5 riskiest places to get scammed online

These five communication channels are favored by scammers to try and trick victims at least once a week—if not more.

Jun 18, 2025 - 11:10

Scammers love your smartphone.

They can text you fraudulent tracking links for packages you never bought. They can profess their empty love to you across your social media apps. They can bombard your email inbox with phishing attempts, impersonate a family member through a phone call, and even trick you into visiting malicious versions of legitimate websites.

But, according to new research from Malwarebytes, while scammers can reach people through just about any modern method of communication, they have at least five favored tracts for finding new victims—emails, phone calls and voicemails, malicious websites, social media platforms, and text messages. It’s here that people are most likely to find phishing attempts, romance scams, sextortion threats, and more, and it’s here that everyday people should stay most cautious when receiving messages from unknown senders or in responding to allegedly urgent requests for money or information.

For this research, Malwarebytes surveyed 1,300 people over the age of 18 in the US, UK, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, asking about the frequency, type, impact, and consequences of any scams they found on their smartphones. Capturing just how aggravating today’s online world is, a full 78% of people said they encountered or received a scam on their smartphone at least once a week.

Here are the top five places that people actually encountered those weekly scams:

65% of people encountered a scam at least once a week through their email
53% encountered a scam at least once a week through phone calls and voicemails
50% encountered a scam at least once a week through text messages (SMS)
49% encountered a scam at least once a week through malicious websites
47% encountered a scam at least once a week through social media platforms

Unfortunately, scam prevention cannot fixate on only these five channels, as scammers change their tactics based on how they’re trying to trick their victims. For instance, though people were least likely to encounter a scam once a week through a buying or selling platform like Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist (36%), such platforms were of course the most likely place for scam victims to have their credit card details and passwords stolen by a scammer masquerading as a legitimate business.

The noise from such daily strife has become deeply confusing, as just 15% of people strongly agreed that they could confidently identify a scam on their phone.

Daily dilemma

While 78% of people encountered a scam on their smartphone at least once a week, a shocking 44% of people encountered a scam at least daily. Similar to the weekly breakdown, here are the top five ways that people encountered scams once a day:

34% of people encountered a scam at least once a day through their email
25% encountered a scam at least once a day through malicious websites
24% encountered a scam at least once a day through phone calls and voicemails
24% encountered a scam at least once a day through social media platforms
22% encountered a scam at least once a day through text messages (SMS)

This list encompasses so much of any person’s daily use of their smartphone. They use it to check emails, browse the internet, make phone calls, scroll through social media, and text family and friends. And yet, it is in these exact places that people have come to expect getting scammed. As if the 44% of people who encounter a daily scam wasn’t depressing enough, there are 28% of people who said they encounter scams “multiple times a day.”

But the frequency of scams can only reveal so much. How, exactly, are scammers trying to trick their targets?

Social engineering and extortion

Scams are so difficult to analyze because they vary both in their delivery method and their method of deceit. A message that tries to trick a person into clicking a package tracking link is a simple act of social engineering—relying on false urgency or faked identity to fool a victim. But that message itself can come through a text message or an email, and it can direct a person to a malicious website on the internet. A romance scam, similarly, can start on a social media platform but can move into a messaging service like WhatsApp. And sometimes, a threat to release private information—which can be categorized as “extortion”—can happen through a phone call, a text message, or any combination of other communication channels.

This is why, to understand how people were being harmed by scams, Malwarebytes asked respondents about roughly 20 types of cybercrime that they could encounter and experience.

Broadly, Malwarebytes found that 74% of people had “encountered” or come across a social engineering scam, and that 36% fell victim to such scams. These were the most common social engineering scams that people encountered and that they experienced:

Phishing/smishing/vishing: 53% encountered and 19% experienced
USPS/FedEx/postal scams: 42% encountered and 12% experienced
Impersonation scams: 35% encountered and 10% experienced
Marketplace or business scams: 33% encountered and 10% experienced
Romance scams: 33% encountered and 10% experienced

For respondents who experienced any type of scam—making them scam victims—Malwarebytes also asked where they had found or encountered that scam. Here, the results show a far more intimate picture of where scams are most likely to harm the public.

For instance, 26% of charity scam victims were originally tricked on social media platforms. 37% of postal notification scam victims were first reached, predictably, through SMS/text messages. And, interestingly, despite how frequently cryptocurrency scams spread through social media, the most likely place for such a scam victim to be contacted was through email (30% for email vs. 13% for social media).

In its research, Malwarebytes also discovered that 17% of people have fallen victim to extortion scams, which includes ransomware scares, virtual kidnapping schemes, and threats to release sexually explicit photos (sextortion) or deepfake images.

Here, scam victims again shared where these scams arrived. The most popular channels for deepfake scammers to victimize people were social media platforms and emails—both at 17%. For sextortion scam victims, the most popular channel was email, at 35%. And 24% of virtual kidnapping scam victims said they were contacted through text messages, making it the most popular way to deliver such a threat.

These numbers may look depressing, but they should instead educate. No, there is no such thing as a perfectly safe communication channel today. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t help.

Check if something is a scam

Malwarebytes Scam Guard is a free, AI-powered digital safety companion that reviews any concerning text, email, phone number, link, image, or online message and provides on the spot guidance to help users avert and report scams. Just share a screenshot of any questionable message—like that strange email demanding a password reset or that alarming text flagging a traffic penalty—and Scam Guard will guide you to safety.

Try Scam Guard today