My 84 year old mother got a message from the State of New York saying she had unclaimed funds and should fill out a form to claim them. She quite reasonably assumed this was a scam and ignored it. A few months later she mentioned it, and my brother who was familiar with the actual process looked on the website, saw that she did have unclaimed funds, and he filled out the form. Turns out the initial message was completely legit. There was a brokerage account which had fallen through the cracks when her own mother had died, and she got a check for ~$20,000.
This ^^^ is a big part of the problem right here --- legitimate messages from government authorities are so totally non-credible that it makes the scammers' jobs super easy.
Same is true of banks and such. A few months ago, I got a mortgage, and I was totally blown away by how much profoundly suspicious shit that was actually legit happened. Like, I'd get calls from totally random new people from the mortgage company, no warning by anyone who I actually knew that this new person was calling, often from their personal cellphones---and it would turn out that the call was totally legit, and I actually was supposed to send more sensitive financial documents to this random new person. Totally bonkers.
And we probably can't discount the role of direct-mail marketing in this, either - my bill from my ISP will arrive in a plain envelope (before I opted into paperless statements), but every random piece of upsell spam I get from my ISP is plastered with giant red letters saying "IMPORTANT INFO ABOUT YOUR ACCOUNT - TIME SENSITIVE" and often with a fake business card for some executive inside.
Even brands themselves are getting in on the game of trying to abuse people's attention with deceptive messaging.
I feel like some kind of PGP authentication system would be very useful for private government to citizen communications. It would require some training on users parts however.
The problem is that governments, banks etc. don't and can't credibly commit to doing the right thing. E.g. banks in my previous company are furious because just when they'd finally managed to convince most people to never open a link from a text message, the government sent out a text message with a link to a COVID-19 information page.
It still shocks me the number of very large companies, even Microsoft, still have marketing and other official communications that look like clear scam messages
It is like they are trying to make things easy for scammers
Heh, I remember when Android first launched, I made a little calculator app for it so it was ready on launch day. Few months later, I got a completely plain text message from some random email address, saying something like "congrats, your app was one of the first 10,000 apps on the Play Store, to say thank you we would like to send you a Nexus One. Please fill out your details on this page <link to some random spreadsheet>". I immediately thought it was a scam, there was absolutely nothing identifying it as coming from Google, nothing that would give me any confidence whatsoever. But, I googled it, and yep, Google has announced they would be giving out phones to early developers - so I filled out the form and without ever receiving any further communication from them, a Nexus One arrived in post couple months later. It was incredibly bizarre, and in hindsight I wonder if they did it on purpose to limit the number of phones they needed to send out.
Thanks for this link!!! I just claimed $12 from a balance overpayment on a credit card, but my sister-in-law seems to have at least $250 in unclaimed cash awaiting her.
Definitely check out the unclaimed property website for your state. It's fun to see which of your friends and family have unclaimed money, although it's much more likely to be ~$20 than $20,000.
I see ads for this in the newspaper sometimes. I've checked them out when they're on a .gov domain and gotten some of my money from an old savings account I forgot about.
But some states use a plain-old .com, and the sites aren't well done, so they look sketchy, even when they're legit. Worse, they sometimes have URLs like comeclaimyourmissingmoneythatyouforgotaboutandwereholdingforyou.com
If you're curious about missing money, go to the web site of the Secretary of State in every state where you've lived or gone to school. There's usually a link.
