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It's Christmas time, so in the holiday spirit a lot of websites, including ours, are doing plenty of giveaways and contests, but that doesn't mean you should trust every Facebook page out there. In the lead up to this festive period, Kaspersky Lab has seen scammers trying to interest Facebook users with pages on PlayStation 4 offers, and on new Apple iPhones and iPads. There were even pages about an iPhone 8, which doesn’t even exist.
While it's usually easy to spot the fakes, sometimes people take a ‘what harm could it do' approach which then results in them assisting the scammers by sharing the page, which can actually be done without the page owners knowledge of it.
Here's a good example of one of the more ridiculous posts you can find:
As you can see, the page is trying to pass off the recently released Oppo N1 as an iPad. We have a lot of tech heads here who wouldn't buy in to this but not everyone has the good judgement to stay away from such scams, some might even believe that you can actually get a functioning ‘piece' of an iPad.
A more realistic page claiming to give away Playstation 4's also exists, this particular post got close to 800 shares on Facebook:
The fact that these pages spread so far shows that there is a problem here.
Kaspersky has outlined four ways that you can keep your personal information and social accounts safe:
- Don’t give away too much. It’s nice to share at Christmas, but don’t share too much personal information. If you do lose control of your social media account to a malicious hacker, it could mean more than just having your privacy infringed upon or messages being posted on your behalf.
- Don’t click on untrusted links. Scammers use numerous techniques to get people to give away their Facebook logins. Clicking on an email link entitled “Facebook Christmas Specials”, for example, could open a fake Facebook portal in which users are required to enter their login details.
- Use two-factor authentication. Using two factor authentication like adding a phone number to a social networking account can go a long way to prevent anyone taking it over maliciously.
- Get the right security. Various kinds of nasty software sniff around your system for social media passwords, so make sure your anti-virus and anti-malware solutions are installed and up to date.
KitGuru Says: We know most of you guys are smart enough to avoid this sort of thing, but most of you have probably seen at least one person like, comment on, or even share one of these scam pages. Try and open their eyes to what these pages are really set out to do, even if it's just a vulnerable relative.
