Scams are everywhere and they exist online and offline. They don’t choose their victims, anyone can fall into their trap regardless of whether you are a customer or a business owner.

Scams grow in number because there are people who are still innocent and can’t distinguish between legal and scam transactions. If you want to exempt yourself from these victims and prevent business scams, here are the top 4 secrets you can consider.

1. Avoid Strange Emails

When someone sent you an email, it looks like a professional way of starting a conversation, isn’t it? Since businesses use email as a professional way to communicate, scams tend to blend in by using this method to reach business owners. They will try to sound as professional as they can by using good email templates, great grammar, fake professional names, and so on just to get your attention. They will even copy other emails to pretend they are true.

If you receive strange emails unexpectedly, do not answer them nor react. Do not click any link within the email and avoid giving personal information. Block the sender immediately or put the message in your spam inbox.

You have to take control if you don’t want scammers to take over you. Emails can look like legit, especially if you haven’t experienced getting scammed through it. Reply only to the emails you are expecting and avoid getting in touch with senders you don’t personally or professionally know.

2. Money Conversation

This can happen online and offline. You will encounter people who will try to talk to you about money, loans, and indebtedness. They will offer you a lot of options that involve these things. For example, they ask you to invest in something that doesn’t really exist and they will lure you with supposedly big returns so you would give in. They may even offer credits and loans with low-interest rates but ask for upfront fees to serve as security funds. These are just a few examples of how scammers will speak about money to you.

Without a lawyer, don’t communicate with someone regarding money, loans, or indebtedness. This comes with being vigilant when someone asks you about your bank or credit details. Whenever money is involved, you need a legal expert to tell you what to do or help you decide. You shouldn’t entrust your money or your details to someone you just met online.

3. Avoid Strange Calls

Receiving calls is very common these days. Although you might not know where these scammers are getting the list of their victims, you should be aware of how to deal with them at least. When you receive a strange call from an unknown number, you can use Spokeo to find out the personality of the caller.

Spokeo is a very useful website. It allows you to do a reverse phone lookup. You can also do a phone number search when you go to its platform. You have the option to choose between an email search or phone number lookup to see who is the one calling you. This is one way you would know who is the person behind the scam call.

4. Cybersecurity Apps

Because of lots of scamming activities that happen online, the demand for cybersecurity is getting stronger. If you have a website where you do your business transactions, you can protect it by using cybersecurity applications.

Some of the great applications you will find on the internet are Keeper for Business, TokenEx, Webroot, and Flowmon.

The Keeper for Business is basically a password manager and a digital vault that can protect your passwords and other sensitive digital assets.

TokenEx works best for tokenization and is considered as an effective key and encryption management platform.

Webroot is ideal as this is a smarter cybersecurity solution. If you want to protect your business from different levels of cyberattack, this is the best you’ve got.

Finally, Flowmon serves as a cloud-based solution that can help you, your network, and your security operations team to monitor and analyze the data exchange on your website.