Scammer new way of stealing private data on Instagram: How to avoid it?

Fraudsters have invented a new method to mislead people. On social networks, they use fake accounts and induce people to respond to their comments, forcing users to click on malicious links, which gives fraudsters access to their data.

Alexander Vurasko, deputy director of Solar Aura company's digital external threat monitoring center, gave details to TASS about how the fraud mechanism works.

In particular, criminals create fake profiles on Instagram and leave offensive comments under users' posts. This action makes angry users to search for ways to respond, which leads them to a link on the perpetrator's profile, which supposedly leads to another social network page. When they try to authenticate through that link, scammers gain access to the victim's data.

To protect against these types of attacks, Vurasko recommends checking domain addresses and social media names carefully before logging in. He also reminds people of the importance of not posting personal information on questionable websites and recommends using reliable anti-virus software.

He said that this is a new method of stealing people's accounts and data, which has been observed on Instagram so far, but may spread to other platforms as well.