Jim Rossman: Facebook scammers rely on your good nature

I’ve been seeing a lot of potential scam posts on my Facebook feed lately.

I’m sure you’ve seen them.

As I was sitting down to write this column, I opened my Facebook page and the first post was from a small town where my wife’s family lived.

It is a post about a dog that supposedly escaped from a boarding kennel. The poster wants all the members of the group to please share the photos and message them if you have any information.

Then you notice they’ve turned off comments for the post.

All you can do is share it.

You feel bad for the person with the lost dog, and you share the post to your friends, so they can help.

That act of sharing the post is all that’s needed. You’ve spread that post to the feed of a lot of your friends or even entire groups and you think you did a good thing.

So, what’s the scam?

A month from now, the scammer will edit their original post, which will change that post on Facebook pages of all the friends.

That post might change into an ad for home rent. The photos of the house will be really nice and the rent will be quite affordable. It’ll likely mention they welcome pets and Section 8 vouchers. There will be contact information, where I’m sure they’ll be happy to hold the house if you put down a deposit today.

Of course, the house doesn’t exist.

The post might change to an offer of a work-from-home job that pays well and seems like it would be easy to do. They’ll offer to send you a cashier’s check to buy all the things you’ll need to get set up. Then they’ll ask you to send them back the balance. The check they sent will eventually bounce and you’ll be stuck.

The takeaway here is to do a little homework before blindly sharing posts.

Posts with comment turned off are a huge red flag. So are posts that seem a little generic.

If the person with the lost dog doesn’t mention a specific location where the dog was last seen, it’s fake.

The post I referenced earlier misspelled the name of the town. I’m sure the dog photo just gets posted to group after group, changing the name of the town.

You can also check on the profile of the poster. When did they join the group? Is this their first post to the group?

You owe it to your friends to do a little checking before you share a post on their page.