Mr. Doctorow noted that just as the Internet has made routine tasks less cumbersome, it has also made scams much easier to pull off. Imagine an old-fashioned boiler room in which talkative artists make hundreds of phone calls in an attempt to extract savings from strangers, he said. Now fast forward to 2024, when fraudsters will be able to send millions of phishing text messages and emails using bots.
“If you can automate parts of it,” Mr. Doctorow said, “you can cast a wider net.”
Text message scams fooled Americans 300 million dollars in 2022, the Federal Trade Commission reported. That same year, Americans received 225 billion spam emails, a 157% increase from the previous year. according to a report from Robokillera company that sells an anti-spam application.
As digitally savvy and cautious as he is, Mr. Doctorow is not immune to phishing.
In December, while vacationing with his family in New Orleans, he received a call from his bank asking if he had spent $1,000 at an Apple Store in New York. In fact, the caller was a scammer who had obtained Mr. Doctorow’s phone number and the name of his credit union — perhaps from one of the many data brokers who collect personal information and sell it to third parties – and then used identity theft software. to appear as your bank on your caller ID.
During the call, Mr. Doctorow gave the last seven digits of his debit card number – enough information for the scammer to charge a fee to his account.
Sophisticated technology makes this kind of deception possible. But Mr. Doctorow argued that, thanks to outsourcing and automation, the typical communication sent by customer service departments at many large companies has become “indistinguishable from a phishing scam.”
The prevalence of online deception can also add a bit of unwanted drama to mundane tasks. Recently, Ms Rutledge, the psychologist, thought she had been scammed when she received a letter from a government office on “the crappiest letterhead I have ever seen “.
