Yahoo Finance’s Alexandra Semenova outlines an elaborate money-flipping scam running rampant on Meta’s popular social networking platform.
Video Transcript
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EMILY MCCORMICK: Get rich quick scams often hit those most vulnerable, promising out-sized gains for small initial investments of time and money. These kinds of scams are proliferating online. And Instagram has been one key forum where users have been targeted. Yahoo Finance’s own Senior Reporter, Alexandra Semenova, is here with the details. So tell us, Alexandra, how widespread of a problem is this?
ALEXANDRA SEMENOVA: Well, Emily, if you use the social media platform Instagram at all, it’s likely at some point you’ve seen users post endorsements for get rich quick investment schemes. Maybe you’ve even received a message directly saying that you could double your money in an hour if you just invest in some sort of new cryptocurrency. But these money flipping endorsements are all part of an elaborate scam that has become widespread on Meta’s social media platform.
How it works is, hackers will steal a user’s account, take elaborate measures to impersonate the user using their own photos, reach out to friends and loved ones, and get them to wire over money to them, promising that they’ll get some sort of big investment returns on the scam. So once they convince someone to wire the money over, they then tell the user that they have to record a video of themselves in order to get that money back, essentially…
