Top 5 social media frauds to avoid

Love for social media and social networking sites are shared by one and all including cyber scammers and fraudsters. Experts at security firm Proofpoint say that the number of phishing attempts on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn has exploded by 150 percent over the past year.

Social media provides an easy platform to criminals to target hundreds of thousands of people at once, but also blend in with the crowd. Taking advantage of the way people use social media to deal with business problems, these fraudsters mimic users and their activities on the networking sites to trick people into giving over their personal and financial information.

Here are five of the most cleverly cloaked scams on social media right now, according to Proofpoint:

Fake customer service accounts on Twitter

Cyber criminals often set up fake customer service accounts to phish for bank login and password information and other sensitive data. These imposter accounts look almost like real businesses, but are often one character off or they include an extra underscore or other keyboard character.

When someone tweets at its bank or some other organization, scammers intercept the conversation and reply to that message with what seems like an authentic answer.

Fake comments on popular posts

When a popular news story or social media post generates a lot of comments, fraudsters like to take advantage of that large audience by adding their own comments with links to other buzzy headlines that lead to credit card phishing scams.

Fake live-stream videos

With ever increasing media companies streaming their shows and movies online, scammers are jumping on the bandwagon.

They do things like comment on the Facebook page of a sports team with a link that leads people to believe they can watch a free live stream of a game. But the links lead to a fake website that asks for personal information in order to start the video, which very often doesn't exist.

Fake online discounts

Just like fake customer service accounts, fake online discounts also work simply to trick people into giving up their personal information. Schemers set up social media accounts that look like legitimate businesses and then pretend to offer a real promotion.

Fake online surveys and contests

This one’s perhaps a favorite with cyber criminals. These tactics have been around for years and are designed to get answers to personal questions that fraudsters can mine and sell later. But criminals embed them into social media posts that often look real because they're a normal looking profile picture and link, thanks to URL shorteners.