Anyone with a social media account has been warned that criminals are increasingly targeting common people and taking over their profiles. According to Action Fraud, the national fraud and cybercrime reporting service, there were 18,011 reports of social media and email hacking between August 2022 and July 2023.
In addition to stealing critical personal data from victims, fraudsters are also using the accounts for fraud – for example, there have been a dozen reports in the last two months regarding hacked social media accounts being used to promote fake Taylor Swift tickets.
If the tickets appear to be sold by someone with a large number of friends on their profile and posts going back a long way, officials said, people are less likely to suspect it’s a scam. Out of the 18,000 reports, 4,092 people reported they had been the victim of financial extortion or that fraud against the public had been committed using their accounts.
There were two main categories of account takeovers in 49% of cases that Action Fraud received reports of:
This article has been indexed from CySecurity News – Latest Information Security and Hacking Incidents
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