Lesson 1The three ingredients
A huge share of everyday scams share the same underlying structure, whether they arrive as a job offer, a loan approval or a prize notification. Learning to recognise the structure — rather than memorising every specific scam — means you can spot new variations you've never seen before.
- Urgency. “Offer expires in 1 hour”, “respond immediately or lose this opportunity” — designed to make you act before you think.
- A request that shouldn't be necessary. A real job doesn't charge you for “training materials”. A real loan doesn't require a fee before the loan arrives.
- Something too good relative to the effort. Unusually high pay for minimal work, a loan with no requirements, a prize for a contest you never entered.
Real-life example
Yaw received a WhatsApp message offering a “remote data entry job” paying an unusually high daily rate, asking only for a small payment to “activate his employee account”. Urgency, an unnecessary request, and pay too good for the effort — all three boxes ticked, confirming it as a scam before he lost anything.