Social media impersonation is rife at the moment. Criminals posing as brands are becoming a significant risk to small businesses that rely on social media to generate business.
What is social media impersonation?
Social media impersonation is a form of identity fraud. Criminals use the name, logo, image, or other identifying elements of a person or business for fraudulent activity. Often friends and followers don’t realise it is fake because criminals use real photos and real names. They often copy social descriptions, posts and hashtags as well.
Whilst there are a wide range of approaches that an attacker might use, the underlying objective is almost always financial gain.
Types of impersonation
Some of the more common approaches include:
Phishing: Impersonating a brand or its employees to get sensitive information or data.
Mass phishing: Data is collected via fake competitions and promotions. This data is then sold to other hackers.
Fake news: Fake social media accounts are used to give out false information and news about celebrities and politicians.
Financial scams: Scams can include romance fraud, investment opportunities, or even just straight out asking for financial help.
Counterfeiting: Selling discounted or inauthentic products to followers.
Ad campaigns: Sophisticated criminals set up aggressive ad campaigns to drive consumers to a fake website to make their ‘purchase’.
Criminals usually impersonate brands that are already on social media, but they have impersonated brand who don’t have a presence on a particular social platform. The type of impersonation used will depend on the social platform. Impersonations on Facebook are usually done through fake pages, and profiles, groups and events may also be used. On LinkedIn, impersonations tend to be of executives and employees rather than companies or brands.
Local example
Claire Turnbull is a well-known and highly respected nutritionist in New Zealand. She had nearly 70,000 social media followers at the time of writing.
Claire has a constant battle with social impersonation. Facebook pages frequently pop up using her name and photos. The below example used her profile image and her name. The impersonator simply added the word Gift to the end of her name. The criminal then reached out to her followers asking them to like the new page.
They then approached friends of the new page with an offer to purchase her diary at a reduced price. But of course anyone who ‘purchased’ the diary via this method was never going to get the diary. They were simply funnelling funds directly into the attackers bank account.
Can social media impersonation be stopped?
Social media impersonation is a growing problem across most social platforms. Consumers are losing money, and companies are losing revenue and reputational trust with customers.
Businesses must report any identity theft to the relevant social platform, but it is still up to the business to identify that the theft has happened and to provide enough evidence to persuade the social media company to take the fake profile or page down.
Monitoring brand usage across social media and the wider internet is a helpful tool to finding impersonations. Businesses should search for their brand name as well as variations and misspellings of the brand.
Give us a call on 0274 974 053 for more advice and help with your IT and cyber security.
