Here at DataCorps, we love Facebook. In fact, the odds are good that if you're reading this article, you arrived here from a link on that very platform. It's an incredible resource to connect with your community and friends. As a business resource, it's unbeatable. The fact is that a huge percentage of ALL internet traffic is coming from the social media giant, so as a business owner, why WOULDN'T you connect with your clients and add value to their lives in the place where they already are?
Like I said, there's a lot of good that can happen there. But, like everything else, there are always bad apples out there trying to ruin things for everyone.
Scam pages pop up on Facebook daily, and we've seen so many of our friends fall victim to very convincing Facebook scams.
One of the most popular ones that seems to crop up several times of year here has a lot to do with our geography. Because Tampa is in easy driving distance of Disney, the Disney World scams seem to do very well here. You've probably seen them: "Disney is giving away four family vacations this summer if you share this image!" Or you can sub in a giant camper, or a boat, or a plane ticket, or a laptop... Whatever people are coveting, you can bet there's a Facebook scam built around it. But the bottom line is this: these are NOT genuine give aways. These are hackers sitting behind laptops in their homes trying to scam as much information out of you as they can. The pages they create look VERY convincing, using official company logos and sometimes exactly copying the genuine company or celebrity page.
WHY do people try to get your interaction on Facebook? Simple. It's your identity. Facebook stores an INCREDIBLE amount of information about its users, whether they're posting their own content or not. Believe it or not, Facebook tracks what articles you click on to read, what articles you react to, even the ones you just slow down your scrolling to see more of. And they collect that huge database of these preferences, and what that likely means about your preferences in the outside world. The more you interact with a page or person, the more of that information is available to the world at large.
So, how do you detect the good from the bad? It's actually pretty simple. Most large companies or celebrity presences online are going to be Verified. On Facebook (and also on Twitter and Instagram) that means that next to their name on their company page, you'll see a blue check mark. ALWAYS look for the check mark. If it isn't there, the page you are looking at belongs to a scam artist trying to collect your information.
Like anywhere else online, you can do great things on Facebook, but use caution! There's always someone out to ruin the fun with dishonest practices.
