Scams change fast. But the playbook is often familiar. They often work because they create urgency and push you to act before you can think or verify what’s happening. They exploit your emotion and sometimes even impersonate people you already trust.

You can read about common scams in this library. That includes AI voice cloning, fake job offers, SIM swapping, crypto phishing, charity fraud, travel scams, and much more.

Every entry in here explains how the scams work, shows real-world examples, and gives you practical advice on how to reduce your risk.

The rise of crypto and ease of digital trading have modernized the scam of good old fashioned snake oil sales. There’s a social media influencer industry for every topic under the sun, and finance is no exception. As a result, there are many unlicensed financial advisors out there willing to scam naive investors.

Aside from just giving dubious advice, some of these influencers may offer free bonuses for investment commitments, or charge hidden fees if you allow them to manage your money. The people hawking the investments may not disclose their own interest in the token or the stock they’re selling you (which is illegal.) They might sell you outdated research information or charge you for dubious training courses.

Any of you who took investment advice from Kim Kardashian and bought the crypto security EMAX (which she was paid $250,000 to promote on her Instagram, but did not disclose) have been vindicated by the SEC, which made her pay $1.26 million in penalties. You might even say her decision to hawk crypto via social was a bad investment.

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The scammer sets up a wifi access point that’s designed to look like a real one–usually a public wifi network. They set up their new access point with the same name and Service Set Identifier (SSID) and so users don’t realize they’re accessing a network other than the one they intended. The user is directed to a login page that looks like the one they’re familiar with from the network they think they’re accessing and then use the credentials to login and capture user data, including sensitive information. The user doesn’t realize that the information has been stolen until much later because the wifi works and nothing seems amiss.

Passengers on a Delta Flight in August of 2026 encountered a wifi network that looked like Delta’s in flight wifi but was created by a passenger. The Delta crew alerted traffic control and it’s unclear exactly what happened, but some of the passengers were en route back from a cybersecurity conference and it’s relatively easy for a moderately tech savvy person to set up an evil twin access point using commercially available devices known as wifi “pineapples” that are used by security professionals to probe security vulnerabilities.

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Scammers create digital charity campaigns with fake appeals that convince users they’re donating to a worthy cause. They may look like a real charity with a slight change in the name or URL, and often use emotional appeals to get people to donate. Natural disasters are particularly ripe for scammers who want to tug at heartstrings to get to wallets.

They may solicit donations via an unfamiliar platform, ask for things like pre-paid cards, or have other non-refundable payment methods that make it difficult for victims to recover their money and difficult for law enforcement to trace.

In the wake of Hurricanes Milton and Helene in 2024, the Department of Justice issued a public alert about charity scammers who created fake philanthropies after prior hurricanes to solicit donations, supposedly on behalf of hurricane victims. Lecia E. Wright, Supervisory Assistant United States Attorney wrote, “As we have seen in the wake of previous national disasters, fraudsters will target victims of the storms along with citizens across the country who want to do what they can to assist individuals affected by the storms. Unfortunately, criminals exploit disasters for their own gain by sending fraudulent communications through email or social media and by creating deceiving websites designed to solicit contributions.”

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Scammers posing as political organizations or pollsters will contact you, unsolicited, offering to register you to vote, to fix your registration, or offer you a gift card in exchange for taking a poll if you give them your credit card information to cover shipping and handling. This coincides with the rise of scam PACs, which purport to be political action committees (PAC), but keep money raised for themselves.

In 2020, scammers sent out an email impersonating the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) asking voters to add personal information to their registrations that the commission does not track. They did this by spoofing the EAC’s official government domain.

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Also known as “SIM hijacking,” scammers transfer your phone number to a SIM card in order to gain access to your digital accounts and get around 2-factor authentication methods that use your phone to verify your identity. They do this by contacting your mobile carrier and using available information they have about you to convince the carrier that your number needs to be moved to a new SIM card.

Patricia Escriva of Florida was babysitting one night when she realized her phone was suddenly quiet and had no service. She connected to wifi and was barraged with alerts that money was being withdrawn from her accounts and that a new device had been added. It took her three days to recover her number and begin the arduous process of getting her money back.

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Scammers impersonate airlines, hotels, and other travel and hospitality companies that people actually use. You might, for example, get a notice from a hotel saying that there was a problem with a reservation or payment–information they have about your real reservation because they’ve managed to get into the hotel system via phishing staffers or hacking their systems in some other way.

If you’ve booked a flight, they might send a text notifying you that your flight needs to be rebooked for an additional fee.

In December of 2025, an investigation by Norton Security found that a fake message had been sent to Booking.com users. According to Wired, the message arrived via Whatsapp. It “said it was from a specific hotel and listed the dates of an upcoming reservation, before asking the individual to click a link and confirm their details. The link led to a false website and included a chatbot that would instantly share any entered details, such as credit card information, with the hackers.” Norton also determined that the service Cloudbeds had been hacked in a similar way.

