Con artists traditionally worked face-to-face in order to pull off their scams. They relied on a plausible story, a well-honed appearance of honesty, and their own charm in order to gain their marks’ confidence and separate them from their money.
The arrival of the internet and social media made it possible to apply the con artist’s specialized knowledge of human nature on a large scale. Instead of working a single geographic location or a small handful of people, scammers now have access to hundreds of millions of potential victims for the crooked game they’re running, whether it’s a romance scam, investment scam, or phishing scam. The good news is that social media – the very tool that helps them – can also be what brings them down if law enforcement leverages its potential as an intelligence source.
Scams Are a Massive Issue for Americans
It’s helpful to start by taking a step back and taking a big-picture view of fraudulent activity. The Federal Trade Commission’s annual Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book is an excellent resource for this, using data drawn from consumer reports and complaints to the FTC. The 2024 Data Book counted a total of 6.47 million reports, with fraud reports accounting for 2.6 million of those, and total financial losses from fraud totalling over $12 billion, a sharp rise of over $2 billion from 2023.
We can’t provide a comprehensive list of the active scams and frauds that residents of your community may be falling victim to, but understanding a few of the most common will set some context for our discussion of how to combat them.
- Investment scams: These are the most lucrative for scammers, accounting for over $5 billion of the $12 billion total. They also reported the highest median loss per incident, at over $9,000 per victim.
- Fake business or job opportunity scams: These exploit people who are looking for jobs or “side hustles” and often take their money under the pretext of fees or startup costs. They may also be used for identity theft or provide a plausible pretext for recruiting money mules.
- Romance scams: Scholars debate whether we’re actually having a “loneliness epidemic,” but many people look to find fulfillment through a romantic relationship. Romance scammers exploit that near-universal need for connection, milking their victims of their savings and belongings. This is another method sometimes used by criminals to recruit unwitting money mules.
- “Money for nothing” scams: These can take the form of sweepstakes or giveaways, but the common feature is that the victim is a “winner” until they attempt to collect their winnings. Then they’re tapped for taxes, shipping, processing fees, or some other plausible-sounding reason to send money.
- “Authority” imposter scams: In these, the scammer impersonates an authority figure – the IRS or other government department, a bank, law enforcement, for example – and typically attempts to bully the victim into making payments. Fake tech support schemes and “problem with your account” schemes, with scammers claiming to be Amazon, Apple, or other well-known tech companies, are a form of this scam.
- “Someone you know” imposter scams: In this scam, criminals take over the account of someone the victim knows and use that to extract money under false pretences. Another version is the “Grandma, I’m in trouble” phone call, with scammers pretending to be a friend or family member (and potentially using AI to clone the family member’s voice) to plead for money for an emergency.
While a few of the most-used scams use other communication methods, including calls, texts, and even physical letters, for many scammers, social media provides the most efficient way to find victims. Because of this, we’ll focus on social media for the balance of this post, though much of what we’ll discuss is transferable to those contact methods as well.
Starting a Scam Investigation on Social Media
When a victim reports an online scam to law enforcement, investigators have potential avenues to pursue. One is the scammer’s social media username if that was the initial point of contact or was provided to the victim afterward. Depending on how the victim was cultivated, they may also have been given a telephone number, an email address, or contact information for an encrypted messaging app such as WhatsApp or Signal.
Some of that information might be searchable through existing data sources, but finding the scammer on social media using nothing but their pseudonym can be challenging without an appropriate tool. This is a prime strength of Spokeo for Law Enforcement, drawing on Spokeo’s origins as a social media aggregator nearly 20 years ago. Spokeo can search usernames and other data across 120+ social platforms, and it’s especially useful for connecting a username back to the phone number or email address used to open the account.
For most people, that number or email will usually connect directly to the person behind the account. With scammers, it’s less simple. Often, the offending account may have been hacked or taken over by criminals and used to target the real account holder’s friends and family. In other cases, the scammer may simply have opened a new account in a real person’s name, copying their photos to make it seem legitimate. Scammers often use a “burner” phone or disposable email for setting up accounts to hide their tracks, though connecting them to the offender is sometimes still possible.
Digging Deeper on Social Media
Taking a deeper dive into social media can push the investigation forward in several ways.
First, if a Spokeo search fails to uncover the actual person behind the scam, it at least connects them to a given phone and a defined geographic area where the phone number is registered. It will also bring up any other accounts, phone numbers, or emails linked to the first one through the billions of data points (both regulated and open-source) that are searchable by Spokeo’s algorithms. If the scammers have had any lapses in their operational security, one of those other numbers or social media accounts may be traceable back to their real identity. The purchase of multiple burner phones that are registered to a given geographic area can help dial in the suspect’s location, and eventually, subpoenaed records from those phone carriers involved can be tied to the scammer’s online activity.
Viewing public posts and interactions on the scammer’s accounts and noting with whom they interact can lead to additional victims and reveal the full scope of the case. Not all victims of scams report the crime to police: The Department of Justice Statistics drew from its periodic National Crime Victimization Survey to estimate that only 14% of victims (as of 2017, when the data were gathered) reported the incident to local law enforcement. Over 75% of victims told their friends and family, though, and social media is often where they do that, so this kind of social media “legwork” can be used to find those additional victims and bring them into the investigation.
Spokeo searches can also clarify whether an account is legitimate or in the hands of a scammer (it’s possible for both to be true). Usually, searching a legitimate account on Spokeo will lead to the same person’s accounts on other platforms. If the posts and content on those are consistent with the account where the scams took place, it could be a scammer with poor operational security. If the content changed drastically at the time of the scams, that’s a solid indicator of a hack or account takeover. Finally, if two accounts use the same name and photos, but one leads back to a normal person’s information and the other leads to a burner phone, it’s logical to assume that the second was set up to deliberately target the real account holder’s friends and followers.
It’s Crucial to Have the Tools for the Job
Utilizing a powerful, modern, flexible tool like Spokeo for Law Enforcement to pursue investigations through social media is crucial for LEAs on the scam beat. Its nimble, powerful algorithms and up-to-date data make for a significant upgrade and complement to your existing investigative data tools, and its ability to draw on both regulated and open-source data in a single search is a game-changer. Its interface is simple enough to please even tech-averse investigators, and Spokeo’s usage-based subscription tiers put it within reach of every police force from the largest to the smallest.
A brief blog post like this one can’t comprehensively explain how you can use the product to fight scams because every team of investigators will find new ways to use it as they gain hands-on experience. Our product team will be happy to go into more detail with you, set up a demonstration, or arrange a no-cost, hands-on trial of the product for your investigators (and IT team). For more information, reach out to us through the contact information found on our Law Enforcement page.
Sources
US Federal Trade Commission: 2024 Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book
Psychology Today: Loneliness is Not an Epidemic
Department of Justice Statistics: Financial Fraud in the United States, 2017