When The Man, The Deal, Or The Success Sound Too Good To Be True

Then it probably is. And your skill of Paying Attention is your way out

Photo by Razvan Chisu on Unsplash

Three stories happened yesterday — each of which was about something that sounded too good to be true. It felt like the theme of the day.

Thinking about these stories I found a connecting message in them.

The message is that we need to slow down to be able to pay more attention to details, listen more carefully, think more critically, and notice discrepancies.

Thereby we can better avoid the potential damage that can be done to us by idiots, scammers, weirdos, or false friends.

The Clever Fraudsters

I pride myself on being usually pretty good at not falling for phishing emails, false emails, or awkward URLs and I never touch a strange-looking email attachment. Yesterday I fell prey to a fraudulent website that had set up a site that looked exactly like an original Italian athletic sportswear site. Except, it wasn’t.

The special sales offers looked legit but were too good to be true. Turned out the site was hijacked by fraudsters, collecting credit card information.

In a rushed world where we are not willing to spend too much time on something fraudsters and scammers have an easy game. They take advantage of our impatience, superficiality, and that we are too overwhelmed to notice mistakes and little red flags.

I failed. If I had taken the time to pay careful attention, I might have detected the scam.

In hindsight, we can see little, sometimes just tiny, hints, misalignments, slightly off signs, and behaviors. Being under time pressure, overloaded with information, and getting used to special offers, introduction discounts, and trials constantly popping up in our social media streams (most of which are legitimate) we don’t slow down and pay more attention to what we are actually looking at.

This makes us vulnerable and a target for offers, content, or information that sound too good to be true.

A good way to protect yourself from getting screwed is to SLOW DOWN, so you pay more attention to details, listen more carefully, think more critically, and notice…