Hi fellow Hiveians,
Today I wanted to talk about something that is a bit important, but overlooked, in terms of the age we live in!
It isn't necessarily privacy at the beginning, but bear with me! :D
I recently got a text message from one of the companies that we do business with. I won't say what the place is, but it is an important one for us. Text messages are a pretty easy and straight forward way for businesses to communicate with us, their customers. What we have to be INCREDIBLY careful about though, is what we do after those text messages.
What a lot of people are sadly in the mindset of, is that they can trust other people with things like this. That is unfortunately NOT the case, especially in the day we live in. There are scammers all over the place, and they are looking for easy victims.
With this text message, the content seemed legitimate. They are transferring something of ours from them to somebody else for whatever reason. It seemed a little odd, as we've been a customer of theirs for a while but I had to make sure to check it out. The most important part though is I do not use ANY contact information from the text message, and instead do it on my own.
Using the contact information from one of these messages is where they can get you, and then once they get you they can steal your identity pretty quickly.
The best practice to do is to take the text message as the letter in the mail so to speak. It alerts you to what they want, but go to the business itself. Going to the actual business' website you are familiar with and know the address, or do a web search which should 99% of the time bring you to the correct website, this is the BEST thing to do in this situation. If it is one where you have an account, which this was, the next step is to log into it.
When I logged into the site, I was looking around but soon found out that the text message that I got from them was legitimate. It seemed odd as the content of the text didn't quite make sense but that's sometimes the purpose of a text. It gives you a 10,000 foot overview of what they are saying and then direct you back to them for more information.
The sad reality is that oftentimes, people may not know to do this type of thing and click on a link in a text or call a number. These are the worst things you can do because that text can come from anywhere. It is much safer for you and your private information to go right to the business itself and log in or find their number from their own website, and give them a call. This guarantees that you are getting to the right person to talk to, instead of some random group doing a text-fishing scam.
I am glad that I did the right process when receiving a text like that, because lord only knows what someone would like to do with my information if they were able to steal it.
What about you, do you practice a few extra steps for safety in your personal data like this? Let me know in the comments!
-CmplXty. Real human written content, never AI. All pictures are mine unless otherwise stated
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