Couch potato phony family and you may followers you to display screen your account
Likes, retweets, shares, comments and follows are all valuable currency on social media. In order to extract them, spammers will employ “like-farming” techniques. These campaigns aim to acquire as many followers and likes as possible. The spammer will then leverage this list of likes and followers to send phishing links, spam messages, sell the information to paigns. On Facebook, these “like-farming” posts can take many shapes and sizes such as a fake post about charity donations, contests where you might win something if you like a post or emotional baits such as “like to save this kid from cancer”. Resource
Phony exams one pull your data
You must have seen those posts and quizzes inspired by movies or video games. Basically, you answer a set of questions and then the quiz tells you what movie character you are or some other personality assessment. Oftentimes, these quizzes are fronts for privacy scams that collect your answers and then sell them to third parties. Many of these quizzes come with a “Login with Facebook” button in order to do the quiz. This gives the website/app pretty much all of your important recommendations eg emails, place, words, job and the like. Oftentimes, this isn’t even illegal, since the quiz developer actually tells you what he will do with the information you provide, but to read this you need to dig deep into the labyrinthine “Terms and Conditions”.
The average Myspace associate keeps 338 family members. Chances are, you’ve never actually met some of those people and don’t know who they are. Criminals can exploit this carelessness by befriending you and then monitor your account to collect information and see what you’re up to. In particular, they’ll be on the lookout for vacation photos outside your home city or country, which means your house is probably empty and ripe to be broken into. Source
Effective fake nearest and dearest and supporters one junk e-mail or impersonate your
Facebook doesn’t prevent users from having duplicate user names, so pretty much anyone can copy the name and pictures of one of your friends and pretend to be you. Depending on what they want to extract from you, a fake Facebook friend can either seek to learn valuable information about you, such as secret data from the company you work at or mastercard facts. In most cases, however, they will pretend to be the friend in question and ask you for a loan or some other “friendly favor”. In other cases, a fake friend will be used because a bot, sending out spam messages and bombarding the newsfeeds of friended users with promotional messages or phishing links, like those infamous porn videos that will infect you too if you make the mistake of clicking them. Source In other cases, it’s possible someone might actually want to steal YOUR identity. In these situations, they’d probably target your boss or other family members.
Currency flipping frauds
Particularly frequent on Instagram, money turning frauds work by promising a user huge returns if he would just deposit a small sum as an initial investment. The scammer claims to be a financial adviser or an Internet marketer, with inside knowledge on how to manipulate exchange rates and stock prices in order to get a 10x return on investment. And all you have to do is to simply deposit some money, usually a minimum of 100$. Here’s what a money flipping account looks like:
Instagram, Fb, and you will Twitter advertisement frauds
Most social networks have a vetting process for ads people want to post on them. Both the ad and the service/product it sells are reviewed to make sure they comply with the company’s guidelines and other legal requirements. However, in cases where the ad redirects a user to a website, a scammer will alter the page after the review process, injecting malicious code, add abusive content, or data-stealing forms. There’s little a social network can do against such fake ads since the linked websites are out of their control. It’s also deeply impractical, if not impossible, to monitor each and every ad created to make sure they continuously comply with the guidelines.