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Jacob Gibson
Comm 102 Section 7
November 22, 2013
Specific Purpose: To persuade the class to become and stay informed
about the common scams that happen today.
Central Idea: You
need to stay actively informed so that you do not lose you hard earned money
Elevator Speech: Scammers
make thousands of dollars a day, you can avoid being the victim and loosing
thousands by becoming informed and taking a few seconds to think before
acting.
Scams, How to Avoid Them
Introduction: (Attention
Getter) I want you to imagine that you are a hardworking parent. You have
spent years earning a living and are living a comfortable life when you run
into unfortunate circumstances. You lose
your job and have to get a new one making less. Its Christmas time and you want
to get a little extra cash to buy your kids some good presents. You have an
extra car that you don’t use that often so you decide to sell it for $2500.
Living in this day and age you post an ad on Craig’s list. A few days later you
are contacted via email and a gentleman says he is interested in buying your
car. You trade phone numbers and he gives you a call. He explains to you that
he is currently in Japan on a business trip but he really does want your car so
he offers to pay you in advance and an extra $100 to make sure you hold onto
the car for him. This sounds like a great deal to you. He even emails you a
copy of his driver’s license and his Facebook URL as proof that he really is
who he claims to be, along with his home address and work address, promising
that you will receive a check in the next couple days. The guy calls you again
the next day and asks you for a favor. He says that he is going to be home in a
few days but that he is having problems taking the money out of his bank from
overseas. He also says that he needs a little extra cash to help him survive
one more week and offers you an extra $50 to help him out bringing your total
to $2650 for the car. He agrees to send you a check and ask that you cash it,
take your agreed amount and forward the rest to him. A few days later you
receive a check for $5000. You cash the check and take your agreed $2650 and
wire the remaining $2350 to him via Western Union. A few days pass and you have
not heard from him. You check your bank account and realize that the check you
cashed for this guy bounced and the bake withdrew the $5000 from your account and
charged you a $30 fee for the bad check. You have been scammed and lost almost
$2350. You try to contact him and ask for reimbursement but you find the phone
number and email address no longer exist. The address turn out to be fake and
the Facebook account turns out to be real, but it was a hacked account. Merry
Christmas to you and you your kids. (Credibility
Statement) Almost this exact same story happened to a friend of mine who
was already struggling financially. I have spent years studying magic tricks,
which is a form and often the means of scamming others. The more I learn, the
more terrified I am about how easy it is to lose money and time simply because
I was not aware of what was happening. (Significance/Relation
to Audience) Over and over I have met and heard stories of people who have
been scammed loosing thousands of dollars. More often than not though it is
much more subtle then the story I just told you. It is likely that it has
happened to you and you don’t even know about it. Central Idea: You need to stay actively informed so that you do not
lose your hard earned money. (Preview) I
have 2 purposes today. First, I want to inform you about a couple of the more
common scams that happen in our society and second I need you to please
understand why it is that although you are doing a great job now you need
to do better if you hope to avoid losing your money.
Body:
I. Main Point: Scammers are able to get thousands of dollars
in a single day from people like us, simply because people are uninformed, misinformed
or as is usually the case under-informed. How many of you have been cashiers? Pay
attention to what happens in the video I am about to show you, I want to see
how many people catch it. (Show Scam school slide (scam school "Money, a
Short Con and Crime = Short Change." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeLl4ZQjocA)
A. That was from a podcast called
scam school. What happened?
1. Brian was able to scam $10 from this lady because she
did not take a step back and think before acting. He threw a lot of numbers at her
and tried to get her to forget what she had just done. Time delay is one of the
scam artist best assets
2. Often they will do things right in front of you and
then quickly distract you in the hopes that you will forget what just happened.
B. A Seattle Times article called “Quick-Change
Con” interviewed a lot of people who had this happen to them. I fear that most
people never find out why it is that their draw is short on cash.
[Transition] There
are many different types of scams. It is imperative that you stay informed in
what is happening. I do not expect you to fall for these basic scams (Show
slide of common internet advertising scams). You are too smart of that you have
grown up with theses all your life.
II. Main Point: The
things that we fall for are often much more subtle. (change slide)
A. look at these statistics from the Internet
Crime Complaint Center (http://www.ic3.gov/media/annualreport/2012_IC3Report.pdf).
Every year they gather the data from all the complaints they have received. The
graph on the right shows you that the number of complaints has been growing
drastically over the past few years. Understand that this is only a small
fraction of the number of actual scams that are done online each year. Only
those reported directly to the IC3 are numbered here. This does not include
those reported directly to law enforcement and those that where not reported.
B. 289,874 reported being scammed last year of
that 114,908 lost a significant amount of money. $525,441,110.00 where lost
which averages out to about $4,573.00 per person.
