 Everyone is looking for opportunities right now. Some of us are looking for great opportunities to uplift and support businesses. Scammers are unfortunately looking for ways to take advantage of businesses. 70% of small business owners have less than one month's remaining capital. So this puts small businesses in a very vulnerable situation needing access to emergency cash and scammers are very keen to this so they see this as an opportunity to unfortunately take advantage of small business owners. There are many scams out there. Three specifically that scammers target small businesses are number one would be fishing for your actual data. Scammers can also try to hack into your personal devices so they may call pretend to be the IT department to find out information that should be very secure. The third way is actually taking funds from you or making you try to pay for something upfront that you either purchased or to rush an order or pay for an invoice. Small businesses can take a couple different steps to be able to protect themselves against scams. They can always look at who is this potential person contacting me. Take a moment to step back and think before you act. Always verify the channel that a person is contacting you through. Does it look like an email that you've seen or does it have some really long funny letters in it? Check a website, make sure that that's a legitimate website. Never be afraid to call back a business. Don't feel like you need to answer or give information right away. Look them up on the Better Business Bureau, see if there's any other scams that have been reported against the business. Always take a moment to look things up and don't feel pressured to make a quick decision. So it's very important to stay up to date with the current scams that are going on to ensure that you're protecting yourself. So it's sometimes difficult to take that moment to stop and think, but it's the best practice you can do to protect yourself against scammers wanting to take advantage of these dire situations.