'Tis the season for holiday scams

Facebook parent Meta is launching a public awareness campaign today about the ways scammers are targeting users this holiday season.

Why it matters: Scammers are most successful when people are looking for deals, desperate to find certain merchandise, and busy.

Driving the news: Meta partnered with researchers at Graphika to track and remove scammers from the company's social media sites.

• Ethical hacker Rachel Tobac also released a new video detailing the ways scammers could lure victims.
• The video will be primarily shared on Meta's own platform and on Tobac's social media accounts.

Zoom in: Graphika released a report today detailing the ways scammers use popular sites, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to convince people to share personal details about their lives or pay for fraudulent items.

• Many users have been tricked into buying bargain-priced Christmas trees and decorations that just never arrived, Jack Stubbs, chief intelligence officer at Graphika, told reporters during a briefing yesterday.
• Stubbs said they've also seen scammers operating across various online platforms, including those not owned by Meta, with the hopes of evading detection and disruption.

Between the lines: Educating users is one of the only solutions to stopping scammers, Tobac told reporters.

• Scammers are pushing the same tricks year after year, in part because they keep working.

The bottom line: Be suspicious of deals that are too good to be true, avoid sharing any personal information with online sellers, and turn on multifactor authentication, Tobac said.

• "People can't know and spot things if they've never heard of them before," she said.
• "Without that level of education, the platforms don't stand a chance because people won't even be able to recognize and understand the alerts when they see them."