Page 14 THE REVERE ADVOCATE – FRIDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2021 Why answering fun questions on social media is dangerous W hether you prefer Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, it’s fun to connect with new friends, reconnect with old friends and keep in touch on social media. In less eff ort than it takes to send a single email to a friend with a photo attachment, we can upload that same photo to Facebook in seconds for all your friends to see and share their comments and compliments. It is powerful technology used by nearly three billion people around the world. When you have that many people posting, commenting and messaging each other in one place, companies with products and services to sell are sure to follow. For these companies, “engagement” is everything. Engagement is what happens when you like, share or make a comment on a company’s social media post. Because most people have more than 100 friends/followers and like dozens of companies/brands, social media platforms use technology to send to your newsfeed only the posts with a lot of engagement. That’s why companies will do just about anything to make sure their fans and followers engage with their posts. One of the most popular ways to do that is to ask a fun, nostalgic question. These questions may include: • What was your fi rst car? • What color was your favorite freeze pop? • What was your first pet’s name? These questions seem harmless, and for most social media users, they are. Unfortunately, millions of criminals lurk on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, looking for personal information they can use against you. Every time you answer a question on Facebook that asks for personal information, you put yourself at risk for identity theft or sophisticated scams. Here’s how identity theft can happen Do you regularly update the passwords for your online banking and credit card accounts with nonsensical combinations of numbers, letters and symbols? If not, that makes you like millions of other people who choose easy-to-remember passwords and stick with them for years. How many times have you used your wedding anniversary, child’s name, birthdate or pet’s name as a password? Probably more times than you’d like to admit. Identity thieves know this. When you answer a question on social media, you give them the hints they need to log in to your bank account and steal your money. It’s bad enough that these thieves can get into your account. Once they have access, they often change the password so you can’t access your own money or line of credit. We hope you never experience the sick feeling of a preventable fi nancial loss, so please stop sharing personal information on social media and change those passwords. Here’s how a social media scam can happen The more personal information you share on social media, the easier you make it for a potential thief to scam you on a platform where your defenses are already down. How many times has something someone shared made you laugh out loud, made you clench your fi sts with anger or made you tear up? Social media tugs at our emotions in powerful ways, and in just a few short clicks, scammers can fi nd some creative ways to manipulate you. Imagine a message with a subject line like “Our friend Stacey Smith needs your help” pops into the email account associated with your Facebook account (because you set your privacy settings to “public”). You don’t know the person who sent the email, but you open it anyway because you love Stacey. Hi (your name here), I’m sorry we’re meeting like this, but Stacey has mentioned you several times at our PTA meetings and all the fun you two had at Red Oak Elementary School when you were kids, so I had to reach out to you with some sad news. Stacey has a rare infection that will require a $100,000 surgical procedure that’s not covered by insurance. I know you no longer live here in Scamsville and that it’s been years since you’ve seen Stacey, but she still loves Tom Petty. In fact, “I Won’t Back Down” is her motto for beating this awful disease. Stacey is super private about this situation (it’s why she’s not posting about it on Facebook) and would probably kill me for doing this, but I’m asking anyone who knows her to help me off set her medical bills. Please send me a check to the PO Box below or Venmo me anything you can to help our friend. Tempting, isn’t it? Now imagine if Stacey herself asked you for money for the same surgery, only the person asking the question is a thief who logged into her Facebook account and is messaging you directly through the social media platform. It happens all the time and millions of trusting people lose billions of dollars every year. Answering random questions on social media puts a target on your back by providing thieves with the personal information they need to break into your online accounts or scam you into giving them money. Be smart, be selective and leave the personal information to in-person conversations that are even more satisfying than commenting, liking and sharing on social media. BBB Study: Online shopping scams flourish on social media during pandemic A shift toward online shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic, a global supply chain crisis, and a resurging economy have all created a recipe for a breakneck holiday shopping season – one where online shopping fraud poses a tremendous risk to consumers. Online purchase scams have skyrocketed during the pandemic, and social media ads play a key role in the mushrooming problem, a new Better Business Bureau® (BBB®) study fi nds. The in-depth investigative study – “Theft on a massive scale: Online shopping