Woman has a warning for people using social media: Be vigilant, be very vigilant
EL PASO, Texas - Social media is used by many to reach out to friends and keep in touch with family, but there are many in the community who have been using it to scam people out of money according to the Federal Bureau of Investigations El Paso Division.
One local woman, Melissa Ponce Gardea says she responded to a post asking her to find a hidden number. She signed up for a game account thinking it was a friend of hers, but it turned out her username and password were used to log onto her bank, email and all her social media accounts and changed her log in information and log themselves in.
Then the alleged scammers reached out to her friends and family asking for money. Gardea only found out because a friend of hers reached out and said, "Hey, I already gave you what I could and I can't give you anymore." Gardea had to have her bank and credit accounts frozen.
Another woman, Thelma Solis, believed her friend had won money and was reaching out to help the rest of their group win as well. Solis was told she had to invest money to get money back and released $500. At one point, the scammers told her she would get $12,000 back if she invested $1,000.
The FBI says there have been 38 victims in the Borderland in the last two months losing a total of $16,000. Special Agent Sergio Barrio says their office has seen an increase in the number of social media cyber crime in the last year. "The best way to keep social media accounts, bank accounts, really any type of bank account you might have is to implement any type of two count identification," he said.
Barrio suggests changing the passwords every six months, do not use the same password on your different accounts, try to have unique passwords for each of your social media accounts.
Between January and March of this year, there have been nearly 12,000 data breach victims in the country with losses totaling $4.6 billion. Texas registered 912 victims with a loss of about $1.2 billion.
