Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
If you’ve been using Facebook for more than ten minutes you’re probably aware that scammers are constantly cloning folks’ profiles to create new fake accounts in their names.
They then send friend requests from the fake account to everyone that’s on the real account’s Friends List.
After several people have accepted the fraudulent friend requests the scammer will then use the fake account to target those “friends” with all manner of scams and hoaxes.
If you use Facebook you’re probably used to receiving cute and funny videos in instant messages (IMs).
And of course there are political videos and a wide variety of other types of videos being shared via IMs as well.
Truth be told, we all get them on a regular basis.
Dozens of videos land in my IM inbox every day, but I never click on any of them. And I strongly recommend that you avoid clicking on them as well.
Many of these seemingly harmless videos are actually quite dangerous because they have viruses attached to them. If you take the bait and attempt to watch one of them, your computer or Android device could become infected. And that could easily ruin your entire day. [Read more…]
As you probably know, scammers love targeting the 2+ billion worldwide users on Facebook, and unfortunately many of the scams can be quite tempting.
These scams typically piggyback off the success of large corporations because just the name of the company alone tends to lend an air of legitimacy to the fraudulent “offers”.
A perfect case-in-point is the “Free Red Lobster Meals” scam that’s making the rounds yet again on Facebook. [Read more…]
Facebook consists of a vast community of “friends” who are interconnected to one another in a multitude of ways.
The whole thing can be both overwhelming and amazing.
Throughout a typical Facebook session we can see people we don’t even know pop up out of the digital woodwork to comment on and “Like” things that we or our friends have posted.
Question from Laura: I know we can hide posts that we don’t like on Facebook, but I heard that hidden posts aren’t actually hidden from everyone.
If that’s true, what’s the point in hiding them? And who are they NOT hidden from?
Rick’s answer: That’s a great question, Laura. And what you heard is correct – hidden posts aren’t hidden from everyone. In fact, the odds are great that the number of people who can see a hidden post will far exceed the number of people who can’t. [Read more…]