(Last Updated On: September 8, 2020)

SCARS™ Commentary: The Odds Of Being Scammed Again

Here Is An Exercise In Understanding How Intuition (Or Your Gut) Is More Likely Wrong Than Right

WATCH THIS VIDEO AND THEN READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE

Was Your Intuition Right?

The simple act of relying on your gut is by definition wrong. That is why knowledge and behaviors are a better approach to your safety than your intuition.

Dealing with complexity is both something we are good at (when linear) and impossible for us at the same time.

A Perfect Example Of This Right Now Is The Perception Of Risk In A Pandemic

It is very simple, the risk is very high you will get the virus, but when people try to figure it out they will come to the wrong conclusion.

While the odds may be reasonable – it applies to each and every interaction, not over a span of time.

Let’s say that you have a 30% risk of getting infected. That is 30% for each and every event or interaction. So if about one in three is the risk, and you have 10,000 interactions, then 3,000 of them will result in an infection – a virtual certainty.

This Is EXACTLY Like The Problem Of Assessing The Risk Of Being Scammed Online

People’s guts say it will never happen, but in fact, it is a virtual certainty.

In addition, it is a virtual certainty that you will be scammed again unless you remove yourself from the risk pool.

The only way to do that is by adopting behaviors that prevent the initiation of new scams.

BUT YOU ONLY HAVE TO DROP YOUR GUARD ONE TIME AND THE ODDS ARE HIGH YOU CAN BE SCAMMED AGAIN.

So If The Average Is That Victims Are Scammed 2.4X (2.4 Times)

This means the odds are that you will be scammed more than once

In fact, our analytics shows that the probability of someone being scammed is nearly 99.9999999999999% Though it is actually only about 8% for any given incident. But since there are (estimated) 26 TRILLION (yes with a “T”) cyberattack incidents a year (source McAfee), 8% of that is a little over 2 Trillion attacks that will succeed.

But that is actually not correct, because it is not 8% total that will succeed, but 8% of each of the 26 Trillion incidents. Meaning, a virtual certainty.

For Example: Think About Your Antivirus Software

You cannot accurately calculate the odds of your antivirus (AV) product protecting you because probabilities deal with the odds of specific events happening.   Here, the cyberattack could be spam, malware, phishing, social engineering, or some other form of attack.  Within each of those categories, there is a wide range of types of attacks.  On average, there are 26 trillion malicious attacks per year, so there are going to be a lot of attack vectors crashing into your AV product.  Calculating the odds is almost impossible.  It’s Downright Scary!

What we do know is that for those 26,000,086,000,000 or whatever higher, scarier number it is, the AntiMalware product did not stop whatever malicious threats and allowed the breaches we read about all the time.  Of course, none of the other defenses those companies had in place stopped the criminals.  In fact, 100% of the time, the combination of all of these products failed for these victim companies – because they had to stop 100% of the attacks, but they only have to fail ONE TIME.

What can you do?

It is apparent from these numbers and from the daily news reports, that there are at least two major things happening in the cyber world:

• the good guys are losing, and
• the bad guys are winning!

This is not just both sides of the same coin, there is much more to it than that.

Sure, the bad guys are getting better at what they do.  They have entire infrastructures to rely on, social networks for criminals, division of labor, secondary markets for their tools, and they learn quickly from what they learn.

They are not all smart, but many are and there are MANY of them.

You are JUST you. You only have to make ONE mistake, which you did before and you see where you are now.

So, Why Are The Good Guys Losing?

There are lots of reasons to be sure, but a significant number of attacks are successful because the incoming threat was not detected at all or not detected until it was too late. Does that sound like what happened to you?

The collective description of the problem in these cases is that people are trying to fight today’s cyberwar (and it is a war) using yesterday’s tactics and yesterday’s weapons. Or worse, they are listening to amateurs and incompetent sources.

Many Victims Are Surprised To Learn That There Is A Better Way

That better way is to use actionable intelligence and proactive intervention to identify the sources of the malicious threats, identify the bad actors and their tools and networks, and to use this information to prevent their success and to take down their infrastructure.

That sounds a lot like what SCARS does. But most of you do not participate in that, so we are few and they are MANY!

This is why we hammer on you over behavioral changes and knowledge to recognize risks.

On this website, about 10% of our visitors have the focus needed to prevent most scams. About 90% are likely to be scammed again and again and again and again.

That thought is incredibly depressing.

But You Control The Equation

Remove yourself from the risk pool through knowledge, change, and reinforcement (another word for that is “participation”).

• Knowledge acquired passively is not retained.
• Knowledge that goes unreinforced is not retained.
• Knowledge that is not integrated in the form of behavioral change is not retained.

There You Have The Reality Of What Is Likely To Happen In The Future

You can agree or disagree. The numbers may be different, but it does not matter, because even if they are off by 25% these facts are still a  certainty.

• 10% of our visitors try.
• 90% of our visitors do not try.

How do YOU calculate your odds of being safe online in the future now?

 

TAGS: SCARS, Important Article, Information About Scams, Anti-Scam, Scams, Scammers, Fraudsters, Cybercrime, Crybercriminals, Romance Scams, Scam Victims, Odds of Being Scammed, Repeat Scams, Staying Safe Online, Cyberattacks, Anti-Malware

 

 

 

 

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