Page 20 - Seniors Today -April20
P. 20

Cover Story




         Hello ma’am,

         it’s a scam











         People have duped others
         throughout human history, and
         scamsters evolve with the times.
         Sandeep Suri offers tips on staying
         safe





         It was early morning on a beautiful summer         to dupe others. The face of economic crime
         day. I reached my office in Dublin, Ireland.       is changing at an unprecedented rate. The
         As I was looking through the glass outside         internet has changed the complexities
         an old, timber-framed French window I              of fraud. With most consumers owning
         watched the beautiful sun rising to brighten       smartphone, tablets, laptops, the digital
         the earth, and I felt more in sync with nature     market is here to stay! Indeed, technology
         and all it had to offer, but then someone          is supporting the large volume of online
         knocked on my door, it was my admin                transactions, but the real currency of digital
         Wendy who was looking quite hassled. I             commerce is TRUST. As businesses witness
         realised that there was something not quite        digital transformations in their fields, they
         right with her that day, she reluctantly           recognise the importance of technology
         told me that her 82-year-old mother was            which is one of the biggest enablers to
         cheated by a fraudster when she innocently         build scale and efficiency. Building trust
         answered a few simple questions over the           through technology without disruption
         phone, succumbed to the creative tricks            is increasingly the goal, while there are
         of the fraudster, and lost about €1000             natural barriers to this audacious goal, it is
         in just in a matter of minutes. This is an         now more critical than ever to transact with
         example of how vulnerable we are to these          utmost care.
         cybersecurity crimes in our society.                Converging trends have propelled the
          I don’t want to scare you, but the fact of        increasing scale, diversity, and complexity
         the matter is that you turn on the news or         of frauds across the globe. As an example, a
         leaf through a newspaper, and there is a           shift from conventional methods of making
         reasonably high chance you will find a story       payments to more sophisticated ways of
         about economic crime or fraud. Throughout          transferring money has accentuated the pace
         the human history, people have attempted           and scale of frauds. We genuinely believe


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