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Sponsor/Advertiser Voice (0:01)
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Clark Howard (0:29)
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Clark Howard (0:50)
I'm so glad you're with us here on the Clark Howard Show. You know, our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you to so you make better financial decisions in your life. So I hate to start out this week on a negative Nelly note, but there's a new scam that several of our team members admitted would fool them. And think about it. We got people who work on our team who are so scam aware and they would have been taken by this one. And it's coming to your email inbox. I'm going to tell you what to watch out for later. I'm hearing from more and more of you about the stress of owing money, having bills, having debt. I want you to know how to know whether a collector contacting you is legit. And also where should you turn for legitimate guidance if you're looking for help to try to get your debts paid off or under control. We're going to talk about all that Today on our YouTube show and podcast. So there's a scam that has been growing. I've been reading stories about it and thought we would do it like a week ago and didn't get around to it. And then I read another story from a woman I just respect so much, Michelle Singletary, who's personal finance writer, the Washington Post. How it happened to her and this scam at one level is very clever, very deceptive, and another actually pretty simple for criminals to pull off. So I need to make sure you know because this will morph and it will become a way that criminals really make your life miserable. So I want to make sure you know, here's what happens. Criminal hacks into somebody's email and what they're after is your contact list and then they send out a fake party invitation to all the contacts of the individual they stole the information from. And so it looks like there's a party for Jim or Mary or whoever. And so a lot of those will go to people who don't really know the person whose party is. They're not even going to pay any attention. But what happens if in those contacts there's a good solid hit with a really good friend or relative and they get something that looks just like a regular party invitation from a regular party site? You know, the ones that do the invites? The one that Michelle Singletary got looked like it was from one of the regular ones and it was somebody she knew, but not well enough to be invited to their party. The other articles I've read about this have been pretty dry, you know, from security firms and stuff. So I thought Michelle's was so great because this actually happened to her and she almost fell for it. And it came on Punchbowl or appeared to be from Punchbowl. And this is the key for you to remember with any party invitation you get, it will come appearing to be from Evite or Punchbowl or any of the various invite systems that people use for a party, but they're not actually from any of these organizations. They just mimic exactly the look of their invitations. They'll have in them where it looks like you're getting it from them, but if you look at the sender, the sender is not from them. It was just, you know, a randomized email account. And they send these all out to the stolen list. So you may wonder, what are they after? Okay, if you click on the link in one of these phony party invitations, you have now downloaded really ugly viruses to your phone or computer that allow somebody to have access to everything on them. And what they're after, obviously are your bank accounts, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, whatever, and your email stuff. So they can then do it to other people and then other people and then other people. This one's pretty serious. So, I mean, for a good while from now, I want you to remember this. And anytime you get a party invitation, before you ever click on the hyperlink in it, I want you to look at the sender information. And if it's not actually from the email service that does the invites, you know you're about to get scammed and get an ugly virus in there on your computer which puts your information at big time risk.
