Category: social media scam

Twitter Scams

 

The most common Twitter scams are:-

1. Home Working

Lots of people would love to be able to work from home and get well paid, enabling them to organise their work life to fit in with other commitments. But the scammers know this and offer home working jobs which don’t exist. They make money by requiring an up-front payment for registration or postage or insurance or a subscription.

2. Pay for Followers

Many people want more twitter followers for their personal or business accounts and lots of scammers offer such a service. Some just take money and give nothing but others do provide more followers. However these turn out to be poor quality or fake followers that son disappear.

Plus, you put your Twitter reputation at risk and may end up banned by Twitter for engaging in spam exercises.

3. Fake Links

There are endless tweets exhorting you to click a link to see a life changing video or solve some problem in your life or win the lottery etc. Don’t click on a link unless you know what it’s for.  Many of these fake links are simply because the poster gets paid for each click but many are malicious.

4. The Twitter Phishing Scam

There are many tricks used in phishing tweets including fake sign-on pages, fake games and quizzes that ask for information that can be used by a scammer e.g. your mother’s maiden name, pet’s name, town of birth etc. Beware giving out any such personal information.

5. Other Money-making Scams

Scammers try to make money out of you.  Any public tweets you make become information for potential scams. e.g. you tweet about wanting to go a concert then get a direct message form someone offering tickets to the concert and a story as to why they are available to you cheaply as long as you respond quickly. SCAMS.

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Scammers on Pinterest

Pinterest is a great social media network based on pictures of all kinds.

People mainly use it for inspiration – food to cook, places to go, clothes to buy, things to do, funnies, absurdities etc.

But it is used by scammers. When a post a picture you can add a link to a website page so scammers post something to make you click and that takes you to their scam website.

Here’s a recent example, posted by an idiot.

The woman in the photo is clearly standing further from the camera in the second photo – even her head is narrower in the second photo.

She looks to have lost weight but who knows how many weeks between the photos and she has a suntan in the second photo so maybe some weeks of holiday occurred in between photos.

However, it is impossible for anyone to lose 5 kilogrammes in2 days.

Oh and the magic herb is just parsley. Drinking parsley tea at night supposedly removes all the fat you’ve eaten that day.

No it doesn’t.

Use Pinterest for entertainment and inspiration but don’t be conned by fake photos.

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LinkedIn Scams

LinkedIn is a business social media network with over 500 million members. LinkedIn profiles show a lot about you that is of use to scammers. If scammers find a way to connect with you, they have an easy way to send you email and generally people are more trusting on LinkedIn than other social media networks.

There are two common types of scams that involve LinkedIn.

  1. Emails that appear to have come from LinkedIn. Fraudsters ask the recipient to click a link within the email to accept the invitation or to view the sender’s LinkedIn profile. The links within these emails are often to another website and these may be scam sites ready to download malicious software to your computer.
  2. Requests coming from LinkedIn members. The fraudster creates a LinkedIn account. With the fake profile, the fraudster can then send LinkedIn connection requests. These invitations arrive in the LinkedIn inbox, which makes the request look less suspicious, especially if the criminal has been successful in connecting with a few other people that you may know or who may be on your contact list.

Pointers to a Scam

  • The sender has very few connections
  • The sender’s profile is mostly blank
  • There are numerous misspellings and grammatical errors
  • The photo is not of a person but is a graphic or a logo or something meaningless
  • The sender’s job title typically makes them an executive at a bank or other financial institution

If you accept a connection request from one of these scammers, the only value is that it makes their profile look more legitimate as it now has a larger number of connections . But what the scammer wants is to talk with you online, pull you into their fraudulent world and steal from you.

If you regret having agreed to a connection, you can block it and if there is evidence of fraud then pass that on to the LinkedIn authorities so they can stop the account.

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The Instagram Money Flipping Scam

On Instagram in particular but also to a lesser degree on Facebook, Twitter and other social media is a scam known as money flipping.

The scammers advertise that they can flip your money – that is to change a small amount into a large amount in hours.  Often the offer is to add a zero to your account e.g. change $100 into $1000.

How does the scam work?

People are conned into believing this is possible by photos posted of people who had their money flipped, testimonies of people who’ve made a fortune this way etc.

Of course none of it is possible – it’s just a simple scam to catch greedy people.

You contact the scammer and they tell you to buy a Western Union card or Green Dot Moneypak card or any other pre-paid money card and load it with $100 or $200 or $500 etc. as you wish.

Then to get it flipped into $1,000 or $2,000 or $5,000 etc. you give them the card details so they can multiply your money but instead they simply empty your card into their account and your money is untraceably gone.

A surprisingly large number of people have been caught out by this scam and there are endless scammers trying it.

Instagram and the other social media networks are trying to remove the scammers but as soon as one account is deleted up pops another one.

If something is too good to be true – it almost certainly is a scam.

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