You’re on Facebook and you see that a friend appears to be providing information about a missing child. Or you may be on a buy-and-sell page for your community where you see a posting for a missing pet. Instinctively you want to help, so you share the post on your own feed. Unfortunately, your good intentions could actually be putting family and friends at risk of identity theft or fraud.
Some of these posts are fake and designed to serve as a bait and switch in order to deceive individuals into handing over their money or personal information. If the post appears to be from a friend, it’s likely their account was hacked or replicated. With the buy-and-sell pages, posts can come from individuals who appear to be from your local community but are actually in another state or another country.
You may be wondering how sharing a post can put your social media friends at risk. After you share the post, the impersonator can change their original post to any type of promotion that could draw people in, ranging from deceptive rental ads to links pointing to surveys that “guarantee” a cash prize. Because your friends believe you are recommending it, they are more likely to fall for the promotion.
While the scheme has many variations, they all use stories that will invoke emotion or urgency that the…
