Photo Credit: shutterstock
It’s becoming an increasingly common scam in the social media world: A seemingly trustworthy party appears out of nowhere, and offers to restore your locked, deleted, or frozen social media account. But what starts out as a free offer soon mounts into something more. Within days, you may be asked for personal information and requested to pay additional fees. Then, as soon as you provide this, the scammer vanishes with both your personal information and your money.
That’s frustrating, to say the least. And it’s potentially dangerous, if it eventually leads to identity theft and scammers getting access to your financial accounts. So here are a few quick ways to avoid the dreaded social media account recovery scam.
#1: Only visit official social media help pages
All of the major social media platforms have pages specifically dedicated to helping you restore your account. As a result, these should be the only pages that you rely on for advice and help. If you’re using third-party pages, then there’s always the risk of malicious links, malware, and just plain misinformation.
These third-party web pages include those that are ordinarily trustworthy, such as a Reddit or Quora thread that seems to be the perfect answer to the problem you’re facing. The problem is that a scammer might leave a helpful-sounding reply along the lines of, “I had the same problem, and I used this really cool service, and they restored my account within hours. Here’s the link…” Once you start clicking on that link, you may already be setting yourself up for identity theft.
#2: Do not pay fees for account recovery
The major social media platforms do not charge a fee for account recovery. After all, their goal is for you to spend as much time as possible on their platforms. Why would they want to complicate matters by asking for a fee?
Thus, if someone is asking for money, you can rest assured it’s a scam. And, if you pay the first “fee,” then you can expect further “fees” down along the road. It’s all part of an elaborate scam to fleece you out of your hard-earned cash. One common scam, for example, is to ask for a certain sum of money (say, $100) to expedite the account recovery process. Then, after you’ve paid this, you’ll inevitably be asked to pay another fee for “recovery software,” and another fee after that as well.
#3: Never share personal information with a stranger
You never know how your personal information is going to be used, so never share it with a total stranger. To help with an illegitimate recovery process, for example, you might be asked to provide your date of birth, your phone number, or your social security number. But, again, this is all just a scam. You will never be asked for this information from a social media platform. But scammers will gladly use this information for identity theft. Once they have this personal information, they can begin to infiltrate other accounts, including your bank accounts.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, some basic common sense can help to avoid the most common scams out there. Just remember to keep calm, and to follow the advice offered by the social media platforms themselves. As soon as you start panicking and Googling random websites, that’s when the trouble usually starts.
