I almost got scammed today. I received a very official looking piece of mail, "billing" me a few hundred bucks. Normally I would be able to see through it immediately, but this particular one caught me off guard. I am usually very good about being skeptical and it disappointed me that I almost fell for it. What I think happened was that, my familiarity heuristic was exploited.

I have business with a certain state and it was familiar for me to receive correspondences from various agencies and pay all sorts of different fees. So when I got this letter in the mail, it didn't raise any flags. I was curious to check online but not because I was suspicious but rather annoyed that I wasn't aware of this fee, that is when I discovered I was almost duped.

This isn't a particularly new scam, I have heard of it before, but when it happened to me, I almost didn't notice. What I learned from this whole thing is to be vigilant against letting my guard down to con artist that exploit the familiarity heuristic. I was so familiar with bills that I glanced over small print indicating that "this is a solicitation". I might have received these scams before but regarding my car payment or mortgage, but I was able to easily pick them out because I didn't have car payments or a mortgage, obvious scam was obvious. But then I get hit right where I am familiar, and then it wasn't so obvious.