Scammers have been taking over social media accounts to perpetuate their nonsense, but Meta has been working on a selfie-style of a fix.
These days, we all know someone who’s fallen victim to a scam in some form or another, and the chances of it happening to you are rising. Scammers are after your details however you connect to the web, be it over SMS, email, and even social.
That last category can be particularly pervasive, and once you’ve been baited with a social engineering scam, you may find your account is lost to the scammer tricking you. It’s an extreme outcome, but it’s one that definitely happens, particularly as criminals seek to control social accounts to spread their scam to more victims.
If the worst happens and you lose your social accounts to a scammer, you have essentially been locked out with little recourse to getting that account back. Meanwhile, the new “owner” is free to mess about in disguise, sending their message to more potential victims while sullying your name in the process.
It’s a problem, and one that Meta, the owners of Facebook and Instagram, know all too well, which could be why it has been working on a solution.
Rather than force you through endless messages and support channels in an attempt to find someone who will listen, Meta is testing a solution involving video selfies.
Simply put, if your account is compromised, Facebook and Instagram will ask you to upload a video selfie, with this being matched to images on your account using facial recognition.
That could come about because you’ve lost access, but it could also be triggered when Meta’s systems believe an account has been compromised, making life that little bit more difficult for scammers.
At the same time, Meta is updating its systems to deal with celebrity scams, something its ad system has previously struggled to handle.
The new system will use facial recognition to compare images being used in fake celebrity bait scams, also known as “celeb-bait”. When an image is matched and the ad detected as a scam, Meta notes it will block the ad.
Both of these systems will take time to roll out, and come hot on the heels of another celebrity security system Meta is toying with that will prevent fake celebrity scams from being created, particularly for scams involving donations, investments, or money of any kind.
