83 percent of Americans have been the recipients of attempts to be scammed in 2022.
Americans are experiencing far more attempts to be scammed this year than in previous years, according to the first quarter report from Allstate Identity Protection (AIP).
The spam people are receiving is coming from many different directions such as texts and calls.
The Allstate Identity Protection survey showed that 83 percent of Americans have received a scam phone call this year, while another 74 percent of people across the US have received a scam text in 2022. Among those who have received a spam text or call, almost half of them reported receiving at least 11 new attempts to scam them each week.
Even though scammers that are sometimes successful don’t always reach the level of identity theft and are therefore not included in the case counts from AIP, they can still be expensive and time consuming for their victims.
“We hear stories regularly from people who were scammed out of their nest eggs,” said Brian Stuart, AIP Director of Customer Care. “Financial institutions don’t often cover these losses, so we want to empower everyone with the tools to recognize scams before they start.”
Allstate Identity Protection has identified the three most common form of scam Americans should know.
The following are the three types of scam AIP thinks all Americans should know so that they can protect themselves from it.
- Spam calls and texts – Scam calls and texts happen to nearly everyone on a regular basis. Moreover, almost 60 percent of the survey respondents reported having implemented some level of protection against them. Some rely on pre-installed basic features on their phones and aren’t looking to upgrade.
- Peer-to-peer (P2P) payment service scams – Nearly half of the survey respondents said that these types of scams affect them, and 29 percent said that they had personally been a victim or that they know someone who had been.
- Charity scams – In these cases, fraudsters home in on crisis situations to bilk money or personal information from well-meaning victims, exploiting their generosity. Half of the Allstate Identity Protection survey respondents said that they were worried about fraudulent charities and 28 percent said they were affected by it or know someone who has been.