Don’t believe everything you see on social media.
That’s the message from cybersecurity experts as a new online scam gains traction on platforms like Facebook.
The scam, University of Manitoba computer scientist David Gerhard says, plays on people’s emotions. Posts appearing to be spreading the word about a missing child are later manipulated into attempts to get your cash.
“You want to help these missing children — you want to help reunite people with their families,” Gerhard told 680 CJOB’s The Start.
“The trick with the scam is that Facebook allows people to edit their posts after they have been made.
“So what happens is the scammer will put a bunch of information and say, ‘Help this missing person.’ Everybody shares it, and then they go back and change it — which means the thing people shared is some scam, some pyramid scheme, or some ‘Click here to make you rich.'”
People are more likely to trust these posts the more they get shared, he said, especially if friends or family are also fooled. Scammers also pay attention to people who fall for these scams and are more likely to target them for other schemes in future.
Gerhard’s advice is to not to limit your source of information only to what you see on social media, as many of these hoax posts can be easily debunked, whether it’s by noticing grammar and spelling errors in the posts themselves, or by doing some quick research.
“It’s not difficult to debunk these things. You can take the photo that’s in the so-called missing child post and do a reverse image search. Just stick it into Google and see if that photo comes up anywhere else. Or check the police records. There’s real information out there.”