Media sources have reported a new type of financial scam known as the “extra income scam”. Criminals offer ways for their victims to obtain quick and easy money, which would be paid to review a service. Once the task is accepted, the victims begin their way through a script prepared by the fraudsters to create bonds of trust with the targets and then convince them to transfer large amounts via Pix, which would be invested to generate profit.
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The Scheme
The victim is approached online by a scammer that offers quick profit with little effort. For instance, work proposal could request the participant to write a good review of restaurants. In such situations, the value offered for each review would be around R$20.
Initially the victims would be paid, so the criminals could gain their trust. During this stage, they would also be encouraged to enlist new members to the scheme, which at this moment shows its characteristics of a pyramid scheme. Newcomers are also pressured to recruit new members.
Later, when the bond of trust is solid, criminals tell the target that new tasks must be completed, which involves sending amounts via PIX with the promise of getting the money back with a profit. Initially, the victim transfers small amounts of money, around R$ 100, and quickly receives its money back with profits. A few transactions later, larger amounts are requested so the victim could take part in a bigger opportunity.
Pix and Scams
The number of scams and frauds associated with PIX has grown in the country. The increase follows the growing popularization of the instant payment system. A recent survey carried out by ACI WorldWide, for example, indicated that Brazil is the 2nd country with the most real-time transactions in the world. In 2022, 29.2 billion transactions were recorded in the country, which represents 15% of the total recorded worldwide, of 195 billion.
PIX ends up being one of the means most used by fraudsters, mainly due to the system’s instantaneous nature. Therefore, the main obstacle lies in blocking the transaction — as it is instantaneous — or in recovering the money. Once the funds fall into the criminal’s account, they are quickly sent to several other accounts, making it difficult for banks to track the path of the stolen money.
Attracting the Victims
To attract a victim, scammers use ads; fake apps that announce payments in exchange for evaluations; and even videos on social networks that promote the alleged services or online applications. Even though complaints are filled against the videos and apps, some escape the control of the big tech companies that control the platforms where they are hosted because they somehow managed to do not violate their policies.
Recommendations
To avoid such incidents, experts recommend being wary of advantageous offers; messages that create a sense of urgency to rush you to get a reward; applications or pages that do not provide customer support information and address for personal contact. In addition, when someone is a victim of this type of crime, he/she should not delete any messages from the scammer, but rather go to a police station to register a report with this documentation, which could serve as evidence.
Analysis:
There is an ongoing epidemic of scams in Brazil. According to the 2023 FBSP survey, property crimes statistical data indicates a strong reconfiguration of offenses committed, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic. Criminals began a migration from some modalities to others due to factors imposed by the health crisis. After the end of the pandemic scenario, some transformations were reversed, but some remained. The proliferation of scams is among those changes that remained. In 2021, electronic frauds became so popular that authorities had to add it to the law. In 2022, 200,322 occurrences were recorded, an increase of 65.2% in relation to 2021. But the real picture may be worser as available data exclude five of the most populous Federation Units in the country (BA, CE, RJ, RS and SP) and Rio Grande do Norte. Criminals took advantage of social changes. In 2019, 74% of the population had access to the internet, in 2021, this changed to 81%. In the same period, the number of internet users that acquired a product or a service online moved from 39% to 46%. Still, anything that could bypass the “isolation factor” created by the pandemic was also an alternative, thus, all types of scams went up. In 2019, a pre-pandemic year, 523,820 cases were recorded. In 2022, this total reached 1,819,409, a 247% increase. The number is equivalent to an average of 207.7 cases registered per hour in the country. Between 2021 and 2022, the growth in fraud records was around 37.9%. The trend does not seem to be slowing down.
