Protecting Yourself From Social Media Scams: The Basics

Ireland has approximately 2.8 million Facebook users – that’s almost half of the entire population. Other people are also using other social networks, which means a large number of them are scam-available every day.

There are lots of ways to be scammed while using social networks. Companies see these platforms as a great way to promote their products, which turns the networks where people share their interests and opinions into powerful mediums that suggest what to see and what to buy.

On a global level, some 2.65 billion people use social media. In this tech jungle, it’s really easy to carry out almost any scam. Back in the day, people only communicated through emails over the internet. It was easy to recognize a scam then – it was a Nigerian prince giving you money for no reason at all. Today, the scam spectrum is much wider.

How to recognize a scam

Some people are really creative and their scams are hard to recognize. The typical person surfing or scrolling through the news feed might be tricked into clicking a specific link which later turns out to be a virus, for example. Here are the five most common tricks that you can be sure are scams, and clicking them can be dangerous:

1. You’ve won a prize

This is a part of the Nigerian Prince scam we mentioned. This scam offers you to pay a lawyer’s fee if you want to accept an inheritance. Similar scams today will tell you that some prize is waiting for you online, but for this, you need to enter your credentials, or credit card info. Give them nothing – it’s a scam.

2. Someone tagged you somewhere

You get a message that you’ve been tagged somewhere, but to see them you need to click a certain link. You do that, and a million pop-ups appear. Your computer is installing a bunch of new software, and you realize there’s no tag at all. At the same time, computer worms are following you and do daily damage.

3. Phone charges

This is a very clever one, actually. You see a fun quiz, like “What Smurf Are You?”. That must be cool, right? The page asks you for some standard details, phone number, registration, and then you answer some questions. Whoop, you’re Papa Smurf. That’s fun. Your phone bill next time won’t be so much fun when you realize that by entering this data you agreed to be charged $5 for this quiz.

4. Building followers by making you feel guilty

Scammers don’t really mind about morals and ethics. You can often see those asking you to reshare their message and help the hungry in Africa, or that they’ll donate a $1 for every share. The truth is, they’ll build a massive reach, and no one gets anything.

5. Receiving friend requests from fake profiles

Let’s face it, Heidi Klum isn’t looking for her next boyfriend in Cork. Fake profiles have one purpose – getting more connections that will be used for scams later. Don’t accept them.

How to protect yourself once you understand the tricks?

The scam statistics show that one in 10 people in the US is sure to become a scam victim. In Ireland, around one-third of the entire population was at least once scammed on the internet. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are. Sometimes we miss the most obvious things.

However, try to avoid a greater problem, like being robbed through the internet. It’s essential to keep your information to yourself.

Whenever someone asks for your credit card info, phone number, or anything that is digging deeper into your personal life, you need to stop and realize that you’re on the first step to getting scammed.

Conclusion

These are the basics to understanding scams and protecting yourself against them. There are more serious issues that only antivirus software can solve. Still, it’s important to know these, because they are the most common ones. The chances of being hacked are not as high as the five scams we mentioned.

By Oleh Koropenko, who is a big fan of technology and a passionate traveller. Reach him out @DMGeekcom

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