Scams are big business, but we’ve got a tip to help you stay on guard during Scam Awareness Week and beyond. Plus we’ll talk new gear, a new phone, and a little more, all in five minutes.
Transcript
For the middle of August, this is The Wrap, Australia’s fastest technology roundup, and this week in Australia, it’s National Scam Awareness Week, a pretty big deal given just how much scams are affecting us all.
Scams are everywhere, landing in your inbox, your SMS… scammers are even actively calling people up. And there’s a good reason why: scams are big business. So big that this week, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said it expects scam losses to hit over 500 million this year. That’s just Australia, and it’s only what gets reported.
It’s a big problem, and this week saw another one kick in, as Australia Post saw a scammer imitate its phone messages with reports of a fake delivery. Of course there’s no package, unless you call having your details stolen a package. That’s the sort of package they can take back, return to sender.
Mind you, that’s not the first time we’ve seen a scam like that, because that’s largely how SMS scams work these days. A scammer sends you a message. It might look super official and come in under the same sender as a message from a real company. You don’t check it, and all of a sudden, someone starts putting their hand in your pocket taking money, your password, and making your life shall we say difficult.
You might have clicked because you didn’t read the message, and you might have entered in your details because you weren’t expecting a scam, but these days, you really might want to stay on guard.
So the best tip we can give you is to check the web address.
You can call it a URL or a link or just that thing that changes every time you visit a new webpage. It’s the www dot whatever, and it’s something you should check every time you use your web browser because of scammers.
One of the biggest tricks scammers use is the web address. They know we don’t check it, and when we don’t, it turns into a problem. The web address is one of the most important tricks, because if we only glance at a scam, we might see what looks real in the first half of the web address, but it’s the back half that counts.
So if you’re clicking on an email that’s asking you to login, or checking an SMS telling you about a prize or delivery, read that link carefully. It might be a scam, and we’d hate for you to be another statistic.
Really, you’ve got better things to do with your money.
Like gear up for new gear, because new gear is coming. It’s always coming, and there will be more news about new gear in the coming weeks, as the products roll out for the holiday season.
This week, we’ve heard rumours of new gear from Sonos, with a suggestion we could see a wireless Sonos speaker very soon. IKEA’s Sonos speakers are coming to Australian stores soon, too, so there will be a few Sonos speakers shortly.
There’s also a new tiny Wonderboom speaker from Ultimate Ears, with an outdoor boost mode bundled in that cuts back on the bass and pushes more of the mids to be heard outside.
Samsung is also talking up a new camera sensor for phones able to capture a staggering 108 megapixels. It will more than likely downsample it back to 27 megapixels, which is more than plenty, and provide some decent low light along the way.
Don’t expect it in new phones just yet, though. This is probably more a next year kinda thing.
This year, hey this week, we have a new phone we’ve checked out, coming in the Motorola One Vision, a $500 phone that packs in a big camera sensor, even if it’s not as big as that 108 megapixel camera.
Instead, you’ll find a 48 megapixel camera on the Moto One Vision, though like the big Samsung sensor, it brings the image back down to 12 megapixels, by four yet again.
Doing that means you get some decent images, which is a high point, even if the camera is a little slow to fire. You also get a massive 6.3 inch screen that stretches from top to bottom with an elongated cinema style display.
There’s a big piece of glass on the back, and the whole thing comes off as a shiny premium phone that isn’t quite so premium or expensive. It even gets Android the way Google says it should look, thanks to the Android One program.
Overall, the Moto One Vision isn’t bad, but we wish the battery life could hit more than a day and a half. It’s a big 3500mAh battery, but you can’t easily hit two days on it, and that’s a bit of a shame.
There’s also no wireless charging, and the water resistance is just a splash. Not a lot, just some. We’ve seen Motorola do better before, so we kind of want it here.
For the price, the Motorola One Vision is worth checking out, and is a little like a cut-price Galaxy S10. Almost. Kinda.
But there are quite a few phones coming very shortly, so you might want to hold tight until you see everything else.
And that’s all the time we have for now, so you’ve been listening to The Wrap, Australia’s fastest technology roundup. The Wrap is found every Friday at Podcast One, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, but until then, have a great week. We’ll see you next time on The Wrap. Take care.
