Investment and payment scams are often perpetrated by criminals who attempt to capitalize on current events and economic anxieties to pursue their targets.
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.
Investment and Online Payment Scams to Watch Out For
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. Some examples of common payment scams include:
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.
Claims of 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 would then reverse their original payment (if they made one), keeping both the original payment and the refund.
Tips to Avoid Investment and Other Online Payment Scams
Here are some tips on how to spot scams and stay safe:
Taking Action Against Scammers
In March, we removed multiple clusters of scam activity totalling over 23,000 Facebook Pages and accounts that primarily targeted people in Brazil and India. The scammers used deepfakes, among other techniques, falsely depicting 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.
We also continue to look for and block attempts by criminal syndicate-run scam centers to create accounts on our platforms. Since the start 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.
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 whenever there are requests or offers to pay in advance of shipping an item, requests to pay using instant payment methods on Marketplace or if there are signals that an account is engaged in suspicious activity.
Selfie verification for account recovery and celeb-bait protections for public figures
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.
Privacy check-up
You can complete a privacy check up on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, 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.
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 the industry even more critical.
- In March this year, WhatsApp and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) joined forces to educate users on identifying and reporting online scams and spam through training workshops for DoT officials, Sanchar Mitras, Telecom Service Providers, and field units.
- In an effort to boost digital literacy and online safety in India, Meta also launched a joint campaign in partnership with the Department of Consumer Affairs (DoCA) that aims to empower consumers through digital literacy initiatives under the government’s flagship ‘Jago Grahak Jago’ program.
- We continue to collaborate with the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) to conduct a series of trainings that help equip law enforcement agencies (LEAs) with skills to address online scams and frauds. So far, we’ve conducted these trainings across seven Indian states including Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Odisha and Rajasthan.
- Recently Meta shared 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 needs including fraud, scams and phishing attempts.
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!
