______________________________________________________________________
We all are aware of social media and social networking, but are we aware of the social scams? Have you ever thought on why these social scams are so successful? It’s not just we who love the social platforms. Cyber criminals are fond of them too. And this is no more an assumption, but a reality. Let’s look at few reasons why the social networking sites are a favourite with cyber criminals.
Looking at the scam history, some of the popular scams have been the ‘419 scam’, ‘See who viewed your profile!’, ‘Dad walks in on daughter …. Embarrassing!’, ‘Get a Starbucks gift card!’, ‘The ‘dislike’ button’, ‘Make thousands working from home!’, Twitter direct messages with bad links, ‘Twitter mentions’, LinkedIn stock scam, ‘Justin Bieber stabbed!’, ‘Your account has been cancelled.’, ‘Confirm your email account’, Pinterest Diablo 3 scam, Tumblr dating game scam, ‘Facebook will start charging members!’, and the list can go on and on.
We all might have come across these names, may be not all but definitely few of them. Repetition of attack or similarity of successive attacks clearly indicates the success cyber criminals have achieved using such scams. In an attempt to find an answer to ‘Why cyber criminals love social media?’ we found a whole bunch of reasons. Here are the few most obvious ones…
Looking at the scam history, some of the popular scams have been the ‘419 scam’, ‘See who viewed your profile!’, ‘Dad walks in on daughter …. Embarrassing!’, ‘Get a Starbucks gift card!’, ‘The ‘dislike’ button’, ‘Make thousands working from home!’, Twitter direct messages with bad links, ‘Twitter mentions’, LinkedIn stock scam, ‘Justin Bieber stabbed!’, ‘Your account has been cancelled.’, ‘Confirm your email account’, Pinterest Diablo 3 scam, Tumblr dating game scam, ‘Facebook will start charging members!’, and the list can go on and on.
We all might have come across these names, may be not all but definitely few of them. Repetition of attack or similarity of successive attacks clearly indicates the success cyber criminals have achieved using such scams. In an attempt to find an answer to ‘Why cyber criminals love social media?’ we found a whole bunch of reasons. Here are the few most obvious ones…
- Booming social media popularity
- The obvious social media addiction/lure
- Social media becoming an ideal place for crime
- The vast transition from emails to social media
- Rising usage of social media over smartphones
