As an avid Facebooker, I am on the social media platform often. Sharing, liking, commenting... You know, typical Facebook stuff. You might have noticed that Facebook now has a marketplace and other groups that you can buy and sell various items. I personally have utilized these avenues numerous times to either buy or sell something. Most of the time the transaction happens smoothly. Every now and then, I will get someone who will send me a random message asking to ship or if I will sell via money order. That answer is always NO.

Scams in the WWW
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Being part of these buy and sell groups, I have seen a rather large influx of scam job postings as of late. These jobs sound way too good to be true, well, because they are. Let's face it, no employer is going to pay $1700 a day for data entry. Coca-Cola is not going to pay you $500 a day to put a sticker on your car. Amazon is not hiring work from home representatives for $75 an hour. See what I am getting at here? It's too good to be true. Especially when these "job" postings are coming from accounts that are only hours if not minutes old. These posts will instruct you to message for information which will usually send you to a third party link. These links will attempt to get you to part with your hard earned money or gather personal information which could be used for identity theft.

Here are some ways you can protect yourself:

  • If it does not look like a legitimate link, do not click on it
  • Set realistic expectations for the job itself. Do you actually know anyone who gets hundreds of dollars a day for putting a sticker on their car? Yeah, I don't either.
  • Look at the profile who posted the listing. If they only have one photo, no friends, no posts and their profile picture was posted only an hour ago, it's a fake account.
  • Never give money to "start a job". If the company is legit, they would never ask you to do this.

There are plenty of posts in these groups that are honest people looking for good employees. Just make sure you are not falling for one of the many scams that are online.

 

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