OKLAHOMA CITY (KOKH) — Experts are warning people about scams on social media claiming people are missing.
The Director of Oklahoma City Metro Search and Rescue, Brian Smith, said the scams originate outside of the US and their goal is to steal people’s identities and Facebook accounts which they use to continue scamming, targeting your friends and family,
“So what these scammers are doing is they’ll post a missing person’s post, they’ll wait for it to get hundreds, sometimes even thousands of shares, and then they’ll edit that post to some other thing,” Smith said.
Smith says the scammers change the post to something that will draw people in like offering free stuff, or expensive things for a very low price,
“Those fantastic offers are what draw people in and you get to the offer, it’ll have a link you’ll click on the link it’ll start asking for your information, and the next thing you know your identity has been stolen, your Facebook or other social media account has been hacked,” he said.
Sometimes the posts are of real people who were missing to throw people off,
“In some cases such as the little girl that we have posted on the on the post today, she is a real missing person or was, she has since been found safe,” said Smith.
Experts say there are many ways to spot those scams like posts having their comments turned off or using uncommon verbiage,
“They’ll use verbiage like ‘flood your feeds’, one of the more common verbiages that I see is ‘please help bump this post’,” Smith said, “What I encourage people to do is just dig a little bit, the person who posted it, click on their profile, is it a new page? Does it only have two or three friends?”
Smith says these scams take away from real missing person investigations, and asks people to do their research before sharing any post online.
