Recession brings with it scammers looking to take advantage of you in tough times.
The harder the recession hits, the greater the need for vigilance against online scammers and exploiters of all shapes and sizes. More and more are going to be aimed at businesses desperate for more customers and ignorant of the online environment.
The last two we’ve seen take the form of ‘business directories’ that end up costing people (who thought they were getting a free listing) several thousands of pounds instead.
The threat this poses to businesses in a recession is obvious. Scammers are going to be hungrier, sneakier, more resourceful and more aggressive than ever before so you need to start taking an interest in the kinds of scams that are going around to make sure you don’t fall victim to one of them.
If you’re approached with an ‘offer’ (whether on the street, through the post , or – more usually – via email) from a company you don’t know, do your ‘due diligence’.
The simplest way to do this is to use Google. If you just search on ‘Joe Bloggs Ltd’ in Google you’ll probably just get what any scammer wants you to find about his company. Type ‘Joe Bloggs scam’ into Google and you’ll start to find interesting results pretty quickly.
