Staying Fit
In this story:
Red flags • Common scenarios • How Social Security communicates • Staying Safe • If you’re targeted
Social Security numbers are the skeleton keys to identity theft. And what better way to get someone’s Social Security number than by pretending to be from the Social Security Administration (SSA)? That still occurs, but perpetrators of impersonation scams have another ploy.
They tell their targets that their Social Security numbers have been stolen and used in crimes and that the only way to keep from being arrested is to pay up.
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Social Security’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) received 73,626 reports of Social Security impersonators and related scams in fiscal 2023. That’s up from 64,773 the previous year, a 13.7 percent increase.
Although those numbers are down dramatically from 2020’s record-breaking statistics, it’s not for scammers’ lack of trying. Of the 21 billion scam calls flagged by T-Mobile’s customer security tools in 2021, the most recent year for which a breakdown was available, 10 percent — or more than 2 billion — were from Social Security impostors.
And now impostors have artificial intelligence as a tool to make their communications more convincing. “Scammers’ embrace of AI has made things exponentially worse,” says Shawna Reeves, special projects consultant for Legal Assistance for Seniors in Oakland, California. “Because of AI, scam calls, emails and texts have become more personalized, and thus, harder to detect.”
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