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Scams are becoming ever more common and sophisticated, so they can even scam the scam experts who carefully seek to avoid them. That’s what happened to writer-film producer Gini Graham Scott who wrote three books and produced two documentaries about different types of scams and how to avoid them.
The books are:
– The Big Con about a book-to-film scam she discovered as a ghostwriter.
– I Was Scammed, about several dozen scams to avoid;
– Scam Story, about a scammer who tried to scam her by claiming to be a PayPal rep but she outwitted him.
These books were turned into two just released films by Gravitas Ventures: “Conned: A True Story” and “Con Artists Unveiled.” Then, she became a victim of two more new scams affecting millions of victims each year and wrote about them too as a warning to others: The Great Big Facebook Hack and What to Do About It and Stop the Recurring Charges Steal, both published by American Leadership Press.
The Facebook hack involves an email replacement hack in which a scammer can take over your account and any groups created with that account before you even realize it or can’t act quickly enough to recover your account. It starts when someone adds their own email to the account, and it can be easy to think that a real warning from Facebook is from a scammer, so you don’t respond quickly enough to say “it wasn’t me.” Unfortunately, with the scammer in charge, you may not be able to prove to Facebook that you are really you.
Though Scott lost her account to a scammer, she was able to create a new personal account which now has about 2400 members, and she got her name removed from the group the scammer took. And then she restarted the groups about scams and using AI with new names: “Cons, Scams, and Frauds” and “The AI Revolution and Writing, Arts, and Business.”
For more details on how to protect yourself from the Facebook hack or recover your Facebook account, The Great Big Facebook Hack is https://www.amazon.com/Great-Big-Facebook-Hack-About/dp/B0CNXX3W9P
The recurring charge steal is one that can affect millions of individuals who have subscripts or are invited to start subscriptions to anything. In Scott case, the steal by one company began after she got a new credit card. While over a dozen other companies contacted her and asked her to update her billing information if she wanted to continue to describe, one company worked around the system, so without asking her if she wanted to update her card information, it kept charging her for seven months.
When she finally discovered the charges and got four overturned by her credit card company, the others were too old, and as Scott discovered, millions of individuals could similarly end up with unexpected charges in this way or in other variations of the scam.
These variations include:
– Companies that offer free trials or big discounts with hard to cancel agreements, so individuals find themselves locked into supposedly authorized subscriptions they don’t want.
– Scammers who send out notices about subscription renewals that have been charged or will be charged in the next 24 hours, so they have to click a link or call a number to stop it. But the email is really a ruse to learn personal information, get money, access the victim’s computer, or all of these.
Stop the Recurring Charge Steal describes how to avoid becoming a victim yourself, after Scott describes how the recurring charges scam works, how to avoid the charges, or how to fight back if someone scams you.
It’s available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQPBK659.
To learn the latest about cons, scams, and frauds, you can join Gini’s new Facebook group: “Cons, Scams, and Frauds” at https://www.facebook.com/groups/882990346206907
You can also learn more about Gini through Changemakers Publishing and Writing at changemakerspublishingandwriting.com