fraud and the role of social media” – fi nds the pandemic, along with lax social commerce shopping platforms, has opened the door for scammers in China to steal from desperate online shoppers. Online shopping fraud has been growing for several years, but according to BBB research, it dramatically increased during the pandemic as more people shopped online. A BBB survey found 29 percent of people shopped online before COVID-19, and this increased to 37 percent by the end of 2020. In turn, BBB Scam Tracker reports about online shopping scams nearly doubled from 2019 to 2020, and the BBB Institute for Marketplace Trust named online shopping scams as the riskiest scam of 2020, publishing special reports on this growing fraud in 2020 and 2021. Complaints to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about online purchases more than doubled in 2020 and continue to increase throughout 2021. Also, online shopping has more BBB “F”rated companies than any other type of business. Most online fraud reports examined involve a response to online ads on Facebook and Instagram. After placing an order, victims report receiving nothing or receiving items that were counterfeit or inferior from what the ads promised. Scammers often take product photos or a landing page from legitimate businesses, post them on Facebook and Instagram and take online orders at websites they create. This leads to complaints against legitimate businesses, as victims often do not realize they have lost their money to a scammer rather than the business the scammer was portraying. Counterfeit and pirated goods, the subject of a 2019 BBB investigative study, are rampant in online shopping scams. Other online fraud reports involve sites selling nonexistent pets, vehicle shipping schemes and deceptive free trial off ers. Many online shopping complaints registered at BBB and reported to BBB Scam Tracker can be traced back to Facebook and Instagram. BBB found it was common that people who were not actively looking for a product, but lost money in the transaction, began with Facebook or Instagram 70% of the time. Fraudsters understand how Facebook targets shoppers and have developed strategies to reach those likely to be interested in buying their bogus products. Many victims and legitimate businesses believe that Facebook and Instagram should do more to prevent this widespread fraud. A recent federal class action lawsuit against Facebook contends that it is complicit in fraudulent sales and fails to abide by its own policies in addressing them. A Missouri woman ordered a decanter and two cups via a Facebook ad, but only received one cup. When she contacted the company to complain about how the set was depicted in the ad versus what was received, she was told she had only ordered one cup. They refused to give her a refund, so she contacted BBB. While credit cards are still the most frequent payment method in online scams, online scammers increasingly are requesting payment through PayPal. Credit cards and PayPal off er a degree of buyer protection by allowing buyers to dispute charges, although scam victims have reported diffi culty getting refunds through PayPal. In addition, scammers employ a variety of tactics to circumvent the dispute process, including exorbitant shipping costs to return items for a refund, supplying bogus shipping tracking numbers and delaying the process in order to run out the clock for a dispute claim. Online purchase scams originate from a variety of actors. Counterfeit goods operations – and those who sell goods online that are not delivered or send items signifi cantly diff erent from what was described – have been tracked to businesses or organized gangs based in China. While China has blocked its people from using Facebook’s social media platform in China, reportedly, some businesses located in the country traffi c counterfeit goods and spend billions to advertise on the site. Reportedly, many pet scams are primarily operated by gangs from Cameroon; vehicle scams have been traced to gangs from Romania, and free trial off er scams have been found to be operated mostly by people in the United States and Canada. Law enforcement actions mostly have been limited to scammers and their accomplices operating in the United States and Canada. In 2020, U.S. customs agencies seized $1.3 billion in counterfeit goods, arresting 203 individuals and securing 98 convictions. BBB’s study makes the following consumer protection recommendations: • Facebook should do more to enforce its policies for third-party sellers. • Credit card payment processors should put more eff ort into combating those who provide merchant accounts to sellers who engage in fraud. • U.S. consumers would benefi t from a program to help counterfeit victims with chargebacks like one operated in Canada by the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC). Such a program might help identify crooked credit card merchant accounts, bogus websites, and points of origin for counterfeit goods. • More regulatory oversight is needed regarding companies that use websites to market products from China but deliver counterfeit goods, items not as advertised or nothing at all. Tips for avoiding online purchase scams: • Check out the website before making a purchase • Check BBB.org to check a business’s rating and BBB accreditation status. Some crooks might copy the BBB seal. If it is real, clicking on the seal will lead to the company’s BBB profi le. • Scamadviser.com can often tell you how long a website has been in operation. Scammers create and close websites regularly, so a site that has only been operONLINE | SEE Page 15
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