Hear the word flimflam and you think of a time of straw hats and cardboard suitcases; of grifters pulling into town to take the rubes with patent medicine, three-card monte and the old pigeon drop con.
It would be nice to think that these words don’t get used today because we’ve become so much smarter. We have information at our finger tips. We are too smart and sophisticated for flimflam, grifts, ruses, hustles, swindles or bunko to work on us.
Of course that’s not true. Words just fall out of fashion. Today we call them scams and cons. And while we might be more sophisticated than we were, we remain human and human nature remains just as exploitable as it was a hundred years ago. Oh, and the Flimflammers have gotten more sophisticated too. They’re now using computers.
Using the Internet to run scams makes sense. Con is short for confidence. And where better to gain confidence than among friends and followers than on mobile devices and in social networks. There are a whole host of scams spreading through social media and mobile applications. At Symantec we’ve been tracking them. We’ve collected a few of the latest scams and cons and we’re going to share our research.
Come join us on May 14th for Cons, Frauds and FilmFlam - An Examination of Social Media and Mobile Application Scams. You can register at: https://symantecevents.verite.com/31068/238107
I have many social networking accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and I would encounter these kind of scams almost everyday. If you're not really cautious some of it really look legit and if one is not cautious enough it can really be deceiving.