Do you even know what Catfishing is?
The term Catfishing comes from the 2010 American documentary film titled Catfish. Despite the awareness this created, even year’s later people are still falling victim to this phenomenon.
As reported on BBC Top News Story today Ruth Palmer’s identity was stolen online to set up fake accounts on social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Ruth’s photos and personal information was used to set up fake accounts for online dating and blogs. This is known as Catfishing.
Catfishing is where internet scammers take your personal information and photos from social media networking sites and setup online identities to hoax people into a romance or scam.
Could you be the next victim?
The BBC South East TV asked me as a Social Media Consultant how easy this is for internet scammers to carry out identity theft.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0539kk8/south-east-today-03032015
It is easy to be a victim of Catfishing when you don’t understand the privacy settings within your Social Media accounts.
Even though you may have set your privacy settings to private on your Facebook personal profile it doesn’t mean that all your posts are protected from predators you do not know.
You need to make sure that when you are posting new updates, pictures and information that you select the privacy of that particular post when you click on “post”. This can be found next to the blue post button when you update your status.
Don’t be the next victim of identity theft where you may experience the humiliation, pain and lies from the misrepresentation of your appearance. Check your privacy settings on your social media profiles and those of the posts when you upload.