TEXAS, USA — As the new school year begins, college students step onto campus ready to take on the new year.
The scammers are also out their as well, ready to take advantage of their excitement.
It's been happening more and more often. Scammers have already been pounding the digital pavement to try and steal money from unsuspecting victims.
Nowadays, scammers are using social media to hook in their victims. Many of them are younger college age students who are more likely to consume social media.
According to Devin Benavides, the director of Partnerships and Community Engagement with the Better Business Bureau, there are three scams in particular that are rising in popularity amongst scammers.
"Those are employment scams, online purchases and investment and cryptocurrency scams,” Benavides said.
Employment scams involve sellers of false ideas and half truths. These types of scams promise a side hustle where a student can be their own boss. The perfect bait for someone trying to stay afloat financially.
“They advertise things that are really enticing to this age group. A lot of times it's remote work, so you can work from home and kind of make your own schedule," Benavides said. "A lot of times it is advertising a really high salary, and of course, to someone that's living on their own for the first time and is maybe having to take care of bills that they've never had to before, these are all very enticing.”
The classic advertisement scams are when something looks enticing enough to buy. The only thing being sold, however, is someone's credit card information.
“You are searching for something online, it sounds like exactly what you wanted, you go to buy it, everything seems great and it turns out that that wasn't the actual legitimate website," Benavides said. "You went on to a fraudulent website, so now you have input your name, your address, your credit card information all into it and now a bad actor now has that information.”
Both scams have already taken millions of dollars away from not just college students, but people around Texas.
Cryptocurrency scams are the newest scam on the block and are more “high risk, high reward.”
They're still costing kids thousands of dollars that they could be using for a better purpose.
“Those are kind of the riskiest consumer scams with an 80 percent susceptibility rate and you're losing almost $4,000 whenever someone is losing that," Benavides said. "Social media plays a big part in these scams, and it targets young adults who are looking to gain financial independence.”
There are some red flags to look out for that, when using a little common sense, can expose these scams for the fraudulent schemes they are.
"If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. For that age group, they can get excited and you're like, 'oh I found this great deal online,' or 'I found this great job and I can work from home and I'm going to make all this money.' Or, 'oh I can invest $2 and they're guaranteeing me that I'm going to come up with a million dollars.' No, that's probably not going to happen,” Benavides said.
The Better Business Bureau has a tool called “scam tracker” where someone can report either a bad business or find a scam that is affecting people in their area.