You need to create a secret password with your family

Scammers are out of control. Every year, fraudsters and cybercriminals make billions cheat people partly out of their money. Romantic fraud, commercial email compromise, investment scams, sextortion– the list of ways criminals prey on people is practically endless and constantly changing.

Add to this impersonation scams, where a criminal pretends to be someone known to his target and extracts money. There have been growing calls for people, and especially families, to create passphrases or passwords with each other. In early December, the FBI issued a recommendation that people create a “secret word or phrase with your family to verify their identity”, and the British bank Starling also published guidelines about creating safe sentences with others.

It’s a simple, if not new, approach that can be effective. For example, if you receive a message or call from your “son” or “daughter”, and they urgently ask for money to get out of a jam, asking to provide a pre-agreed passphrase can reveal if it is really them. .

“Scammers use manipulation tactics to put the victim in a vulnerable state where they act out of panic, urgency, or a strong desire,” says Erin Englund, director of threat analysis at fraud detection firm BioCatch. “Having a passphrase or similar strategy prepared allows victims to quickly validate the legitimacy of an unusual interaction and take control.”

Calls to create family passwords or passphrases have come as scammers are increasingly adopting AI. Machine learning has allowed criminals to create deepfake impersonation videos people and to clone voices with just a few seconds of audio. Scammers used these voice clones to pretend family members have been kidnapped and are demanding ransom payments for their release.

“AI creates a great deal of risk for businesses and households,” says Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Security. Tobac says companies he’s worked with have been receiving cloned calls from AI voices, also using fake phone numbers, trying to impersonate company executives.

“I also hear about a few families every day who have received AI phone attacks that clone the voice of a nephew, niece, or brother in hysterics about being kidnapped or being involved in a car accident where they hit a person pregnant and need money for legal expenses and bail,” says Tobac.

Make a good family password

As with your online passwords, there are dos and don’ts when it comes to creating a common passphrase. For starters, you shouldn’t make a passphrase the same as any of your passwords, and it shouldn’t contain things that a scammer could easily find, such as street names, birthdays, pets, or other personal information that can be shared. online.

“Consider everything you or your loved ones post online as data available to scammers,” says Englund. “Even if you keep all social media private, your data is available to your connections and followers who can be hacked.”