Funds Back LTD Says Watch Out for These Social Media Scams

Funds Back LTD

Not every scam is out to drain your entire retirement account or make you take out a second mortgage. These days, many online scammers are focused on low-profile scams that allow them to get a small amount of money from a lot of people. Funds Back LTD specializes in helping people get their money back from scams, but some of these schemes take such small amounts that victims don’t feel like going through the effort of getting it back. Instead, it’s better to avoid being scammed in the first place. So here are a few common small-scale social media scams that you can watch out for.

Give-Away Scams

Offering a cash prize is a time-honored scam technique, so it’s no surprise that it’s found a new evolution on social media. There are a few different permutations of the fake give-away. Some are relatively harmless in the grand scheme, simply designed to garner a page a lot of likes and engagement in a short period of time. However, many of them include malware links, or are designed to collect your personal information by having you fill out a form to enter the contest.

There are a couple of ways these giveaways operate. One is that a page will impersonate a major brand or celebrity, and create a post claiming they are doing a giveaway. One popular theme is to pretend to be a popular grocery store giving away gift baskets or generous gift certificates ahead of a holiday, or to celebrate their anniversary.

Another is for a page to impersonate a brand or celebrity and respond to the comments of the genuine page’s posts to tell random fans that they have been selected to win a giveaway.

Funds Back LTD says the best way to spot these scams is to look for the verified check mark. Celebrities and major brands usually have their pages verified to prove they are official and managed by the brand’s team. You can also check the page’s like/follow/friend count, or check when it was established. Usually these fake pages will be newer and have a smaller follower count than you might expect.

In addition to reporting these scammers to the social media platform they’re using, you should also report them to the brand they are impersonating! This will allow the brand to post a warning about the scam. According to Funds Back LTD, these brands also often have more leverage to get the social media platform to deal with the scammers, as they usually have a legal team who can follow all the right avenues to get impersonators banned.

Taking Advantage of Charitable Intent

A particularly unkind scam that has taken off recently is taking advantage of peoples’ desire to help. In this scam, a social media user posts about something that has gone wrong in their life: car broke down, rent was suddenly raised, an unexpected medical expense.

Well-meaning friends and followers immediately chime in with “How can I help? Do you have PayPal? Is there a GoFundMe?”

Scammers find these posts and act quickly. They make a fake account, stealing the original poster’s profile picture and creating a near-identical user name. They then respond to the sympathetic followers and say “Oh thank you, my PayPal is…” and collect the donations meant for the original poster.

Funds Back LTD says this one is relatively easy to avoid, thankfully. Before sending a donation to a friend in need, carefully look at the account and make sure it’s actually your friend’s account, with the right amount of friends/followers! You can also avoid it by directly messaging your friend to ask how you can help, giving them the chance to respond privately.