New study says New Jerseyans get scammed a lot

As technology advances, scammers keep pace, quickly finding ways to exploit that technology for nefarious purposes. To at least somewhat quantify how much scamming is being attempted, a company called Secure Data Recovery analyzed Google searches to determine which states are the most susceptible to scammers.

Some of the main findings about New Jersey are:

• New Jersey ranks #19 in states with the highest frequency of pesky scams (based on the volume of searches for scam-related keywords).
• Facebook is the most frequently mentioned brand scam search in New Jersey.
• New Jersey is the 7th state most affected by shopping scams.

The states that face the most scam attempts are Colorado, Maryland, Virginia, Florida, and Washington.

I think most of us have seen the Amazon scam where you get an email or text telling you that your account has been suspended and you need to click on the link to unlock your account.

There are scores of these scams and many major brands are spoofed: Facebook is mentioned in scam-related searches in 18 different states. PayPal, Cash App, Amazon, and Geek Squad round out the top five.

In New Jersey, the most frequently used brand for scams is Facebook.

New Jersey ranks high in both area code scams as well as the aforementioned shopping scams, but not very high for dating scams.

Here’s the methodology:

We researched the most common spam and scams Americans face to compile a list of 150 scam-related search terms (we trudged through each and every search term to make our list as precise as possible, deleting keywords like “spam recipes”). Once we had our list, we analyzed Google search trend data in all 50 states to reveal where people are struggling most with spam and scams, and in the process, uncovered that area code scams, shopping scams, and dating scams are uniquely problematic to Americans.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Bill Doyle only.

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