it's now roughly free to send a personalized, grammatically-perfect email from an account that seems to belong to a human. gone are the days where princes from a country on the other side of the world would drop apostrophes when trying to disburse millions of dollars to internet strangers. the most suspicious emails and texts we receive on a regular basis are legitimate communications from delivery companies attempting to coerce us to pay them for tariff paperwork. the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.

the best way to avoid losing all your money is to stay calm in the face of uncertainty and fear. the second best way is to establish an independent mode of communication. the third best way is to be skeptical of too-good-to-be-true offers.

in general, emails and texts can be ignored for a few hours or a day without much consequence. that's plenty of time to come back down to your emotional baseline.

if you're contacted by someone claiming to be your bank or credit card provider, hang up. there should be a phone number on the back of your card; call that number, wait in line, and tell the nice receptionist what happened. if there is really something happening, they will know about it; if not, you've avoided being scammed and can feel glad about your safe practices. the same goes for a delivery company, cloud storage provider, internet provider, and whoever else. hang up / close the email, google the name of the company, and contact them directly. if you don't recognize the company, you can generally ignore it.

clicking on a link is very safe, browsers like chrome, firefox, and safari put immense effort into making sure of that. the main danger is that you are tricked by the webpage pointed to by that link - maybe it looks like your bank and asks for your password, maybe it says you have malware and asks you to run a program, maybe it looks like a two-factor authentication or anti-bot captcha. it takes technical savvy and alertness to discern a real webpage from a scam. it helps to use a password manager with autofill - if your password doesn't autofill, it might not be safe. if you're uncertain about something, it's always best to contact someone you trust that's good with computers. they'd much rather help you out than have you fall for a scam.