By now, we’re all immune to emails from a prince or oil baron in Nigeria who needs help getting his billions of American dollars out of his country and into an American bank. While amusing, those scams proliferated for so many years because they worked. People sent money and banking information to strangers and got scammed and screwed in the process.
In today’s age of social media, though, nobody uses email anymore to scam. Now, the scammers are using networks and apps like Instagram.
From fraud.org:
Over the past few months, NCL’s Fraud.org has received a number of complaints from consumers describing a new variation of the so-called “flipping money” scam on Instagram. In a typical flipping money scam of this type, a consumer sees an Instagram account featuring photos of other users, often holding large amounts of cash captioned with a description of how easy it is to make turn a small investment into large amounts of money. All the consumer has to do is text or instant message the Instagram account holder and send a small initial “investment” (typically a few hundred dollars). Unfortunately for the consumer, the ploy is all a scam. The fraudster quickly breaks contact (after getting the cash in hand) and the consumer loses her initial investment. This a widespread scam. For example, there are more than 45,000 photos on Instagram tagged #flippingmoney. In practically every photo we reviewed, the pitch was a scam.
But it gets better.
There’s a new variation on the flipping money scam, however. In the past, the scammers asked to send the initial “investment” via wire transfers or a prepaid debit card. However, in a number of recent complaints, the consumers/victim is not asked to send money. Instead, they are being asked to mail their physical debit card to the scammer as well as their account PIN, so that a check can be deposited in the account. The consumer/victim is told by the scammer that she will receive a percentage of the proceeds from the check to compensate her for her trouble.
It’s safe to say that if you follow the “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” philosophy, you won’t end up getting duped.
