Celebrity accounts, for example, can be a free-for-all for a deluge of hateful comments and mean remarks. The internet lends itself to anonymity, and anonymity can often lend itself to bad behaviour – especially on social media, where there are no real standards or policing. In an incredibly bizarre case in America, a woman discovered that her niece was planning to murder her when she befriended her with a fake account on Facebook. Sometimes, catfishes are bots created by spammers to send dodgy links en masse on social platforms. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh.”Īnd et voila, a word was born into the cultural lexicon.īut catfishing can be dangerous. And there are those people who are catfish in life. So this guy came up with the idea that if you put these cods in these big vats, put some catfish in with them, the catfish will keep the cod agile. By the time the codfish reached China, the flesh was mush and tasteless. “They used to tank cod from Alaska all the way to China. In the documentary, one of the characters gives the following speech: What’s the link between the two things and why is it called ‘catfishing’? In 2010, Nev Schulman (who has since gone on to create a long-running MTV show of the same name) filmed a documentary called Catfish about the fake woman he’d fallen in love with online. A person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes. Any of an order (Siluriformes) of chiefly freshwater stout-bodied scaleless bony fish having long tactile barbels.Ģ. Never open a link in an unsolicited email unless you requested the link and/or know exactly where the link is going.ġ. While phishing is largely popular in email, private messages on social media can also contain phishing links. On the other end of the screen, a hacker could then have access to a person’s credit card information or personal information to set up identity theft. In some cases, the emails even link to a spoof version of a website (a bank or online store, for example), and users will input their details. Phishing is particularly potent as the emails can often look very real.
Phishing happens when someone sends a message pretending to be a reputable company/contact in order to get their victim to reveal personal info like passwords or credit card numbers. Followers are great, but just make sure they are more friend than foe! 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.
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