Five tips for recognizing frauds on social networks and WhatsApp

It is a mistake to believe that cyber attacks happen just like hacker movies. In real life anyone can be a victim, besides, aggressions are so simple that they go unnoticed by most people.

Cyberattackers are a wolf in sheep's clothing that takes advantage of ignorance to deceive and profit from others. They use social engineering strategies to benefit from people who don't verify offers, links, accounts, contests, among other things they see on the Internet.

A person who does not know that cyberattackers pretend to be real sites and offers, can easily fall into fraud, so here are five tips to recognize frauds on social networks and WhatsApp, as they are the favorite places to attack.

According to Spain's Department of National Security (DSN), cyberattackers want their victims to click on their malicious links at all costs, which is why they often pose as irresistible contests and promotions.

If you receive the message of a winning prize, you should be suspicious, especially if you are not participating in a contest. It should simply be ignored if it says that to deliver the supposed gift it is necessary to share “something” with friends, fill out a form with personal data, make payments, make a subscription or accept confusing legal bases.

This scam can be recognized because unexpectedly a verification code has been received from the application via SMS to set up the account on a new device. Under no circumstances should the code be given to anyone, not even by someone claiming to be a family member in distress.

Another of the strategies of cyber hackers is to impersonate companies or influencers, so before clicking on any link, you must first check that there are no other accounts with a similar name and content, since it is possible that it is a cloned profile.

It should not be trusted if the account with which you had interaction does not have the blue arrow of verified account, shares links from unknown or unrelated websites, as well as that your messages appear to be generated by a bot or requesting support from your followers.

This is another common but equally effective strategy, since there are never no longer people who fall into this trap. It is characterized by using open profiles of attractive people. They usually use photos stolen from other accounts and are interested in interaction.

Once they establish communication they pretend to have the same tastes, hobbies and more to win affection. When the victim trusts them, they begin to ask for financial favors under any pretext, they also ask for intimate photos or videos, but later they ask for money in exchange for not revealing them.

It is very common for attackers to clone official e-commerce pages and then send promotions to their potential victims, who may not realize that they are apocryphal by not paying attention to them.

They are dangerous because they are spread on social networks with very attractive promotions from well-known brands, however, the URL or link of the store has nothing to do with the original one. Product images are in low quality, descriptive information is scarce, but above all, payment methods are strange, for example, they provide forms to enter bank details without giving options such as PayPal.

Because scams are more common than people think, it is recommended not to believe in very good offers, to be wary of pages that are not very elaborate or unrelated to it, and to be alert to misspellings, as they could be signs that they are fraudulent pages.

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