Consumers were cheated out of $770 million by social media scams last year, according to the Federal Trade Commission, which said the number accounts for roughly one-fourth of fraud losses for the year. New scams involving e-commerce and cryptocurrency helped boost the haul, which was 18 times greater than the $42 million in social media fraud the FTC tracked for 2017. As a result, incidences of younger victims grew, with adults 18-to-39 reporting fraud losses 2.4 times more than adults 40 and over. Investment and romance scams were also high on the list. 

Under a heading proclaiming “social media a goldmine for scammers in 2021,” the FTC’s Consumer Protection division issued a report indicating one-in-four who lost money to fraud said it “started on social media with an ad, a post, or a message.” For scammers, “there’s a lot to like about social media. It’s a low-cost way to reach billions of people from anywhere in the world. It’s easy to manufacture a fake persona, or scammers can hack into an existing profile to get ‘friends’ to con,” the FTC report says.

Not surprisingly, it was the two most popular platforms in the U.S. — Facebook and Instagram — that spawned the most social media scams in the romance and investment categories. “Specifically, Facebook accounted for 23 percent and Instagram 13 percent of romance scams. These scams would begin with a seemingly innocent friend request, followed by sweet talk, then a request for money,” TechCrunch writes.

Instagram topped the investment sector, accounting for 36 percent of those scams, while Facebook tallied 28 percent, followed by WhatsApp (9 percent) and Telegram (7 percent).

While “romance and investment scams continued to account for the largest losses by dollar amounts, even reaching record highs, the scams with the largest number of reports to the FTC involve consumers trying to purchase something they first saw on social media,” according to TechCrunch. In 2021, the FTC found that 45 percent of reports about money scammed due to social media were tied to online shopping, and again Facebook and Instagram led the way, with consumers attributing nine out of 10 e-commerce scams to the Meta-owned social outlets.

Meta could be particularly vulnerable to a decline in consumer confidence in online purchasing, “as the company’s larger ad business has been impacted by Apple’s privacy changes on iOS which let consumers opt out of tracking,” TechCrunch reports, adding that in anticipation of a resultant decline in personalized ads, “Meta has been diversifying its revenue by creating in-app shops where it can capture more first-party data based on consumer shopping inside its own platform.”

A Meta spokesperson told CNET that the company is quick to act against scammers, going “beyond suspending and deleting accounts, pages and ads. We take legal action against those responsible when we can, and always encourage people to report this behavior when they see it.”