Although flirting is more common, others are more direct. The approach used by the fraudster varies with the target. I get about three direct message requests per week that start off with a simple "hi" or the more come-hither "hi honey." Sometimes, these messages are from individual accounts (or maybe groups) who claim to be women who "just want to chat and make friends." Often, these are slow-moving affairs-probably because the people on the other end are involved in trying to reel in multiple fish. This suggests that there's a high level of sophistication to this latest wave of fakers.įinding these accounts wasn't hard. But the scale of these efforts goes far beyond what you'd expect from what are (to those in the know) recognizable cons. They follow a fairly easy-to-spot pattern for anyone who has tracked identity scams. I've been gathering anecdotal data from a number of such accounts as they've attempted to prepare me for a lure.
#GOOGLE HANGOUTS SCAMS FROM TOM W WINDOWS#
And there are dozens of other fraud games being played out on Twitter and other platforms.įurther Reading “You took so much time to joke me”-two hours trolling a Windows support scammer
But that has hardly put a dent in the efforts of scammers, who move on to set up new accounts and run new scams. Thousands of accounts involved in the ongoing campaign have been suspended. Recently, Twitter's security team has been tracking a large amount of fraudulent activity coming out of Africa, including "romance schemes"-wherein the fraudster uses an emotional appeal of friendship or promised romance to lure a victim into a scam. Based on anecdotal evidence, Twitter has become their favorite platform for luring in suckers. But for some reason, I've lately become a magnet for an entirely different sort of scammer-a kind that uses social media platforms to run large-scale wire-fraud scams and other confidence games. I've spent hours on the phone with tech support scammers, and I've hunted down bot networks spreading fake news.
I've got a history with Internet scammers. The joy of burning an account used in a criminal operation.
Enlarge / The heartbreak of being blocked by a romance scammer.
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