WASHINGTON (TNND) — As holiday shoppers search for their final gifts this week, experts are urging people to be careful not to fall victim to increasingly sophisticated and deceitful scams, especially on social media.
“A lot of times people think, ‘Oh, I would never get scammed. That would never happen to me.’ But the reality of the situation is, we know that young people get scammed just as frequently as older individuals,” said Rachel Tobac, the CEO of SocialProof Security, a firm of “friendly hackers” that help companies strengthen their cyber defenses.
With just about everyone doing some amount of their shopping online these days, a scammer can make a pretty safe bet that their target has a package coming.
“A lot of times they’ll get your credit card information, your address, people sometimes even give away their Social Security information because the attacker pretends to be the U.S. Postal Service and says they need that information to get your package to you. The attackers really try to employ a sense of urgency or fear that you’re not gonna get what you need during this holiday season at the time that you really need it,” Tobac said.
Another common red flag occurs during a person-to-person sale on a messaging platform when the seller insists the buyer pay them via Venmo, Zelle, Cash App or some other third-party payment platform.
“You can’t get your money back once it’s wired,” Tobac said. “The attackers are really smart and so they’re going to move it really quickly and your bank is not going to be able to respond in time.”
The good news is, that some social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have rolled out tools to help users identify suspicious behavior.
On Facebook Marketplace, users will get alerted if the account they are interacting with displays patterns consistent with scam scenarios, according to Meta. The company uses artificial intelligence to detect suspicious behavior.
“They’ll say, ‘Make sure you don’t take this conversation off platform. If this person is demanding Zelle and that’s the only way to pay, move on. It’s probably a scam.’ Definitely heed their advice and any other social media platforms when they put up those alerts,” Tobac said.
On Instagram, if a “potentially scammy” requests to follow a user, they’ll get a notification from the platform to be cautious of suspicious interactions. On WhatsApp, if a user gets a message from a stranger or is added to a group by someone they don’t know, they will now see a context card giving them more information about that person or group.
“Scammers constantly evolve their tactics to evade detection and rarely, if ever, target one single platform. They do so to ensure that any one company can only see a small piece of these scam campaigns. This makes collaboration with law enforcement and within industries, including the financial services industry, even more critical in our anti-scam efforts,” Meta said.
Though holidays are especially prone to scams, schemes targeting users’ financial assets and personal information are ever-present and ever-evolving.
“These types of scams do not go away, they just morph and change over time,” Tobac said. “So right now, we’re seeing delivery package scams about your holiday gifts whereas when it gets closer to say, Valentine’s Day, they will shift the way that they talk about to Valentine’s Day language.”