How McAfee's Scam Detection can help you spot fraudulent texts
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IRS releases list of 'dirty dozen' scams
From smishing to new client scams, the Internal Revenue Service is warning taxpayers, businesses and tax professionals to watch out for schemes that threaten financial information. (Scripps News Group)
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You've seen the message: 'Your package is on hold. Click here.' Or maybe, 'Your EZPass toll payment is past due. Pay now to avoid legal action.'
Welcome to Scamland, population: all of us.
Last year alone, Americans lost more than $16 billion to online scams, a jaw-dropping jump from $10.3 billion the year before, according to the FBI's latest figures.
AI-supercharged cyber crooks target people across every demographic with deepfake videos, bogus texts and phishing emails so slick that they ensnare just about everyone at some point.
Cybersecurity company McAfee just launched a suite of new features it hopes can slow down online crooks and thieves. It's called Scam Detection, and starting today, the company includes it in all its main protection plans, starting at around $50 per year.
I took the new service for a test drive, and I'll get more into how it works and what it does in a second. But first, the bigger question — can it slow the rising tide of scams that seem to get eerily smarter with each click?
The emotional toll behind the click
'I had a bunch of packages on the way, so the text [from a mail carrier] made total sense. It fit the moment perfectly,' 34-year-old DeShawn Hoskins, a filmmaker in Austin, Texas, told me over the phone. One tap, and he was out more than $400. 'It made me feel like a sucker,' he admitted.
'It was one click. That's all it took. I'll never forget how fast it happened,' said Cory Camp, 30, a personal trainer and life coach who also lives in Austin. The text message appeared to come from Verizon, but it was actually from scammers who hijacked Camp's SIM card, leaving him with a dead phone and new carrier bills that took months to recover. 'I felt like an idiot. I really did. I thought this kind of thing only happened to older people.'
And then, there's Beth Hyland, a 54-year-old administrative assistant in Portage, Michigan, who was swept up in a whirlwind romance on Tinder by a man she planned to marry. He was handsome, attentive and an incredibly proficient conman.
In just two months, he not only swept Hyland off her feet, proposed, and convinced her to wire him $26,000 — a huge part of her retirement savings — to 'unlock' a frozen multimillion-dollar payout. She didn't know he was a scammer until her financial advisor — her first real confidant during the ordeal — gently broke the news.
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'It felt like being kidnapped by aliens. Like I was drugged on my own brain chemicals,' Beth told me over a video call. 'I was falling in love. But it wasn't real. And it nearly destroyed me.'
How are the scammers getting so good?
And just in case you read this and think there's no way it could happen to you, I promise you, it can.
On the morning I was set to interview McAfee for this very story, an email landed in my inbox — apparently from their team — asking me to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Totally normal, I thought, moving quickly and only half-paying attention as I tapped the link. We sign NDAs all the time when reviewing unreleased tech. But the page it took me to was obviously a fake.
'I write about scams for a living — and I still fell for it,' I confessed later that day to McAfee's Chief Technology Officer Steve Grobman and Senior Product Manager Adam Curfman over video call. 'But the timing, wording and intention of that specific email was insanely spot-on,' I insisted. 'How was that a coincidence?'
'As a scientist who studies statistics as a big part of my day job, I know correlation doesn't equal causation,' Grobman explained. He said that the scammers aren't random, but rather relentlessly data-driven.
This generation of cyber crooks buys and mines leaked records from last year's 1.35 billion breach notices — everything from our email and phone numbers to recent purchases — to pre-fill their scripts. They scan public posts on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn for 'trigger events' (moving announcements, vacation selfies, shipment updates) and use third-party cookies on 42 percent of websites to track when you browse banking or shopping sites. Meanwhile, AI-powered bots scrape forums and dark-web markets for the latest successful phishing templates, spinning up new, hyper-targeted campaigns in minutes.
'When you combine all of that, those 'coincidences' become precise pattern recognition. Awareness alone won't cut it — you need a defense that learns and adapts every single day, which is exactly what our AI-powered Scam Detection delivers,' Grobman said.
Luckily, all the scammers got out of me was a quick bite on the end of their phishing lure. Verification that they reached a person who might, someday, take the bait and get reeled in all the way, hook, line and savings-account-draining-sinker.
Can a tool like Scam Detector stay ahead of the bad guys?
The way Scam Detector works should seem familiar: You sign up, add the app to your mobile devices, give it permissions to scan your email account(s), texts, DMs and social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok and YouTube. On your desktop and laptop, you need to add the web extension.
Then, it runs nonstop in the background of all your devices, scrutinizing every single thing coming in — analyzing emails, texts and videos — to stop and flag potential scams in real time. If it spots one, it sends you an instant notification to say 'hey, don't respond to that one, here's why, and here's how to make sure you don't get duped in the future.' Education is a big part of this specific tool, which is a nice touch.
'We built this to meet people where scams happen most,' said McAfee product manager Adam Curfman. 'That means texts, social apps, even fake videos. This tech flags suspicious content before it can trick you, and we're constantly evolving along with the [scammer techniques].'
There's also an interactive element. If you get any message you're not sure about, you can take a screengrab and text it to McAfee to analyze, which feels a lot like texting a paranoid uncle named 'McAfee,' for a second opinion.
So, will McAfee's scam detection work?
Early users say yes — with a few caveats. 'It's not magic. But it's one more layer between you and getting swindled,' Camp said. 'It's like a seatbelt. You hope you never need it — but you're glad it's there.'
'We've been trained to click fast,' Hoskins added. 'This tech forces you to slow down and think. That alone could save someone's entire life savings.'
McAfee says it can already catch deepfake videos with up to 96 percent accuracy, and scammy texts with a 99 percent track record. For people like Camp, Hoskins, Beth Hyland and yes, even me, all of this is a welcome relief, but it's only part of the picture.
The company also partnered with a non-profit organization called FightCybercrime, and launched the Keep It Real campaign to elevate scam survivor stories. The hope? To end the stigma, warn others, and make cybercrime less isolating overall.
'We don't 'fall' for scams or get 'duped.' We're victimized and manipulated,' Hyland insists. 'That language matters. So does talking about it. Scammers count on our shame and silence.'
Let's be honest — scams are everywhere, and they're not slowing down. But doing something is always better than nothing. At the very least, maybe we can stop blaming ourselves. Maybe we can finally stop clicking.
Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Award-winning consumer tech columnist and on-air contributor for "The Today Show.' The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY. Contact her via Techish.com or @JennJolly on Instagram.
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