Best Ways To Stay Safe From Social Media Fraud
Social media is a social destination for people to communicate, stay afloat with trends, and transact business, as the case may be. But as people are leveraging various social channels to stay connected socially and business-wise, it has also been a hotbed for various fraud schemes. But one major scheme that can continue to fester the ills of social media is social media identity theft.
What Is Social Media Identity Theft?
Social media identity theft is the event of a person pretending to be someone else to deceive people with a fraudulent benefit. These are fraudulently individuals or groups of people working as syndicates to hijack social media accounts or create an account impersonating your identity.
This is common in popular social media platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, etc. How these fraudsters work is that they breach your social media account, take control of the account, and reach out to the frequent people you do contact to pretend like it is you. They go ahead to reel out their fraudulent scheme by informing your contacts of false situations about you with the move to create an urgent need for financial assistance.
Often than not, your contacts may fall prey to this false claim, thereby swindling them of their money. Unfortunately, all these shenanigans can be taking place without your knowledge, and which could in turn, put your reputation at risk, debts or possible legal action taken against you. As such, it is important to understand the best practices to stay safe while you are on social media.
How To Stay Safe On Social Media
Enable 2FA On All Social Media Accounts
A two-factor authentication (2FA) is a formidable security framework that is designed and enabled to restrict unauthorised access to your account. This always comes with a unique code with your password to give you exclusive access to your device and account. Therefore, it is important to enable 2FA on all your social media access to prevent fraudulent access and activities in your account.
Keep Personal Information Private
In similitude to the essence of social media, which is to connect with the public, you must ensure to keep your personal information away from the public reach. This includes account details, date of birth, and Bank Verification Number (BVN). This is because fraudsters can use any of this personal information to compromise access to your social media accounts.
Verify Online Stores Before Making Purchases
One of the popular ways that people get defrauded on social media is through fake shopping sites or fraudulent campaign ads to attract buyers and scheme them off their money. This is why you should always verify the credibility and reliability of the shopping site you want to buy from.
This is one major issue Peppa is tackling to ensure the safety of buyers on social media. With Peppa, buyers can use an access escrow system to act as the intermediary between the buyer and the seller. When this is in place, buyers can be guaranteed that they are not losing their money to a fraudulent seller.
How the Peppa escrow service works is that buyers make payment for the purchased product into an escrow account that locks the payment until the seller delivers the products to the buyer satisfactorily.
Do Not Click On Random Links
You endeavour to avoid clicking random links that you see on social media pages, or the ones sent to you. Most of these links may have malicious software capable of downloading your data that may enable fraudsters to get your password and other vital information to access your social media accounts.
How To Recover From Fraud
- Track The Fraud
According to the local parlance, “once bitten twice shy,” making a mistake twice is not advisable. If you almost/fall victim to fraud, you must keep track of how it happened to the point of losing money. This would prevent you from falling victim to the same incident in future.
Here, you may need to change your access details like username, email address, password, or PIN or possibly block your account to shut off the fraudsters from your account control.
- Secure Your Account
Often than not, being proactive is better than being reactive. Therefore, ensure to secure your account by using a strong password that is difficult for anyone to imagine. It is always advisable to use a mix of upper-case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and signs to make your password very strong. This would enable you to get your account secure again.
- Escalate The Fraud
You must report the case of fraud to social media support and other relevant institutions like your bank and the police. This is to make a prompt response that could help the recovery of the lost funds or avoid debts as a result of the impersonation of you by the fraudsters.
Conclusion
Security matters are a serious matter, especially when it has to do with your identity and funds. This is why taking precautionary measures is important on social media. Keep your personal information private and avoid buying from fraudulent sellers. In this regard, create a Peppa account to access the escrow service that would protect you from losing money to fake shopping sites.
