Archives - Social Media Scams


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.

Block as needed on social media

Social networks are full of scams designed to harvest your personal data by sending you to risky websites or soliciting sensitive information. You should block any account you think might be trying to scam you – that way, you won’t see any of its posts.

Run suspicious profile images through a search engine

If you’ve ever gotten a social media profile request or dating app picture you didn’t trust, you’re in luck. You can upload that image to Google image search or a similar (reverse image search) service to see if it’s been pulled from somewhere on the web and is putting you at risk of being scammed.