C. I was curious to see the different
dynamics of people who were scammed and the results surprised me. Look at this
table over 9,000 more men reported being scammed them women. I also looked at
the college age dynamics and it turned out that just under 40% of all reported
scams where form people ages 20-40 years old. That is a lot of scams for our
age group.
D. now take a look at the amount of
money lost on different scams.
·
Auto
Fraud where people sale cars they don’t have or
don’t really own $64,572,334.97 lost
·
FBI
Impersonation E-mail Scam where people pretend to be government agents and fine
people when they don’t have the authority to do so. $4,672,985.06 reported as
lost
·
Intimidation/Extortion
Scams this is basically blackmail $10,624,427.14
lost
·
Hit
Man Scam where people [pretend to be a hitman often finding our
information about you and your family and try to scare you into paying them not
to kill you. $ 1,884,002.11
·
Scareware
/ Ransomware have any of you ever seen this on your computer
(show picture of out of date flash) often these are scams wanting to download a
virus to your computer that will steal your information or use you or your
computer to get money. $134,899.85 where gained using this method.
·
Real
Estate Fraud $15,418,734.82
·
Romance
Scams we probably don’t need to go into detail
about theses $55,991,601.08
(Transition) Many of you know someone who has or have yourself
fallen for one of these scams, even if you are not aware of it. These happen
all of the time and are more common than we are often prone to think.
a. Here
is a brief list of some of the more common scams. (Show slide of the commons
email scams) This is from The FTC’s report on common scams that appear in
people email boxes. This is a little outdated but many of these are just as
common today as they were then. All of you have received an email or text
offering you one of theses. They happen constantly and sometimes one of those
computer scams are used so that they can use your computer and email address to
scam others.
(Transition) I want to talk briefly about a fairly common
scam that all of you who have a smartphone or tablet have probably fallen prey
to. How many of you have paid for an app in the app store?
III. Main Point: Many
of you probably looked at the reviews for that app before buying it. You
probably found a lot of good reviews so you decided that you were going to pay
for the app. I am going to explain how you might have been scammed by doing
this. This is an article in the magazine New Scientist.
(Show squibble slide) Have any ever
heard of this app? It used to be popular but not as much anymore. Now have any
of you ever heard of Mechanical Turk? Many people haven’t. It is a business
owned by Amazon. They offer outsourcing for menial task to business. The problem
with this is that some of the makers for Squibble started paying Mechanical
Turk to have people go online and give their apps high ratings. This means that
all of those ratings you see could potentially be paid to be there. Think about
that the next time that you go to download an app.
(Transition) So what if you do happen to be scammed what
should you do them?
IV. Main Point: The
sooner you report it the better for you it will be.
a.
(Click to reporting slide) There are numerous
places that you can go to report a scam. This is a list of places as identified
by the website www.onguardonline.gov
b.
It is your responsibility to report it to help
other not fall victim like you did. Many of the reasons people are able to get
away with this is because they do not report it.
c.
(change to IC3 reporting slide) It is easy to
report it here and it will be quickly turned to the law enforcement that will
best handle the case
Conclusion: (Transition/Review of main points) The threat that theses scammers pose is real.
People fall over and over again to the same things and theses criminals are
able to walk away with thousands of dollars simply because people say this
can’t happen to me. You need to know about the scams that happen commonly in
our society. You need to understand that yes it can happen to you. It is much
more common than many of us would like to think. Scams don’t have to be big
they can be as simple as posting false reviews for things online. If you are
scammed it is you responsibility to report it. (Restatement of Central Idea)
It is your responsibility to stay informed. If you don’t you will lose your
hard earned money. (Note of Finality) Scam artist will do all they can
to steal every penny they can from you. You must understand that this can
happen to you and you need to do all you can to prevent it. Thank you. Are
there any questions?
Works Cited
"2012
IC3Report." Rpt. in Http://www.ic3.gov/media/annualreport/2012_IC3Report.pdf.
Web.
"Avoiding
Online Scams." OnGuard Online. Web. 22 Nov. 2013.
<http://www.onguardonline.gov/articles/0001-avoiding-online-scams>.
Brushwood,
Brian. "Money, a Short Con and Crime = Short Change." Interview.
Video blog post. Youtube. TestTube, 29 Dec. 2009. Web. 22 Nov. 2013.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeLl4ZQjocA>.
Iovino,
Zena, and Jim Giles. "Mischief and Fraud in the Crowdsourced
Workforce." New Scientist 11 July 2011. Print.
Kusumoto,
Kay. "Quick-Change Con Artists Find Their Prey In The Unwary
Cashier." Seattle times [Seattle] Apr.-May 1992. Print.
"Scams."
Craigslist. Web. <http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams>.
United
States. Federal Trade Commission. Consumer and Business Education. The Dirty
Dozen. Washington, D.C., 1998. Print.
Imagines used in Powerpoint
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