From phishing scams to an account taking over your legit giveaway, nothing pisses me off more than this group of scammers, mostly found on Instagram. Hiding behind fake accounts and doing their best to speak English, the scammers fool even the smartest of the smart. (Although the broken English should raise an alarm in of itself.)

How do they trick us, you ask? My experience leads me to believe one of two scenarios when scammers fool one of us: we weren’t paying attention (going too fast etc.), or we want to believe it’s true. Slow down and question EVERYTHING, and you’ll save your social account from these nitwits.

Typical scams include, but aren’t limited to:

• Sending you a pitch that’s “too good to be true.”
• They’ll help you with something – like gaining more followers, likes etc.
• They want you to be a swimsuit model, but the best thing you model is your bottle of wine on your patio table.
• Replying VERY FAST to DMs
• Asking you to click on a link to do something
• Asking for money (brazen, but seems to work)
• And – the best one: “can I ask you a favour please” (again, is this British? Canadian?)

Repeat after me – you owe no one favors on Instagram. Absolutely no one. I don’t care if they are your best friend. Would your best friend DM you on the gram asking for a favor? No.

Except that last one gets people – it landed a large account in our industry a few months ago (they did get their account back…eventually.) Once they gain access to a “trusted” account, they go after their friends. How? Let me show you in screenshots – I covered the account it was sent from to protect the innocent.

Okay, this is all via DM’s in Instagram. The scammers already took over this legitimate account, so the likelihood of you falling for their scam just increased 100-fold. Except, once again, can we just look at the English used? Do your friends use British words and abbreviate certain words like they are 12 years old? Doubtful.

Also, Instagram would never ask 30 people to verify your account. My goodness they can barely help A SINGLE PERSON much less send a note to 30 people!!!

Moving on, here’s the next screen shot of this debacle. Notice how they are typing so fast (again, moving fast is in their favor, not yours) they are misspelling words and not correcting them. They have a live one and by gosh, they are not letting you go. Can we also just question why in the FREAKIN WORLD would you ever have to turn off two-factor? Let me give you a scenario where that would happen – NEVER!! IT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN!!

This last screen shot below is of them showing the user how to turn off their two-factor. The reason they want you to do this is so they can quickly take over your account and keep up the charade.

One last tidbit: the email scamming/phishing is getting worse. My PayPal and Amazon accounts have been ‘closed’ multiple times over the last year. One look at the email address and you can tell it is not a legit email. HOWEVER, there have been scams where the sending email address is very close to a legit one. You can double-check this for Instagram. Simply open your Instagram account and click on the three lines in the upper right corner. Go to Settings > Security > Emails from Instagram. You’ll get a list of emails Instagram sent you over the last two weeks. 

Here’s a screenshot of mine – nothing to report here!

Hopefully this real-life scenario is helpful to you. Please share with your colleagues so others may learn. And remember, when it comes to requests on social media, it usually always is too good to be true. Question everything, respond slowly. – Michelle Scheuermann, editor, Archery Wire.