However, it’s not all about ego-massaging as sometimes fake accounts will friend or add you only to send you a dangerous phishing message. Why would anyone buy fake followers? Likely to massage their egos. You can do it across the board for social media.
If you search ‘buy followers’, you’ll soon see that just about anyone can buy thousands of followers for the princely sum of a tenner. Don’t be surprised if you find your inbox inundated with spam emails promising all kinds of things! The scammer will earn a referral fee for your email address and you’ll never see that gift card.
So you enter your email address and hit submit. Let’s say, for example, you’re scrolling Twitter and you see an ad offering a gift card for an exclusive department store to the first 20 people to enter their email address. With social media scams, affiliate programs are often the source of the money.Īffiliate scams are incentive programs where companies pay an affiliate to drive traffic or new subscribers to their site. If scammers aren’t making money, they’ll have to move on to a new idea or technology to trick people. Morbid curiosity kicks in and people hit the link en-masse, compromising their account or computer, or driving money to scammers via affiliate scams. Titles range from recently dead celebrities to shocking worldwide events and explicit videos. Titles and topics vary, but there’s one constant: the news usually takes the form of a video with an outrageous title. Many of the pages were created for ‘like farming’ to gather likes and then be sold on to a third party.ģ. Social media based competitions are widely popular and create lots of interaction – but they can come with a sting in the tail in the form of fake giveaways specifically created with the intention of tricking people into handing over precious information.Ī famous example of a fake giveaway is from a couple of years back when a number of pages using famous car brand names ran competitions with prizes of new cars. On Instagram, designer Marc Jacobs scouted for new models via a social media casting call with the hashtag #castmemarc. You’ll see competitions all over social media.įor example, chocolate conglomerate Mondolez International ran a competition on Snapchat asking users to submit a drawn-on photo of a TimeOut bar for the chance of winning €10,000. In the last few years, marketers in big brands have used competitions as a cheap way to earn likes, clicks, and traffic.