Is it a Red Flag or Your Bias?

We’ve all gotten a scammy message or two somewhere on the internet.

Chances are you’ve also seen someone sharing screenshots of these messages along with a post about their frustrations.

I’ve watched as these posts become more common and I’ve noticed something very alarming.

Bias

Recently, I saw a post just like this. The white woman making the post was warning about red flags in the messages. I looked at the screenshots several times and could not for the life of me find a red flag.

The person who messaged the woman was asking her a question about a platform the two of them both used regularly. They were in groups together that supported that platform, which is likely how the person who messaged her found her.

There wasn’t any request for money or access to any of the woman’s accounts.

There was just a simple question, asking for help with something, on that platform they both were using.

I thought about that post over and over. I thought about other posts like it.

I started to wonder what the red flag could have been. I looked through the comments to see if other people agreed that there were red flags. The results were mixed, most people just shared their own experience.

For some time, I paid more attention to these types of posts. Many people shared their own screenshots of alleged red flags in the comments. I read them. I spent more time than I’d like to admit scrolling through and taking a look at these posts on personal feeds and in groups. As I read, a pattern began to emerge.

I looked harder because I didn’t want it to be true.

I tried everything I could to find some other explanation but the pattern was clear.

Words from my virtual assistant in Kenya rang clearly in my head, “I have to use an American version of my name on social media to avoid being called a scammer.”

My heart sank as the cold hard truth ran through me. The red flags in many of the screenshots that I couldn’t detect was their name.

It didn’t look American and as a result, no matter what they said, they were portrayed to be scammers. The same didn’t happen to people with names that sounded like they belonged to a white person. Those women (and men) could slide into DMs, ask questions about dogs, family, and business. They could get to a sales pitch and get a polite rejection.

But someone with a name that didn’t sound American couldn’t even get past the salutation before they were considered to be a scammer.

I knew this type of bias existed because I had seen it happen. I knew it was true because I had worked with many professionals from other countries who had experienced this same level of bias because of their name.

When I worked as a high-level manager in healthcare, I fired an HR manager when I saw she was throwing resumes away because the names sounded “too ghetto.” She wasn’t even looking at the qualifications.

That bias, and others like it, didn’t go away when social media came into the picture, instead, now it is easier to spread.

I think one of the most important things we can do to be good humans is to look at these biases that live in ourselves.

A big part of that is asking ourselves hard questions about some of the things we think and feel. In this case, we could ask ourselves, if someone with a different name and skin tone had sent me these messages would I consider them a scammer?

Of course, there are some red flags to be aware of and there are scammers out there. It is important to be smart about getting messages but that doesn’t mean assuming it’s a scam until you’ve been asked for money or access to an account you have directly.

Social media is a place to interact with other people and people reaching out to interact doesn’t have to be seen as suspicious - until it actually is.

But a different name, difference in culture or how sentences are put together are not red flags.

Different cultures often have more direct ways of speaking and interacting. Some cultures may consider some topics ok to approach with strangers and other cultures may not. None of these are red flags.

Red flags would be when someone asks you for money or something like your bank or ID numbers.

For many people, their cultural bias makes them feel suspicious of people with different sounding names or different ideas. Those biases make them feel like what they are experiencing is a red flag when it may not be.

It could just be their own bias.

I’d like to invite you to take a look at this in you.

What do you carry around that may be making you see people in a biased way?