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Scams on Facebook are extremely common not just from scammers selling fake tickets but other scams such as fake vent cleaning services, verification scams, fake marketplace listings, and countless others.
The ticket scam starts with a user stating they have tickets and can't attend an event or show due to some random reasons. Usually, when you check their page, they may even seem real with a long history of posting. But this is where it starts taking a turn. The reason why they look like a real profile is because the profile might have been real at one point but these accounts are usually ones that have been hacked by a foreign person or group. They do this to appear more real and give you the victim a level of trust through their vail of a stolen profile.
After you send the scammer a message, they ask for you to send an amount of money (cheap which should be the first red flag) to a Venmo or a cash app.
These payment accounts are operated in one of two ways, the first way is through a stolen Vemmo account that has been hacked to be used as the in-between account from the hacker to you.
The second way which is arguably the even darker way is sadly the more common way they get the money to them out of the country. They start by finding people who are usually low-income or desperate to make money and offer them a "job". But the dark truth is the scammers are using them as a way to exploit the said person to receive the money from the victim unknowingly and sending to the actual scammer account while keeping a percentage of it as their "payment for their work".
The scammer lies to this person, usually telling them they are working as an assistant to receive payments for stuff like rent, product purchases, payroll payments, and countless other excuses that are all lies. But what happens to the poor middleman? Well, after a while his account will get banned, as a result of protecting the scammer's real account that was getting the money.
Once this money is laundered out of county there are near-impossible ways of getting it back. There is also legal repercussion to the middle man too, he can be audited by the IRS and be arrested for being a part of a scam he unknowingly was helping with.
These scammers are stealing thousands and getting away with it. So how can you help stop them? Send this article to someone you know, especially someone younger who might be the kind of person to fall for this. The best way to protect is awareness. Thousands of people fall for these types of scams almost daily across not just Facebook but all over many other social media platforms.
Sources: cnyonline.org's own social media moderation team.
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