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You get a package that looks like it’s coming from Amazon or a similar company, but you didn’t order anything. Inside is usually something cheap. A scammer is sending it to you in order to get validation of delivery so they can use your name to write fake reviews to “brush” up their sales, so the FTC refers to it as a “brushing scam.”  Is this a lot of trouble for a fake review? Yes. But it might be worth it for the scammer if they can use you as a reviewer repeatedly or get you to scan a QR code to find out where your surprise “gift” came from.

Michael and Kelly Gallivan of Massachusetts found themselves with a humidifier, a computer vacuum, a portable speaker, and some LED lights–all of which would have made for a cheery and clean home office–but neither had ordered any of those items. The sender, who was located in China, appeared to be running a brushing scheme, so if you notice a “Michael and Kelly Gallivan” leaving enthusiastic reviews under a humidifier you’re considering buying from Amazon, you should be aware that the actual Michael and Kelly might not be quite so excited about it.

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You get a job offer, completely unsolicited over Whatsapp from a professional recruiter. How nice. Flattering, even. In this economy? Amazing!

Not so fast. Aside from the fact that professional recruiters rarely if ever make first contact via a messaging app, they certainly don’t offer jobs without so much as an interview or discussion.

What scammers do, however, is offer a gig that involves simple tasks or data entry, usually billed as a “work from home” gig. In order to get paid, you must pay them first some minimum or offer up personal information that could be of use to part you with your hard earned money.

Seven people in the UK paid a total of 200,000 pounds after being recruited for jobs as “data optimizers,” a real sounding job that was, of course, a fiction created by a scammer. Victims were asked to “match” their supposed earnings with their own money. One thing was certainly optimized: scammer profits!

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For better or worse, more job interviews are happening digitally these days, some of them conducted entirely by AI. This is a rich opportunity for scammers to convince victims who are job hunting to download software or documents as part of the supposed interview process. Many of these scams are initiated via LinkedIn messages and the company issued a warning to users in a 2026 safety report.

A LinkedIn user lost £18,000 worth of cryptocurrency after downloading a seemingly normal looking document as part of a supposed recruitment process. The user may have been targeted because they indicated on their profile that they were looking for work.

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Scammers impersonate the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) to re-target people who have already been victimized. They may offer help to victims in recovering funds and in the process. This may occur via email, or messaging, and recently scammers have used AI to create fake videos from supposed FBI personnel encouraging reporting. When them the victim contacts them, they may direct them to malicious code, or collect more personal and financial information.

An FBI alert from July of 2026 described a recent scenario: “After the victim of a scam begins to realize they are being defrauded, the victim informs the scammers they will report them to the FBI and file an IC3 report. The victim is later contacted by an individual impersonating an FBI agent on Facebook Messenger (FM). The impersonator communicates via Telegram and FM and sends a link to update the submitted IC3 report. The link may contain malicious code or may be used to collect more financial data to revictimize the person.”

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Scammers use voice cloning technology (often powered by AI) to create facsimiles of a person’s voice in order to impersonate them to friends or family. They’ll often claim to be a loved one who’s having an emergency and needs money.

Voice cloning is increasingly common, and instances of it were up 1,210% in 2025 according to Fox News. A research study from McAfee reported one in four people they surveyed had been voice cloned themselves or knew someone who’d been scammed.

Scammers don’t need to be technically sophisticated to execute this scam. With as little as three seconds of a person’s voice, they can use freely available–and free–technology to produce a voice clone. Many of us send voice notes and post audio to social media, and this is often source material for scammers.

California mom Deborah Del Mastro received a call from a man claiming to have kidnapped her daughter and demanding money. Del Mastro wired over $5000 to Mexico after hearing a voice recording that sounded like her daughter, distressed and panicking. She only realized it was a hoax when she arrived to pick up her daughter and no one showed. She called her daughter’s phone to find that her daughter was perfectly safe, and at work.

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Scammers use AI to create deepfakes of celebrities, politicians, or other public figures in order to spread disinformation or lure victims to click on malware links. These are images or video that appear to be authentic but are generated by AI.

Tom Hanks, Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, and Oprah have all been made into deepfakes to sell products including dental plans and cookware. More insidiously, they are sometimes used to manipulate individuals, as some golf fans discovered when they were lured into romance scams by digital deepfakes impersonating well known female professional golfers.

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This scam works like many other phishing scams: the target receives a link, usually in an email, that appears to direct them to a login page for their crypto wallet, and once they have the target’s private keys, they steal the money in the wallet.

Direct access to crypto wallets are disproportionately responsible for multi-million dollar losses, but even if you don’t have a lot of money in crypto, losses can be extremely difficult to recover. Crypto isn’t insured the way your bank accounts are, nor do they have the protections you’d have as an investor in securities.

