Archives - Social Media Scams


Reject unknown friend requests

Cybercriminals will often create fake profiles on social media sites like Facebook and Linkedin, with the objective of gathering sensitive information about you. By looking at your social media page, they can use your personal information to develop a phishing scam. To do this, they might create an alias or impersonate somebody you know before […]

Never click and tell

Limit what information you post on social media—from personal addresses to where you like to grab coffee. What many people don’t realize is that these seemingly random details are all that criminals need to know to target you, your loved ones, and your physical belongings—online and in the real world. Keep Social Security numbers, account […]

Watch for the soldier scam on social media – especially on Facebook

Impersonating U.S. soldiers is a common scam tactic on Facebook. Someone will pretend to be a service member and then ask for escalating payments to help tend to an injury or other invented pretext. As a rule of thumb, don’t pay anyone on Facebook unless you know them.

Consider making your Instagram account private

Instagram is a popular social network. As such, it is home to a lot of spam and scams, in the form of messages and comments meant to lure you into a phishing scheme. You can minimize your exposure to harm by making your account private. That makes it so that people (or bots) can only […]

What is a social engineering attack?

In a social engineering attack, an attacker uses human interaction (social skills) to obtain or compromise information about an individual or organization computer system. An attacker may seem unassuming and respectable, possibly claiming to be a new employee, repair person, or researcher and even offering credentials to support that identity. However, by asking questions, he […]

Delete social media accounts you’re not using anymore

Social media is a blessing and a curse. It helps you keep up with others but can also leak a lot of data and increase your vulnerability to breaches. Accordingly, delete any old accounts you don’t need to reduce risk.