When Chris Mazzocco saw that Bill Pulte, a true real estate mogul and self-proclaimed inventor of “Twitter philanthropy,” was giving thousands of dollars just to stay with him and retwite him, he thought it was perhaps his chance to get out of his debts. Array The 34-year-old was already behind on rent payments and credit cards. He then lost his job as a graphic designer because of the pandemic.
“I had no way of paying my bills. My bank account was negative. I didn’t know what to do,” said Mazzocco, who lives in Pittsburgh.
That’s why he started tweeting Pulte, infrequently like twice a day. But he didn’t realize he was also opening up to criminals, one of whom would end up leaving him $2000 in the hole.
Curhirely, nearly a part of the U.S. adult population. She’s unemployed. To make matters worse, the CARES Act, which provides 30 million Americans with another $600 in weekly unemployment benefits, expires next week, around the same time as hiring expires.
In the absence of sources of income and choice, others turn to social media for help. They tweet more sensible people like Pulte, rapper Megan Thee Stallion and good-looking guru Jeffree Star, as well as notable brands like Cash App, a cellular payment service founded through Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. In March, Cash App began making weekly gifts, known as #cashappfriday, but Twitter users had to stick to @CashApp and retwite their posts to qualify for some of their awards.
Celebrities and brands like this would possibly have the ultimate altruistic intentions when they offer money in exchange for follow-ups and retweets, yet this kind of “philanthropy” does more harm than it is. Some lucky Internet users would possibly get donations, but many others would be scammed in the process. Gifts necessarily provide cybercriminals with a database of those most affected by the pandemic. They will pass through retweets or comments to accurately locate who they should target and will be introduced into that user’s direct messages or inbox claiming to be a user affiliated with the philanthropic organization, or simply an intelligent Samaritan.
From there, scammers can exploit the data they have about vulnerable victims to get their acceptance as true and convince them to fall into one of their fraudulent payment systems. Sometimes scammers go so far as to hack into the social media accounts of prominent people.
Last week, some of the world’s best-known people were hacked: Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Barack Obama, the most often user on Twitter, for calling some.
Cybercriminals have used the identities of celebrities and politicians to trick others into one of the most common scams on social media: handing in cash or promising a massive payment in exchange for a small prepayment. They promised monetary assistance due to the pandemic, but ended up stealing approximately $160,000 in Bitcoin, according to knowledge compiled for VICE News through Delphi Digital.
“As long as there is cash and there is an interconnection of people, there will be scammers. As this increases, scammers will have more opportunities to enter,” said Joseph Magliocca, education and data awareness coordinator at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of CyLab. the university’s security and privacy institute.
That’s exactly what happened to Mazzocco. He retweeted Pulte in February and almost without delay won a direct message from those who did not know who claimed to be affiliated with Pulte’s philanthropic Twitter movement.
“He said he saw my tweets and sought to help me,” Mazzocco said. “I was skeptical and reluctant to do so, yet I am a newcomer in my thirties and I have no money. My stage forced me to accept a threat I wouldn’t make.”
The mystery guy showed up to send $3,000 to Mazzocco, but there’s a problem: Mazzocco had to send some of that money to other people in need through the Cash app. He said it was a “paid” philanthropic style. In fact, it’s a cash mule scam, or when a scammer uses someone to move stolen funds. Mazzocco did and ended up wasting more than $2,000.
Pulte has been doing those gifts on social media for years, but it wasn’t until March, when COVID-19 instances peaked for the first time, that celebrities like Megan Thee Stallion and Star got on the car (none responded for a comment). Since then, scams have been on the rise.
The FTC reported receiving nearly one million court cases of fraud at the time of this year’s quarter. That’s more than 100,000 compared to last year, and the highest number in at least five years. The FBI predicts that increased use across the United States of “online environments” will lead to more cybercrime than the pandemic.
One such technique is called spear-phishing, or opposite targeted attack on an express person. The purpose of spear phishing is to collect as much data as you can imagine about someone. Scammers will use this data to manipulate their victims, or worse, borrow their identity. It is a selection weapon among social media scammers because it requires virtually no effort on their part, especially if users have public profiles and post their Cash App identifiers, also called “Cashtags”.
“Every component of my frame gets tense when I hear other people post their ‘$Cashtags’ on Twitter,” said Paige Hanson, director of cybersecurity education at NortonLifeLock. “You are connected to your bank account. He treats you like any other sensitive data, such as your Social Security number or passwords. You don’t know what other data scammers have about you.”
Aly Collins, a 31-year-old unemployed assignment manager from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, didn’t realize it when she included her Cashtag$ and other non-public data in her tweets to Pulte. As a result, he bombed the thieves in the hope of capitalizing on their naivety.
The strangest DM came from a guy who asked him to buy Him $5,000 Amazon gift cards in exchange for $300. The FTC says gift cards are popular with scammers because they’re like cash: if you buy a gift card for a scammer, you can count on them never to see that cash again.
The offender said he would donate them to a charity, but Collins knew it wasn’t the truth. When she called him, he suddenly fell silent and blocked him.
Fortunately, Collins never overlooked the cash, but not everyone made the right decision. So who’s helping the victims? The short answer is no one. They can touch the Cash app visitor service, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to get their cash back. In fact, that’s precisely what Mazzocco did after learning he had been conned, but until then it was too late.
Cash App begged him to touch his bank, just like the local police, but he had already done so. Your bank said there’s nothing you can do. Banks treat fraudulent cell phone bills as fake checks. As the FTC explains, banks make the budget obtained from checks and cell deposits in a matter of days, however, it can take weeks to know that the cash is fraudulent. If a scammer has already spent this cash, the user who sent it is still guilty of the bank’s refund.
Social media “philanthropists” like Pulte also don’t assume duty because they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong. Actually, they have: Free promotions, philanthropic or not, are banned on Facebook and Instagram. Speaking on behalf of both companies, Facebook spokeswoman Roya Winner said, “If we see this type of content, we will remove it.”
But Twitter doesn’t have the same policies. When asked for a comment, a spokesperson referred VICE News to the platform guidelines, confirming that it authorizes the gifts.
Facebook and Instagram also have their own charitable tools; in this way, they keep the whole philanthropic procedure at home. On Tuesday, Instagram announced that it was testing a new feature on its platform that will allow users in the US, UK and Ireland to start their own “personal cause” and make a donation. Previously, users could only donate to registered nonprofits.
Facebook has implemented those fundraising features over the past part of the decade, and in that period, more than forty-five million users have raised about $3 billion. Your fundraising team protects both donors and recipients of donations, as all nonprofits and non-public reasons must go through a lengthy approval and verification procedure before they are allowed to start accepting money.
The cash that has been lost due to COVID scams so far this year is not a small amount: more than $90 million, according to the FTC. If social media corporations like Twitter don’t make their component to cybercrime users, such as philanthropy scams, expect more to happen.
Cover: Screenshot of Megan Thee Stallion’s Twitter with Canva.