People who are
active on social media like to send out regular updates about their life to
friends and family members. The updates in general could be simple and routine
like ‘x’ is in a theater right now about to catch the latest Marvel movie or
could be in a fancy restaurant with a bunch of friends, all of whom have been
tagged. In some cases, we also see status updates where users convey their
emotions. Case in point would be a situation where a friend declares that he or
she is annoyed after a tiring day at work or is feeling sad about the end of a
great vacation.
Ideally these
status updates on social media are just meant to be for fun but off late, cyber
criminals have been using them to track and monitor people. This is especially
the case with users who are about to take a long vacation to some foreign
country. They provide updates on their schedules and upload tons of photos.
Such users are always vulnerable to online scams and the reasons for it are
quite obvious.
Scammers regular
scour the internet to look for people who are about to take a vacation. They
then find out the details and do a little research on the person to get an idea
of their background. The scammers then hack into their account and startworking on a number of online scams. The most common of online scams being here
is to contact friends and relatives of the traveller with urgent messages.
The message
would be an urgent plea for help and would look like was sent by the actual
traveller from his own account. The message would ask the receiver to quickly
wire in money to a bank account detail provided below. Now with online scams
like these, the response could always be a little mixed. Some people by nature
are careful and suspicious and so they will make it a point to call the person
who is out of town to confirm the request.
While the others
will consider the request to be genuine and will send in the money immediately
thinking that their friend or family member is left stranded in a foreign
country with little or no money. The fact that they received the message from
the actual users account is good enough for them to consider it to not be one
of those online scams.
So scammers take
both kinds of responses into account while sending carrying out their online
scams. To have the maximum impact, they will send the same message to a number
of friends and family members featured on the user’s list. By the time, word of
the online scam gets around, the damage would have already been done and the
cyber criminals would have disappeared.
One effective
way to avoid such online scams is to be careful. While in some cases, the plea
for help might be genuine, it will just take you a minute to call the person
and confirm. Otherwise, you might simply be sending the money into the private
account of some unknown criminal and it would be very difficult to get it back
later on.
When it comes to
users making updates on their travel plans, it should generally be discouraged.
There hundreds of criminals out there who have made it their life’s mission to
simply look for people who are known to make such updates. To make matters
worse, not only will your social media account be compromised, you end up
putting your friends and family members also in a vulnerable position. And in
an act of coincidence, if your cell phone happens to be switched off or in
Airplane mode, your family members cant event contact you immediately and they
will naturally assume that you are facing some kind of problem. So avoid making such updates to protect your
own social media account.
