Investment and payment scams are often perpetrated by criminals who attempt to capitalize on current events and economic anxieties to pursue their targets.
Investment scams are designed to lure people into investing in fraudulent or non-existent opportunities. These scams often promise quick and easy returns with little to no risk on assets like shares of a company, cryptocurrency, real estate or precious metals and coins. Scammers often contact people by email, social media, texts or calls with offers of “exclusive” or special opportunities, or invitations to join “investment coaching” groups.
Payment scams often rely on the speed and relative anonymity provided by online instant payment services to defraud targets.
That’s why, as part of our ongoing efforts to promote scam awareness, we’re sharing insights and practical tips to help you recognize common investment and payment scams online. We’re also highlighting tools that are available across our platforms to help you avoid these scams.
Tips to Avoid Investment and Other Online Payment Scams
Here are some tips on how to spot scams and stay safe:
You can use FINRA BrokerCheck or the SEC Investment Adviser Public Disclosure tool to confirm you’re engaging a licensed and registered investment firm or adviser.
We partnered with internet safety expert and ethical hacker Rachel Tobac to share how to avoid scammers who target people across the internet with investment and instant payment scams.
Investment and Payment Scams to Watch Out For
In addition to our ongoing investigations, we partnered with open source researchers at Graphika to find and disrupt investment scams. Where these scams showed up on our apps, we took action against the scammers, which included blocking their websites and taking down their accounts.
Here is an example of a common investment scam to watch out for, according to Graphika’s research:
Cryptocurrency Investment Coaches
Scammers targeting people in South Africa used fake Facebook and TikTok accounts to pose as employees and investment coaches affiliated with the Luno and Valr cryptocurrency investment apps. They attracted people by claiming to have trading secrets for Luno, Valr and the trading platform Yellow Card. These fake investment coaches also posted decontextualized images and videos of people crying or singing, superimposed over screenshots of crypto accounts that had made profits, to make it look like they were being thanked for earning people money. Scammers also offered to help people recover funds lost to previous Luno- and Valr- related scams.
Here are examples of common payment scams to watch out for:
Advance Payment
A scammer might have a legitimate-seeming storefront or profile on a reselling platform, like Facebook Marketplace. After selling an item, they might ask the buyer to make payments ahead of the shipment or delivery of a purchased item. After receiving payment, the scammer stops responding to contact and does not send the purchased item.
Overpayment and Refund Request
A scammer might overpay for an item they’ve purchased online (or claim to have overpaid using a fake receipt) and request a partial refund from the seller. After receiving the partial refund, the scammer then reverses their original payment – if they made one – keeping both the original payment and the refund.
Our Anti-Scam Tools
Here are some of the anti-scam tools we’ve built to help users stay safe.
On Messenger, we may display warnings when there are requests or offers to pay in advance of shipping an item, requests to pay using instant payment methods or signals that an account is engaged in suspicious activity.
On Messenger and Instagram, we recently launched measures that use facial recognition technology to help detect and prevent celeb-bait scams and enable faster identity verification for account recovery on our platforms. Video selfie verification using facial recognition technology is optional, and a faster and easier way for people to verify their identity and regain access to their accounts.
On Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, you can complete a privacy check-up, and update your settings to choose who can contact you and who can see your personal information, like online status, profile photo and activity. This helps avoid unwanted contact from people you don’t know who may be scammers.
Taking Action Against Scammers
We continue to look for and block attempts by criminal syndicate-run scam centers to create accounts on our platforms. Since the beginning of 2024, our expert teams have detected and disrupted over seven million accounts associated with scam centers across Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines. The criminal organizations behind these financial scams target people globally through messaging, dating apps, social media, crypto and other apps.
In addition, in March, we took action against multiple clusters of scam activity, removing over 23,000 Facebook Pages and accounts that primarily targeted people in Brazil and India. These scammers used deepfakes, among other techniques, to falsely depict popular personal finance content creators, cricket players and business figures in Brazil and India, endorsing scam investment apps and gambling websites. The scammers redirected people to messaging apps for “investment advice” and in some cases to a fake website that mimicked the Google Play store to download scam gambling apps.
Working With Others to Protect People From Scams
Scammers constantly evolve their tactics to evade detection and rarely, if ever, target one single platform. This makes our collaboration across companies even more critical.
- We are supporting the FBI’s Level Up program, which aims to minimize financial loss from investment scams linked to known scam centers by identifying people who may be falling victim to a scam and quickly notifying them to prevent further financial loss. Level Up may share information about scam center activities, which we can then use to investigate foreign criminal syndicates and develop mitigations to prevent scammers from targeting people on our apps. This joint anti-scam effort has already resulted in the disruption of multiple in-progress scams targeting Americans.
- We recently announced the Llama Defenders Program, which aims to help partner organizations and developers access a variety of open, early-access and closed AI solutions to address different security threats including fraud, scams and phishing attempts.
- As a founding member of the Tech Against Scams Coalition (TASC), we work closely with our industry partners to develop consumer education resources. TASC has made new resources available on their website to help people identify and avoid scams.
Raising Awareness About Online Safety Around the World
We’re running safety education campaigns with our partners around the globe. Here are a few recent examples:
- We launched a consumer and business awareness campaign in partnership with the City of London Police, the UK Home Office and Action Fraud, highlighting the importance of Two Factor Verification (2FV) in the fight against scams.
- We released educational videos to help people spot and avoid investment scams on messaging platforms. We worked with creators and local authorities in Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore to raise awareness of common investment scammer tactics on messaging platforms.
- We partnered with Esteban Madrigal (@astrologiamillenial on IG) to release astrology-themed tips for staying safe online and avoiding common scams.
As part of our continuous efforts to protect people from scammers, we’ll keep sharing regular updates about our work to counter scams more broadly, including safety tips and product updates across our apps. Stay safe!
