Avast Blog Tips & Advices: The Menacing 7: Today’s worst social media scams

[harlan4096]

Learn to recognize and avoid the most common malicious schemes terrorizing newsfeeds everywhere.

Thieves no longer stop at credit card numbers and financial swindling. Sure, they want your money, but today’s career criminals want more. They want your data.

Personal info comprises today’s riches: what you like, where you go, who you love, what you believe — anything that details who you are is valuable data. In earlier days, this data would immediately be put to use to commit identity theft. But today, it is equally advantageous to the criminal to sell the data. Shady organizations and services use this type of info to target ads, launch social engineering campaigns, or effect other manipulative operations.

The more an entity knows about you, the more it can use what it knows to influence you, such as leveraging, for example, the dislike of a political party to promote fraudulent gossip. With the right (sinister) calculations, social engineering and population manipulation can have major global effects.

I’m just one person, you might be thinking. My action or inaction won’t cause global change. Nobody’s going to target me. How wrong you are. Your action or inaction CAN cause global change, and the evil powers that be DO in fact want to get into your social account... because they don’t just want you — they want your entire network. And then they want the networks of all those in your network. And so on.

Benjamin Franklin famously said “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Here’s your ounce of prevention. Get hip to these scams most commonly making the rounds today, and avoid them at all costs.

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