More than one in four people who reported to the Federal Trade Commission that they lost money to fraud in 2021 said it started on social media, according to the agency.
The FTC stated that data suggests social media was “far more profitable to scammers in 2021 than any other method of reaching people.”
More than 95,000 people in 2021 reported losing money to a scam that started with a message, post or ad on social media, according to the FTC. Their losses totaled $770 million. Social media scams have rocketed over the past half decade as back in 2017 there were 5,000 people who reported social media scams to the FTC, with losses totaling $42 million.
“For scammers, there’s a lot to like about social media,” the FTC stated. “It’s a low-cost way to reach billions of people from anywhere in the world. It’s easy to manufacture a fake persona, or scammers can hack into an existing profile to get “friends” to con.
“There’s the ability to fine-tune their approach by studying the personal details people share on social media. In fact, scammers could easily use the tools available to advertisers on social media platforms to systematically target people with bogus ads based on personal details such as their age, interests, or past purchases.”
By far the most common type of social media scam in 2021 involved online shopping. These types of scams represented 45 percent of all reported social media scams.
In about 70 percent of online shopping scam reports,…
