How to Avoid Scams Online This Holiday Season

As the holiday shopping season kicks off around the world, we’re launching a global anti-scam awareness campaign to help people stay safe online and on our apps. Scammers are persistent and try to trick people in a variety of ways – malicious texts and emails, websites impersonating known brands, posts on social media, visual discovery platforms, discussion forums and more. 

That’s why we’re sharing the latest relevant safety tools we’ve launched this year on Facebook Marketplace, WhatsApp and Instagram, along with new research into holiday scams across the internet we’ve disrupted on our apps, updates on enforcements against phishing domains and our work with industry peers to protect people online.

We partnered with a top internet safety expert and ethical hacker, Rachel Tobac, to share how scammers might be targeting people online this holiday season and how to avoid scams. 

Pre-Holiday Anti-Scam Tips

As you’re looking for gifts and deals online, here are some tips for staying safe: 

Holiday Scams to Watch for This December

In addition to our ongoing detection and enforcement against scams, we worked with open-source researchers at Graphika to find and disrupt scams that take advantage of the holiday season. Where these scams showed up on our apps, we took action against the scammers behind them, including blocking their websites and taking down their accounts. Here are examples of three common scams to watch out for ahead of the holidays, according to Graphika’s research.

1. Promise of Christmas gift boxes. We disrupted scammers targeting French-, Spanish- and English-speaking users with false promises of gifts and prizes. They posted photos of fake prizes on multiple apps, including Threads, X, Facebook and online discussion forums like Quora. If someone commented on the posts, the scammers would direct them to messaging apps or to Google Sites websites and ask for details like their email, phone number, address, income level and outstanding debts in order to win the prize.
2. Discount holiday decorations. We disrupted scammers targeting English-, French-, Italian- and German-speaking users with offers of artificial Christmas trees and decorations at extremely low prices. Scammers copied videos of holiday decorations from real people across the internet, and, after adding AI-generated voiceovers describing the goods and warning of limited stock, they posted these videos on multiple platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and others. If someone responded, the scammers would direct them to websites, including some created using Shopify services, to make a purchase that would never arrive. 
3. Holiday coupons. We disrupted scammers offering people in the US, India and the UK fake coupons and gift cards in an attempt to trick them into providing personal information. They posted on several platforms, including Telegram, Facebook and Pinterest and directed people to websites mimicking social media, where they were prompted to fill out a survey with their gender, age, income, employment status and level of interest in cryptocurrencies in order to enter a prize draw. These websites showed fake comments from people claiming they had won in previous draws “despite thinking it was a scam.” 

Our Latest Anti-Scam Tools

Here are the latest anti-scam tools we rolled out this year to help users stay safe.

On WhatsApp, if someone you don’t know messages you or adds you to a group, you’ll now see a context card giving you more information about the user or the group.

On Instagram, if an account we suspect to be engaging in potentially scammy activities requests to follow you, we will remind you to be aware of potentially suspicious interactions.

On Marketplace, we rolled out warnings to alert you if we detect messages that follow the patterns of known scam scenarios.

Working With Others to Protect People From Scams

Scammers constantly evolve their tactics to evade detection and rarely, if ever, target one single platform. They do so to ensure that any one company can only see a small piece of these scam campaigns. This makes collaboration with law enforcement and within industries, including the financial services industry, even more critical in our anti-scam efforts. 

For example, we are continuously refining and expanding our pilot program, FIRE (the Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange). We initially launched this pilot with banks in the UK and Australia, and FIRE now includes banks and consortia from around the world. FIRE enables financial institutions to share information about potential scam activity so we can work together to protect people using our respective services, providing all of us valuable insights into the lifecycle of scams and helping improve our proactive detection and integrity systems. 

Taking Action Against Scammers

We constantly work to find and disrupt phishing domains impersonating our brands across the  internet by working with others, including registrars and hosting providers globally. For example, this year, we were able to get over 15,000 URLs hosting phishing content in Vietnam removed from the internet. And in Singapore, we got over 9,000 URLs impersonating WhatsApp, Facebook, Meta, Instagram, Threads and Reality Labs removed. 

We’ve also taken down over two million accounts on our apps associated with scam centers in Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines this year alone. 

Raising Awareness About Online Safety

We’re running timely safety education efforts around the globe in partnership with public figures, NGOs, creators, consumer groups and others on an ongoing basis. Here are a few recent examples from Latin America and Europe.

In Latin America, we worked with renowned comedians Adal Ramones and Fede Cyrulnik on a late night stand up show, “Your Security is Serious Business,” to share safety tips with their audiences. We’ve also partnered with content creator Holly Morris in the UK and French YouTuber and streamer, Henry Tran, to raise awareness among young adults about scams. In the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Brazil, Japan, Australia and Singapore, over 30 million people have seen our recent in-app tips on how to spot and avoid common scams, which lead them to Meta’s Anti-Scam hub for more information.

As part of our continuous efforts to protect people from scammers, we’ll keep sharing regular updates about our work to counter scams more broadly, including safety tips and product updates rolled out across our apps. Stay safe!

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