The IRS reports that scam calls have been on the rise in recent years, with thousands of people falling victim to them.

Fraud is a problem that impacts all of us in different ways; there’s probably no one who hasn’t been directly or indirectly impacted by some kind of fraudulent activity. Have you or someone you know had their identity stolen? Has someone hacked your email or social media account? Have you had money taken from your account (think bank or credit cards here) one way or another? These are all examples of fraud and how it can affect us.

Read also: A hacker who stole data from 40 million license plates arrested in Spain, a former cop faces charges for hacking, and more.

Defeat the scammers by educating yourself and your employees about these increasingly common tax-related scams.

Scammers are increasingly resourceful when coming up with scam techniques. But they often rely on long-standing persuasion techniques for the scam to work. So, you may hear about a new scam that uses a novel narrative, but there is a good chance that the scam relies on proven scam techniques once the narrative is stripped away. These scam techniques often exploit our characteristics and heuristics, or things that make us human and fallible.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, our world became chaotic overnight. Throughout the nation, individuals were met with layoffs or stringent checks—pushing the financials of families to their breaking points. Simultaneously, business organizations faced similar issues; because fewer bodies were allowed in the same area, production trickled to a minimum, niche clients limited their spending, and small businesses counted the days until their doors closed.

I recently read an article about a bright, sophisticated woman who fell victim to an unbelievable scam. By unbelievable, I mean most people reading or hearing about it could not believe it was successful. A group posing as an Amazon employee and various U.S. law enforcement agencies were able to convince a woman to take $50,000 out of her bank account in cash and hand it off to a complete stranger in the streets. It is a wild story and most of us would not be tricked into doing what happened to her.

What happened with a fake call purporting to be from Amazon tricked a financial advice columnist into handing over $50,000 to a stranger.