With the rise of technology in the digital age comes a rise in fraudsters trying their best to get hold of personal information and money. While a lot of scams are easy to spot, criminals are becoming a lot smarter with how they trap their victims. According to Business Tech 45% of respondents in a consumer study were targets of fraudulent behaviour.

These were the most common types of scams, according to the study by consumer credit agency TransUnion:

Smile Breakfast got talking about scams that we’ve all seen when Lindy got this SMS (something that probably looks very familiar to a lot of us):

So Lindy decided to give Mr Mark a call:

Of course Lindy didn’t call back, but we’ve come to learn that this particular scam has been doing the rounds since at least 2014. Victims would typically be asked by the scammer to pay money into an account so a transfer of the prize money can take place. We gave tech expert Brendon Petersen a call to hear about some of the more common scams he’s noticed lately:

While most of us can probably spot the red flags and smell a scam pretty quickly, there are some very intricate and smart fraudsters out there. Terrence, someone who had invested in cryptocurrency, gave us a call to talk about a Bitcoin scam that he fell victim to:

But you will always have people trying to take a fat chance. These were some of the not-so-intricate scam attempts we heard of this morning: