How to Avoid Social Media Scams in 4 Steps

Cyber attacks don’t have to be elaborate in order to succeed. In the finance industry, social media platforms are being used to lure people into baseless investment schemes. They often imitate pages of legitimate businesses, fool victims into following their requests, and then disappear with their money as swiftly as they appeared.

These impostors are clever at designing their page to be as close to the likeness of the official page. They could repost content and sometimes produce their own original posts to appear natural. They would buy likes and followers to appear legitimate. On Facebook, we have found at least two fake Easy Crypto pages in October alone.

We have taken all the necessary actions to report and close down fake accounts. But when one gets taken down, another one appears; it’s just too easy to create a new account on popular platforms, and scammers are relentless. 

To fight against scammers, you must pay attention to specific things which you will know very soon in this article. First, let’s take a look at a couple of fake pages that we have caught red-handed:

Already, we can spot a decent number of red flags 🚩 :

• The scammer asks you to deposit cryptocurrency to an address.
• The scammer makes a promise of a guaranteed investment return.
• The scammer is in a rush to get you to deposit.
• The scammer rushes to give you additional rewards to push you into depositing.
• The scammer tries to convince you with a meaningless screenshot.
• The caption is written in poor English.

With these in mind, here are four steps to avoid falling into a social media scam.

Beware of accounts that ask you to deposit crypto for a promised reward

Easy Crypto will NEVER ask anyone for money or cryptocurrency, especially in exchange for a reward, credit, or other incentives. Avoid accounts that use our name to lure people into depositing crypto into a wallet address for a promised reward.

Falling for these scams can potentially cost you more than the money that you lose. If you give away your personal details, you will compromise your privacy and security. NEVER give away your wallet’s private key to anyone unless you want to give them full control over your funds.

There is no such thing as a guaranteed return

Many of the social media scams that we encounter claim that they can multiply the crypto or money that you “invest” with them. A scammer may even use the foot-in-the-door technique to earn your trust by actually giving you the guaranteed return after you send them a small amount of money. The next time you do that, however, your money will be gone.

The scammer may go through lengths to explain how they will be able to guarantee a return (or a range of returns). They may, for example, claim to use DeFi farming protocols, which typically offer promising high returns to early participants.

DeFi is a tricky field, and you should be really careful about putting your money into unfamiliar projects. On the other hand, projects like Aave, Uniswap, and Orion have been tried and tested for years. 

Of course, you can dip your toes into a new DeFi project if you want, but don’t rely on a third party. If you don’t understand a project enough to be able to try it on your own, then you shouldn’t get into it yet.

Don’t trust all financial influencers (finfluencers)

Finfluencers are social media influencers whose content is geared towards helping people make better financial decisions. Many fin-fluencers genuinely have good intentions, and they often give fresh new insights into money management and how various investment instruments work. 

Unfortunately, due to the competitive nature of social media, many of them border between what is legally acceptable and what is questionable (in the grey area) in order to attract new followers. In most jurisdictions, it’s unacceptable for anyone who is not a licensed advisor to give financial product recommendations. 

Influencers may cross this line unintentionally by offering more than just educational content about a particular product. For example, while it’s okay for someone to explain the benefits of Bitcoin over Ethereum, or cryptocurrencies over shares, it’s not okay to actively encourage audiences to buy or sell anything. 

You should avoid tuning in to an influencer who consistently and blatantly crosses this line. For example, if they ask their followers to buy and sell an asset at the same timeframe, it’s likely that they are organising a pump-and-dump scheme. 

Pump-and-dump schemes occur in the market for lesser-known assets, which means the price could be “pumped” by getting a high number of people to buy it at the same time, and then “dumped” by getting them all to sell for a profit. Pump-and-dump schemes are illegal and are subject to heavy fines in most jurisdictions. 

Simply email us! 

Easy Crypto has a dedicated compliance team who proactively help our customers avoid scams on a daily basis.

If you are not sure about whether an account with our name is legitimate, or if you want to make sure that a reward offering is not a scam, please don’t hesitate to contact us through this Contact Page.