Census Scams and ‘Grandparent Scams’

Not all phishing is by email – indeed, when it spills over into social engineering by phone, it’s often referred to as vishing (voice phishing).

And, as Benjamin Franklin might have said had he lived a couple of centuries later than he did, nothing is certain but death, taxes, and phone scams. I’ve talked here about tech support scams many, many times, of course – and unfortunately will certainly see a need to do so again – but there are other scams around, less publicized but no less persistent. One I hadn’t been aware of – well, I don’t spend all my waking hours scamwatching – is the census scam described by Sid Kirchheimer in an article on Census Scams: Hard to Detect, Easy for Fraudsters. The scam described involves a phishing email that directs potential victims to a web site that purports to collect data for the yearly American Community Survey.

Census Scams and ‘Grandparent Scams’