Greg's Corner

Missing teen scam hijacks social media

By Greg Collier

Nothing gets shared on social media faster than the report of a missing child. Posts like that elicit such a visceral reaction in us that we’ll share the post without verifying it. This is precisely what scammers are hoping for when they post phony reports of missing children on social media. As we tend to point out, scammers will use any type of tragedy, real or imagined, to fleece their victims.

In Wyoming, it’s been reported that scammers are posting the picture of a teenage boy who allegedly went missing after not returning home from school. The name of the boy changes, but the pictures largely stay the same. These posts are being posted by several different people, with some of them claiming to be the boy’s mother. The scammers are said to have been making these posts in community and neighborhood groups, and pages dedicated to other missing children.

So, you’re probably wondering what the scammers can possibly gain by creating a fictitious missing child. The missing child post is just an avenue to get the post shared as widely as possible. Once the original post is shared enough times, the scammers will change the post to whatever their latest scam is. In the Wyoming case, the posts were changed to posts for a banking scam.

So, of course, we always want to help when a child has been reported missing, and we still can. But before you share that post, you might want to make sure it’s from a credible source. For example, if the post comes from a local news station, a police station, or an established organization like The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), it’s probably a legitimate post.

You may also want to check the age of the post. If you share a post that is years old and the child has been found, repeated posts could make things more difficult not only for police but the child’s family as well.

Lastly, you could be sharing a false post that is designed to hurt someone.