Does it feel like stories about scams and cyber frauds are everywhere this summer?

The Dallas ransomware attack launched on May 3, 2023 and instantly shut down multiple critical systems throughout the city, including websites for the police department and city hall. Continued reverberations from the attack caused limited access to important services such as the 911 dispatch system, the courts, permitting and zoning offices, and the library and animal shelter systems. Worst of all, we have recently learned that the attack may have compromised the personal data of city employees through the employee benefit system.

Royal, the organization behind the attack, is a cybercriminal gang that attacks businesses and municipalities with overburdened and underfunded IT systems, demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars — or up to millions — in ransom to prevent further damage and the release of personal information.

At this point you may be saying, "That’s terrible, but I'm not a business or municipality, so what do I really need to know about this now that it's done?"

Unfortunately, quite a bit.

Even if ordinary individuals are unlikely to receive huge ransom demands for malware infestations, the delivery system used for such malware is remarkably simple, and gets deployed against individuals for identity theft and other forms of fraud all the time. According to FBI estimates, two-thirds of such attacks are accomplished through phishing emails — those innocuous-seeming "please open the attached invoice/receipt/confirmation/etc." emails that every American seems to receive every day.

Our older loved ones are particularly at risk from the scams and frauds initiated by those emails, as many seniors control readily available funds, trust institutions that appear legitimate, and have little knowledge of technology and current scams. According to the FBI Elder Fraud information page our elderly population suffers more than $3 billion in losses to fraud annually.

Please help keep your loved ones from becoming part of that statistic by reading and sharing the information we’ve included below.

Among the links we’ve attached below is one for an article from AARP on the top scams in 2023. The next is the link to a downloadable PDF document that lists some of the sneakiest ways thieves are trying to get inside our senior loved ones’ defenses. We’ve also attached the links for articles from the National Council on Aging (NCOA) and the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on ways that your loved ones can identify and protect themselves from legitimate-seeming phishing attempts.

If there is one piece of information we’d like you to share above everything else, it is to NEVER CLICK on a document or link in an email, even if it seems to come from a genuine company, government agency, utility, or bank. Spelling errors, poor grammar and slapdash logo placement used to make phishing emails easy to recognize, but modern artificial intelligence (AI) language and graphics tools have made such frauds increasingly realistic. Make sure that your loved one knows that instead of clicking on a link in an email, they should always type the company, government agency, utility or bank name into their website browser independently to see if the information in the email is repeated on the website.

99.99 times out of a 100, it will not be and the email should be deleted.

Finally, we want to highlight a low-tech scam that places seniors who still send and receive paper checks at particular risk: mailbox fishing and check washing. At the most basic level, this scam involves pulling checks out of outgoing mailboxes (including those street corner blue boxes), washing the checks, and rewriting them for the thief to cash. More sophisticated versions of this scam are now spreading, which include the theft of mail directly from mail carriers and mail trucks, and ongoing identity theft.

To protect against this scam, make sure that your senior loved ones never place anything in an unprotected outgoing mailbox, use indelible ink to fill out any information on a check, and ideally, never send checks through the mail at all.