Avoiding cryptocurrency scams: How scammers use your friends and social media against you
Experts say it is a perfect storm: the combination of unknown and cutting edge currency, making scammers come out of the woodwork. Paper money? Try computer-generated, digitally encoded signature money. That is cryptocurrency, and it is now number two on the Better Business Bureaus (BBB) riskiest scam report. It happens within a matter of a couple clicks. “Because its coming from your friends, your relative, your brother, you think, Oh, is this real? Is this legitimate? And you look into it a little bit more,” said Rebecca Barr, BBB communications manager. Its a scam artists dream—unknown, cutting edge, and unregulated. Using social media and the influence of friends, by hacking social media accounts, scammers target the younger generation by luring them into buying cryptocurrency. “They get you in contact with an investment guide whos going to tell you how to do it,” Barr explained in a hypothetical situation. “And it only costs an initial upfront investment of, lets say, $500, but youre going to make $5,000. And in most of the reports, we see what were seeing is you actually do see the investment make a profit and quite rapidly so youre watching your money, or so you think, grow and grow and grow. But