Today's most common scams

"Today's most common scams fall into three categories: online-shopping deals and product giveaways in which the goods are never delivered; offers of free cash or too-good-to-be-true investment opportunities, sometimes involving cryptocurrency; and fabricated romances, says Satnam Narang, a research engineer at the cybersecurity firm Tenable who has been studying social-media scams since 2007. No platform is exempt from these schemes, he says.

So what can be done? It is advisable for people to closely scrutinize the profiles of users they're interacting with for the first time. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok "verify" certain users by appending blue check marks to their usernames to signal that their identities have been confirmed. Also it is worth reviewing the historical content posted by the user in question. Real users are more likely to have a history of organic posts, while fake accounts often appear to be newly created, solely for the purpose of posting scams or monetizing content.

Stacey Wood, a psychology professor at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., who discusses fraud with her students, says they tell her that when they receive a direct message on Instagram from someone they don't know, they immediately check the "bio" of the sender. One marker of authority is the number of followers, Prof. Wood says, though her students note that bots are often employed to increase that number artificially." [1]

1. Wealth Management (A Special Report) --- Get-Rich-Quick Schemes That Target Young People Online Proliferate: Many scams can seem surprisingly legitimate to those who spend a lot of time on social media
Narula, Svati Kirsten.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 15 Nov 2021: R.1.