Although the "age of the Internet" or the "digital age" has brought tremendous conveniences, speed, efficiency and so forth to our lives, that was undreamed of before the dawn of the age, it has also brought forth with it opportunities for bad actors, scammers, hackers, unscrupulous individuals to exploit the system, your information and you. The modern system(s) relies on information or data to function. In fact, information is the core of it. Therefore it is imperative that you treat your information, especially personally identifiable &/or sensitive information with care while sharing, lest the bad actors take advantage of the otherwise legitimate and useful sharing of data. We are especially concerned about seniors and veterans who often fall victim to the scams and phishing schemes whether it be via email solicitations, online or over the phone. While we may not be able to go into in-depth discussions on online scams and security on a website dealing with unclaimed property, the following is some general advise and tips that are relevant in the context of any solicitations you may receive :

1. Authenticate the source of inquiry : If someone out of the blue is soliciting personal info., be weary. Find a way to authenticate the individual or company in whatever way you feel is best. It could be by calling them and asking them questions (not giving them all the info.!) or by doing some quick Google research or by going to their website online (see the next topic).
2. When you visit a website, ensure that it’s an authentic site BEFORE providing any information : Look for obvious signs :
   Pay attention to the address bar of your browser ; does the address begin with “https…” or “http…”? The former means a secure connection where data is encrypted (coded) during transmission / reception between your device / computer / browser and the computer / server at the other end where the website sits. 
   We use strong and up to date encryption technology known as Transport Layer Security (TLS) –indicated by the website address beginning with "https://...–" to protect any and all data that flows between your browser and this website. Our company, this website and its address have been authenticated by an independent Certificate Authority to ensure that we are who we say we are. Look for / click the "padlock" icon near your browser's address bar for details. If we are requesting any information from you in connection with researching or claiming your assets, the forms collecting the information and the information / data itself is encrypted during transmission and storage. We are also working on giving you the ability to delete the entire form data - esp. after we have completed the claims process and you have obtained your money. You’ll have the option to do this if we haven’t already deleted your data after we have completed the claim process. We should have no need to retain your information post-claims completion. But we'd love to retain you as friends and hear back from you and have you share your story with us!
3. If you get an email solicitation for information from an unknown sender, be cautious : Look at the From email address. Look at the part that comes after the @ sign which is the domain where it is coming from. Looks suspicious? Does it match with where the email seems to be coming from? Be careful clicking on any attachment to the email. If in doubt, don't click to open it. 
4. Don't be fooled by the look and feel of a website that is made to look like a government affiliated site. Almost all government websites have the website address ending in .gov (E.g. www.HealthCare.gov). 
5. Be weary if you are asked money up front : If you have received solicitations from individuals or companies about unclaimed funds and they are requesting fees up front, consider this a red flag. In most cases asking for or charging fees up front before they find, claim and actually obtain your unclaimed money from the government may be illegal.

Resources :

• American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) has an entire section devoted to Scams & Fraud. A lot of information on the topic. This is where you'd go when you have some "retired" time to do some serious reading! But the information presented is useful to everyone in general even if you are not in the senior / retired / veteran category. The sheer amount of information on the site could have been better served with a less cluttered, less crowded page layout and more pictorial content but kudos to AARP for presenting that much of information in one place. It could make you an expert or quite well informed on how to avoid all things scams and frauds and so on, both online and offline! When you get to the page linked above, keep scrolling down until you see Fraud Resource Center listing various types of scams etc.
• Here's Everything You Need to Know About Sketchy Emails - An article by Nicole Nguyen of BuzzFeed who details on what "phishing" is, how to identify it and avoid it. She also mentions a report by Citizens Crime Commission of New York City titled 
  How Human Behaviour and Decision Making Expose Users to Phishing Attacks. It's a great read, put together well, available for download.