This can happen even to sophisticated crypto investors. Take the story of Glen, for example, who lost $180,000 after responding to a fake customer service support alert.

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This is a broad category, and includes but is not limited to many different digital scam tactics (phishing, catphishing, use of deepfakes, etc.) In short, the scammer approaches their target as a potential romantic interest and develops the relationship over time in order to extract money and goods from their target.

Where to start? True crime shows are full of stories about people victimized by charming strangers who go on to exploit them in insidious ways. A 66 year old woman from Montana named Rita lost $90,000 over several months after someone contacted her on a social media platform claiming to be a celebrity. The imposter convinced her that he needed money to help pay for events he was doing and insisted that she pay in bitcoin.

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The most common form of tax scam involves a scammer calling a victim and pretending to be the IRS. They will demand payment for money owed and may threaten the victim with arrest or deportation if the fee isn’t paid immediately. They may also promise a refund and ask for sensitive bank information so they can deliver it.

A 2023 NPR report noted that victims of this sort of scam have lost more than $28 million since 2018. People anxious to comply with the IRS may panic, thinking they owe money and fail to be sufficiently skeptical. But the IRS does not contact taxpayers via phone, or email, or text. They communicate via the postal service, and will not initiate anything via other channels unless a taxpayer has failed egregiously to respond to other letters.

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The target receives a text or other type of message from a scammer claiming to be a toll payment company, like E-ZPass or FasTrak, claiming that the victim has a toll payment due, and threatening suspension if the balance isn’t paid immediately via a link provided.

Virginia Beach resident Eric Moyer received a blizzard of texts, purportedly from E-ZPass, telling him he had unpaid tolls and could have his license suspended if he didn’t pay them. Unfortunately for the scammer, Moyer was immediately suspicious–largely because he hadn’t used a toll road in months. Security experts say many of the scams are run by groups of Chinese criminal gangs who buy phone numbers in bulk and spam them with demands for small amounts of money, and the personal information they acquire from the victim is worth more than the money they demand.

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Scammers send targets emails or texts offering jobs (often work from home jobs that are well compensated) that pay a certain amount a week or small amounts of money for small tasks. Once engaged, the targets are asked to provide bank information and / or deposit money in order to receive higher payouts.

Californian Dawn Furseth thought she’d received a part-time job offer from Facebook and lost $176,000 to a scammer. Furseth was a contractor who had worked for software companies and was approached by a scammer who only communicated with her over Whatsapp. The scammer convinced her that she had a job involving posting facebook ads and Furseth was instructed to put money from her own account into a digital wallet.

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An oldie, but a goodie. (Or a baddie?) Scammers impersonate a tech support company, usually Best Buy’s Geek Squad, confirming a payment the victim didn’t make, then redirect them to communicate with the scammer. Then they often ask for remote access to the victim’s computer. This one is so pervasive that Best Buy has a whole notice page warning customers and noting that the Geek Squad doesn’t make unsolicited calls to customers.

You probably already have this kind of scam email sitting in the spam folder of your inbox. But they’re still squeaking by in the inboxes of less tech savvy and more vulnerable users. (Think about who typically does need routine tech support for personal computer use.) Scammers use fearmongering to convince these more vulnerable users that they will lose access to their technology if they don’t pay up, and convince them to pay fast before they might notice any red flags.

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Scammers impersonate the target’s bank via text, and begin a chain of communication where they convince the target to give up their bank information. This is a “smishing” scam–phishing over SMS.

A typical text might look like one of the victim’s bank’s real fraud alerts and the scammer will ask them to call a number to contest a fraudulent purchase. The scammer may then impersonate a customer service rep, using scripts that are similar or identical to those used by the bank, in order to get the customer to “verify” their personal information.

CBS journalist Matt Guttman nearly fell for this scam, even though he has covered scams in his capacity as a reporter. He got a call from what was supposedly the fraud department of his bank and the scammer, impersonating a bank professional, seemed to already know a lot about Guttman and his bank account. But his daughter had recently been scammed in a similar fashion and he double-checked with the bank.

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This is a phishing scam where targets receive an invitation to a party that looks like it comes from prominent digital invite companies like e-Vite or Paperless Post. The initial message looks identical to actual invites that would arrive via text or email, inviting the recipient to “view the card” or event. Upon clicking the link, targets are asked to provide login credentials and scammers may use that access to install malware. They can also use access to your address book on the platforms to target your contacts.

This scam exploits FOMO (fear of missing out). Who doesn’t want to go to a great party? As a result, victims may be extra curious when the invite comes from an old friend, an ex, a colleague, or someone unexpected.

Andrew Smith, a grad student in Manhattan received a message from an ex-girlfriend while he was at a bar. “The choice of sender was super clever,” he told The New York Times. “This was somebody that would probably get a reaction from me.”

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