We all have been bombarded with emails, phone calls, text messages, social media posts demanding our attention and some just waiting for that lapse of judgement that may cost you a lot of money.
I am talking about scams and those aren’t always easy to spot. Just today I received an email that tried to raise an alarm using “Your PayPal account was used to pay for an Apple Watch.”
In everything, the email looked similar to real ones. Almost everything, except the fake email address using a completely different domain name than @paypal.com.
But the scammer was smarter than usual. They know people have often been advised not to click links on emails. But this one didn’t have any links. Instead, it had a helpful local phone number.
The scammer is probably counting on people thinking it looks legitimate enough to be “official” and call that phone number.
This is how most scams start, and we have been reading many stories in the last few years of people losing their savings through money mules that will send money away overseas with no recourse for recovering. Banks don’t seem too interested in helping here.
Norton is aware of this and put together the many years of experience with their security products, coupled of modern Artificial Intelligence to create a service that can tell you quickly if a message or image is a scam or not.
I have been playing with this for a month now. Every text message I receive I pass through the Norton Genie scanner and it’s been reliable in identifying the scams and giving the ok to clean messages.
Norton Genie is available as both free Android or iOS apps, and also via your web-browser.
It’s very simple to use; you just need to copy and paste the message text or an image to receive a verdict.
In some cases the answer comes straight away. In other cases you might have to answer a few questions. For example I tested a message receive from my optometrist with Norton Genie and the app was smart enough to go beyond and ask “Are you a client of this optometrist?” and “Are you due for a checkup?” before giving me the all clear.
For a free app that could quickly save you some hard cash, it seems like a winner.
And before I go. It correctly identified the fake PayPal email as an invoice scam. And it correctly identified the Geekzone forums email notifications as clean.
