentityTheft.gov and ReportFraud sites provide you with a road map of the next steps in recovery.
Depending on your personal situation, these might include (but certainly aren’t limited to):
- Setting an extended fraud alert or credit freeze with each of the main credit-reporting agencies
- Changing the passwords or PINs on all of your accounts
- Filing an Identity Theft Affidavit with the IRS, if your tax accounts have been affected
- Contacting your insurance company, if you’ve been the victim of medical identity fraud
- Communicating with your bank or credit card provider to have fraudulent charges reversed
- Closing out any fraudulent accounts that may have been opened in your name
- Clearing yourself of any criminal charges a scammer might have incurred in your name (!)
How to Recover Psychologically
There’s another aspect to your recovery that a lot of articles gloss over, but it’s important: your emotional and psychological recovery. Being fooled by a scammer is psychologically damaging on many levels, from the basic “How could I have been so stupid?” after a phone or phishing scam to the much deeper wounds caused by romance scammers.
The Identity Theft Resource Center regularly follows up with victims of this form of fraud, in order to assess the longer-term impacts. The 2021 edition of its report, like earlier versions, found that the emotional impacts included high levels of stress, feelings of anger and violation, reduced trust in other people and in some cases even thoughts of suicide.
That’s a lot to unpack, and you may need some professional counseling to help you through it. First and foremost, though, just give yourself a break. You were up against a professional, and were outmatched just as surely as if you’d gone out to shoot hoops with LeBron James or Steph Curry. Scammers may not understand psychology in quite the same way psychologists do, but you can bet they know how to manipulate peoples’ weaknesses and emotions effectively. That’s what they do.
Protect Yourself Against Future Scams
Arguably the most discouraging thing in the Identity Theft Resource Center’s report was that for 30% of respondents, it was not their first time as victims. This doesn’t necessarily mean being scammed repeatedly — identity theft can happen for other reasons, like data breaches — but it does mean that ongoing vigilance is important.
Simply staying educated about current scams is an important step. The FTC’s website has lots of useful information, for example, and so do the BBB’s Scam Tracker and this very blog. The AARP is a great source for information on scams targeting seniors. If you use dating apps, selling apps or social media, each of those platforms will usually have articles on its help pages to warn you of common scams.
Finally, signing up for some form of identity protection can also provide peace of mind. Spokeo Protect (Spokeo’s new identity theft protection product) includes dark web monitoring that can detect when your personal information is offered up for sale in the black markets of the internet’s netherworld. Finding out about it before the purchasers can make use of their ill-gotten information can limit the damage and help speed your recovery.
Sources
US Federal Trade Commission: New Data Shows FTC Received 2.2 Million Fraud Reports from Consumers in 2020
US Federal Trade Commission: The Top Frauds of 2020
US Federal Trade Commission: Scams Starting on Social Media Proliferate in Early 2020
US Federal Trade Commission: Free Credit Reports
IdentityTheft.gov: Report Identity Theft and Get a Recovery Plan
ReportFraud: Report to Help Fight Fraud!
US Federal Bureau of Investigation: Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)
US Securities and Exchange Commission: Investment Scam Complaints on the Rise – Investor Alert
US Securities and Exchange Commission: Report Suspected Securities Fraud or Wrongdoing
Better Business Bureau: Scam Tracker
US Internal Revenue Service: When to File a Form 14039, Identity Theft Affidavit
Identity Theft Resource Center: The Identity Theft Resource Center’s 2020 Consumer Aftermath Report Reveals Impacts on COVID-19 Identity Crime Victims
Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology: The Psychology of Internet Fraud Victimisation: A Systematic Review; Gareth Norris, et al.
US Federal Trade Commission: Scam Tag: Avoiding Scams