Most prevalent social media scams worldwide 2015

This statistic presents the distribution of global social media scamming threats in 2015. That year, 76 percent of social media threats required end users to propagate them. Fake offerings were ranked second with 17 percent of attacks being attributed to them.

Distribution of global social media scamming threats in 2015

Characteristic	Number of social media scam attacks
Fake plugin*	1%
Fake apps	2%
Likejacking	5%
Fake offering	17%
Manual sharing	76%

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Release date

April 2016

More information

Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

2015

Supplementary notes

*Less than 1 percent.

Manual sharing: these rely on victims to actually do the work of sharing the scam by presenting them with intriguing videos, fake offers or messages that they share with their friends
Fake offering: these scams invite social network users to join a fake event or group with incentives such as free gift cards. Joining often requires the user to share credentials with the attacker or send a text to a premium rate number.
Likejacking: Using fake "like" buttons, attackers trick users into clicking website buttons that install malware and that may post updates on a user's newsfeed, spreading the attack.
Fake apps: users are invited to subscribe to an application that appears to be integrated for use with a social network, but is not as described and may be used to steal credentials or harvest other personal data.
Fake Plugin: users are invited to install a plugin to view a video, but the plugin is malicious and may spread by re-posting the fake video message to a victim’s profile page without permission. Examples include installing a fake YouTube premium browser extension to view the video, or noticing that a DivX plugin is required, and the fake plugin masquerades as such.

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