Social Distortion

We live in a world with constant evolving technology and social media platforms are being used to communicate with other humans more than ever. We’ve all been warned, we’ve seen a lot of scams, we’re ignoring certain types of messages, yet new scams arrive each day and it is important to stay "in the know." 

Here are some of the top scams on popular social networks and how to avoid them:

The Fake Friend

Pretty easy to spot a direct message from someone without a profile picture claiming to be someone you already know, right? Wrong. People still accept these friend requests without verifying if the person actually sent the message. What’s worse is that it’s not hard to find an old post or profile information to send a personalized message like, “Hey Judy, I haven’t seen you in forever! Loved the vacation photos! Let’s chat soon!” Unfortunately, lots of people still accept the request and now have a new fake friend. 

• See if the friend is already in your list
• Text or message them to see if they sent you a request. If not, tell them their account may have been hacked and to change their password.

See Who’s Viewed Your Profile

I mean who wouldn’t want to know who has been stalking their page? Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has remained adamant that the See Who’s Viewed Your Profile feature will never be available. You would think that’s all anyone would need to know to know that anything else would be a scam but here we are…

You’re scrolling through your newsfeed for the 5th time today, you see an ad that says, See Who’s Viewed Your Profile, you click on it to install the app, allow the app access to your profile information, and then not only do they have your information, they’ll gladly use your account to post even more ads, and worse, create a fake account and try to friend everyone you know in order to spread their agenda.

Now, you don’t have to just go on Facebook for this....I found a website full of false info and clickbait just waiting for me by doing a simple Google search for this scam. 

• If Facebook implements this feature, it will be automatically added in your settings and the majority of your newsfeed will be talking about it like it’s going out of style. Do not trust anything else.
• If you see a false ad, report it to Facebook.
  You can always go straight to the source to ask questions about features in Facebook’s Help Section!
  

The Long Awaited Facebook “Dislike” Button…is NOT Here

Nope, Facebook still hasn’t implemented this feature and anyone or anything telling you otherwise, is lying. The closest you will get is the angry face emoticon.

It’s a quick ad in your newsfeed, “click here to upgrade and add the dislike button”, nope, don’t do it. This scam works just like the “See Who’s Viewed Your Profile” scam! 

Great Deal on a Sweater

Instagram is a huge success due to rapid photo posting and many cyber criminals are copying product photos from popular retailers and pretending to sell items at great deals through Instagram. An unsuspecting buyer then clicks on the item, purchases it, and never receives it. After that, it’s pretty hard to track down the original post since you’ve probably gotten 100 more in your feed since you clicked. Can anyone say, #InstaSCAM?

Take a look at the link you are going to before you go! You wouldn’t take a trip without pulling up a map!

Account Brokering

Buy this account for $45, comes with tons of followers, oh and it’s not real but I’m $45 richer plus you just violated Twitter’s Terms of Service against buying and selling accounts so good luck getting help. Not only are these scammers creating bogus accounts, they’re running off with your money!

Simple way to avoid this...Don’t do it.

Buy “Likes” and “Followers”

This is actually a thing. Anyone running a business and marketing through social media knows that the way to get “seen” online is to have “likes” and “followers.” This takes time but many people want to jump in and start making money right away so they try to purchase them to grow their brand fast. Here’s the problem, buying this information can not only get you in trouble with most sites’ TOS agreements, we can guarantee you won’t get qualified “likes” or “followers.” Most of them are bots anyway so upping your customer engagement game won’t even work. 

Just Don’t.