At
the moment, it is hard to find people who had never heard about
social networks. Almost everyone has a private page on Twitter or
Facebook. Unfortunately, enormous popularity of social networks has
attracted not only its users, but many scams.
Scammers
have developed a lot of different ways of cheating in social
networks, but their main aim is money. Almost all offenders are
hunting for cash. I'm sure that most of us have negative experience
of falling for their tricks. Of course, I cannot list all the
possible methods of fraud in social networks in one article, but I
can give you the most obvious.
Beautiful
strangers
Scams
can create a page on one of the numerous social network sites and
spread many photos of one beautiful girl. Then they can also send
many bulk emails on behalf of this girl, and send friend requests to
everyone. When they have many friends in their list, they will start
chatting with somebody. The actual fun begins when the scammer on
behalf of the girl suggests visiting a new friend. Of course, this
girl has no means to visit friend’s city. The victims of such
scams, naturally, help so-called "poor girl" and send money
to the indicated in advance bank account. Basically, that’s all on
this subject.
Hacking
personal pages
Perhaps
you don’t need to be told about the meaning of the words "hacked
page." By hacking people’s personal pages, the scammers have
access to their emails and start sending bulk emails to friends.
Those friends follow the link, trusting their so- called “friend."
These mailings can contain different kind of information, but the
target of the criminals is, of course, money.
Your
personal page will be removed in an hour
Scams
send users information on behalf of the site administration, with the
requirement to confirm that they are real-life people. They offer to
do this by sending an SMS to the above specified number. Then they
warn that the page will be removed forever. Somebody laughs at this
fraud, but many people still fall for this trick.
How
not to fall for the scams’ bait
In
order not to fall for tricks of these scammers, you need to follow
some rules. First, you should better call your friend, who sent an
SMS and check if he sent the SMS with the text you received and if
not delete the email or mark it as spam. You also shouldn't “add to
friends" people you do not know and think of more complicated
password.