Anirudh Harshavardhan

Social media in the past decade has permeated society to become a means for staying in touch with friends, family and businesses. It’s safe to say that billions of users have some sort of social media profile, with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter holding the lion’s share, in terms of number of users. Not every user on these platforms is verified as being a real person. It is very likely a significant percentage of profiles are fake. A report by the USA’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) entails that social media is a ‘gold mine’ for scammers to take advantage of naive users and that in 2021, one in four users reported that they lost money to fraudulent activity on social media.

Over 95,000 people reported losing a total of about $750+ million via social media in 2021, which accounted for 25% of all monetary losses due to fraud. For these scammers, social media is an easy way to target billions of people in every corner of the world. Scammers create fake personas with relative ease, by looking at their target’s patterns via the content of their posts. Or, they hack into users’ accounts, thereby gaining easy access to the followers on that profile. Scammers could easily use the tools available to advertisers on social media platforms to systematically target people with bogus ads based on personal details such as their age, interests, or past purchases, the report says.

There are also a lot of investment scams that occur online, particularly in the realm of cryptocurrency, reports of which have surged in recent years. Scammers build up a fake social media presence, baiting users into what on the surface seems to be a lucrative investment opportunity, only for the users to return empty-handed.

Romance scams are also a thing and the FTC reports on these being second in place in terms of how lucrative they are for scammers. Unassuming users receive a friend request from a stranger, who sweet talk them into letting their guard down, before eventually asking for financial help.

But the biggest share of reports against scammers go to online shopping sites. Several unverified  ‘businesses’ put up ads on social media with attractive visuals of the fake products, and when some users inevitably purchase these products, they end up never receiving them, losing a lot of money and personal information in the process. Some reports even describe ads that imitated legitimate businesses and steered them towards fraudulent websites. Nearly 9 out 10 users reported that Facebook and Instagram were where they fell prey to these scams. More and more profiles like this are making their way onto the platforms on a daily basis.

There seems to be more and more bad press about these social media platforms, and it appears to be relentless and unavoidable. But users do have power over this. There’s no avoiding an online presence in this day and age, but there is a lot one can do to be safe out there:

• Limit who can see your posts and information on social media. All platforms collect information about you from your activities on social media, but visit your privacy settings to set some restrictions.
• Some platforms allow you to opt out of targeted advertisements. Exercise this option.
• If you receive a message from a friend asking you for money via cryptocurrency or wire transfer or any online medium, call that friend to confirm this.
• If someone appears on your social media and rushes you to start a friendship or romance, slow down. Don’t send any money to someone you haven’t met.
• Before you buy something that you saw on an ad on social media, look up the company followed by search queries like ‘fraud’ or ‘scam’ and see if they’re what they say they are.