Scammers are becoming very sophisticated in using big data to target prey, and they are employing it a lot, said Kati Daffan, an attorney in the division of marketing practices at the Federal Trade Commission.
She made the comments at a Consumer Federation of America fraud seminar in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.
While scammers are using the latest tech tools to do their misdeeds, old-fashioned phone calls remain the chief way the crooks contact potential victims, said Daffan and other experts.
Big data is the massive amount of health, education, spending and other publicly available information government agencies, businesses and non-profits use on practically everybody. Scamsters use it, too.
But Daffan said 77 percent of people complaining about fraudsters to the FTC said they were reached by the crooks on the phone.
John Breyault, the fraud chief at the National Consumers League, said that even in the internet era, the phone remains the chief way fraudsters try to seduce.
Speaking of seduction, he said that of all types of fraud, romance scams have the highest average loss: $2,000.
It figures, said Breyault, because scamsters have to devote a considerable amount of time to persuade the lovelorn to send them money.
While seniors complain about fraud more, the experts noted, younger people lose money more often because they are less wary of the callers.
Emma Fletcher, director of the Better Business Bureau’s scam and fraud initiatives, pointed out that the No. 1 reason people complain about fraudsters is that they want to help others, and it’s not necessarily that they want to get their money back.