Scam Alert🚨📢: Episode 06: Quiz and survey scams

While most of the surveys are genuine, there are those impostors who set surprising quizzes or surveys with the intent of gathering personal information. In these surveys, victims might face further interfering questions, including asking for their addresses, birth dates, and other financial details. This takes the form of so-called ‘friend requests’ or ‘surveys’ that tempt the victims with the prospect of a gift or a chance to win something. All this is just an attempt at receiving personal data that these fraudsters may later use for identity theft or fraud attempts.

• Overly personal questions: If a quiz spams a participant with too many questions or too many questions unrelated to the offered prize or if it tries to get the participant’s bank account details, be wary.
• Too-good-to-be-true rewards: what a great idea to get a wonderful prize or a reward for doing nothing! But words like ‘free’ and ‘easy’ are often bait used by scammers.
• Unverified sources: When it comes to taking quizzes, there is a lot of false information, so only take quizzes from reliable and credible sources. There is always a potential benefit to getting informed about an organization that is carrying out the event before becoming engaged.
• Unexpected pop-ups or redirects: Scams may lead to a pop-up or redirect page with a request for additional information.

 

Here’s how you can avoid quiz and survey scams:

• Limit personal information: Supply only the amount of info required concerning a person and do not give personal information (for instance, your account details).
• Verify the source: This is important, and you only take a few minutes to search the internet to confirm that the quiz or survey is from a genuine source.
• Ignore unsolicited quizzes: Refrain from ‘liking’ or ‘sharing’ ‘friend requests’ or messages received from persons not known to the individual.
• Check permissions: Check the permissions that a quiz or survey requires and avoid those that do not need the access they’re seeking.

Catch you in the upcoming episode…