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I recently recieved a email saying I won some prize money but the truth is I never enter any contest to win any prize money, but my brother thought it was real, so he sent my information. What should do to prevent this scam from happening?
The complaint has been investigated and resolved to the customer’s satisfaction.
Kill your brother.
JUST KIDDING! But a serious butt-kicking wouldn't be out of line.
First, before even continuing here, IMMEDIATELY! cancel every single financial account to which your brother may have had access, whether debit/ATM card, checking account, credit cards, etc., if you haven't already done so.
Next, ensure nobody has access to any of that stuff in the future. Especially your brother.
Call 1-(888) 5OPTOUT, [protected], and within about four to six weeks you'll be off of all the main telemarketing and mailing lists. This one is from the ftc.gov site if you want to confirm its legitimacy. (Which you should, as I'm a random stranger on the Internet... :^D )
Try not to sign up for any sweepstakes, drawings, raffles, anything where their purpose is to collect your personal information, as all of that stuff ends up being sold and resold to other mailing lists. If you can afford it, rent a cheap post office box for all of that crap and use only your regular mailing address for your actual business (paying bills, etc.)
When you sign up for anything, including magazines, use a middle initial that identifies where you gave that information. (Jamie N. Brooks for your Newsweek subscription, Jamie S. Brooks for Sports Illustrated, Jamie A. Brooks for that Albertson's win a car drawing you couldn't resist, etc.)
Then you know where any scammers or other annoyances got your info, regardless of the original company's supposed privacy policies.
This one you can't really control except ensuring it doesn't happen again: When you actually fall for one of those scams, the value of your name/info goes up exponentially, and also gets sold and resold to other scammers.
If 1, 000 essentially unscreened names (with info) are worth $2, your name alone, having a proven success rate, is going to be worth $2 to $5.
So brace yourself for a wave of this crap that will hopefully ease (but never go away entirely; scammers have no problem scamming other scammers) after "you" haven't fallen for anything for awhile.
If telemarketers, regardless of their ### way of getting around the DNC list, call, don't even pick up the phone, ever, just let it keep going to voicemail.
Good luck with this, and I do hope all you'll get from it is annoyance, and no financial headaches or nightmares.