Start here to shield yourself and your organization from the crooks, the cons, the cybercriminals and the insiders. Want a deeper dive? I’ve got a full battlefield manual ready for you in my new book Spies, Lies and Cybercrime.
This page is your Scam Survival Checklist. If you’d rather not hunt it down later, drop your email and I’ll keep you updated when scams evolve and new tricks appear.
Criminals use AI to clone voices and faces, impersonating family or officials to create urgent, believable demands.
Grandparent scams, fake Medicare/IRS calls, romance scams, and emotional manipulation targeted at older adults.
Influencer impersonations, fake giveaways, phishing links in social apps, and peer-account hijacking.
Bogus online stores, fake delivery notifications, counterfeit gift cards, and fraudulent charity appeals.
Crypto cons, fake investment platforms, “guaranteed returns,” and pig-butchering schemes that drain savings.
When a cybercriminal compromises you, every second matters.
As a former FBI counterintelligence operative who helped expose one of America’s most damaging spies, I’ve spent my career studying how attackers manipulate trust and exploit human behavior.
Follow these steps to stop the breach and protect yourself from further damage.
Reach out to your banks, credit card issuers, mortgage lender, and any other institutions where you maintain financial accounts to place a lock on all cards. Make sure you inform each organization about every account or card that might be at risk, including ATM cards, debit or check cards, credit cards, and phone cards.
Change all PINs and passwords and autopay options you may have established with online vendors and financial institutions. Ensure you turn on Two Factor Authentication on all critical accounts (including email and social media).
File a police report and submit a separate report with the Federal Trade Commission. Keep records of all conversations, reports, and correspondence.
Continuously monitor your credit report and financial accounts for unexpected activity. You receive a free credit report every year from each of Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. Consider investing in credit monitoring services like Aura or Equifax.
Getting breached is bad. Staying vulnerable is worse. Harden your perimeter.
Cybercriminals have adopted the tradecraft of spies and are constantly evolving their tradecraft. To defeat them you need to think like a spy and act like a spy hunter.
Older adults are high-value targets. Scammers know it, and they tailor their attacks accordingly. Awareness is the strongest defense.
Teenagers aren’t easy to fool… until someone pretends to know them better than their parents do. Scammers target teens because they move fast, trust fast, and live online, which is exactly where predators operate.
This is the new cybercrime frontier. Deepfakes are no longer science fiction. They’re now cheap, convincing, and used to scam people out of millions
A parent gets a call from their teenage daughter. She’s crying, panicked, breathless. She was “in an accident.” She “hit someone.” She needs money right now.
Except she’s fine and is at school, at practice, or living her life.
The voice was a deepfake. The fear was real. The urgency was engineered.
The scammer only needed a few seconds of audio scraped from social media to mimic her perfectly.
A friend calls from a trip abroad. Their passport was stolen. Their wallet, phone, everything is gone. They need emergency cash, wire transfer only, and they “can’t talk long.”
Except your friend is sitting poolside sipping something cold, completely unaware someone used their voice to beg you for money.
Deepfakes are the newest evolution of cybercrime. The rules of spycraft still apply: verify everything. The moment emotion takes over, and you stop checking the facts, you’ve already given the scam a head start.
Dos
Don’ts
Monitoring your credit reports regularly is a good way to quickly identify and correct for fraud. If you have already been victimized, it is critical to maintaining awareness of any new accounts or large transactions created by the fraudster. Contact the credit bureaus — Experian, Equifax, Innovis, or TransUnion Credit — for more information.
Consumers can receive a free credit file disclosure, commonly called a credit report, once every 12 months from each of the nationwide consumer credit reporting companies: Equifax, Experian, TransUnion or Innovis.
To receive your report, go to AnnualCreditReport.com. AnnualCreditReport.com is the official site to help consumers to obtain their free credit report.
Deepfakes aim to mimic reality. Look for the flaws in the cloned voice or image.
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