Member-only story
Two quick ways to see if your Instagram friend is a scammer
Instagram is a scammers paradise
Spend some time on Instagram, and you will find two things: people love to share pictures of their cats, and there are a lot of scammers on the platform.
Scammers love Instagram as an endless stream of victims can be a veritable cash cow.
Two of the main scammer types are those wanting to get you to invest in crypto and romance scammers. Romance scams manifest themselves in many ways. Such as, when attractive women go after men, and men often pretend to be lonely, oil rig workers go after women.
If someone sends you an unsolicited message and says they are oil rig workers, they are a scammer. If anyone sends you unsolicited attractive pictures of themselves, they are a scammer. Common sense makes that eminently clear. But in the heat of the moment, the rational side of people’s brains shuts down, and they fall for the scammer’s many lies.
Instagram scammers are often part of large, well-organized networks of scammers. They groom their victims and will lead them on for weeks and months. Building a story that eventually concludes with their requests for money or gift cards, and in large sums.