Careful what you click

CHICO » This week we have a rather old scam popping back up.

It’s one my friends and I used to deal with way back in the era of Myspace and it went a little something like this: you receive a message from a friend claiming to have an embarrassing video/picture of you with a link attached.

As an awkward teenager, you panic and click the link, it takes you to some sketchy website that crashes your computer with popups and the next thing you know a bot is on your account sending other people the same messages.

About a month or so ago, my grandma, who has been on Facebook for years now, was showing me messages from distant family members with roughly the same setup, minus the embarrassing picture used for targeting kids. Instead, it was targeting seniors with money and health care scams.

Fast forward to last week when I got a message on Instagram from a good friend of mine that just said “photo” with a link. I didn’t click it because I had a weird feeling about it and didn’t want to ruin my credibility writing this column by having my account taken over. I asked him about it in person and he told me that not only did a bot take over his account, Instagram essentially had to quarantine it, blocking him from accessing it.

The American Association of Retired Persons put out a warning about this one, specifically related to text messaging. Apparently, the scammer can spoof your phone number once you click a shady link resulting in all sorts of issues.

Normally this is the part where I would say don’t give out personal information like social security numbers and banking info, which I stand by, but in this case, I’ll add don’t click on any suspicious links with strange messages attached. This is especially true when the message comes from someone you haven’t talked to in some time.