If you have a facebook account and spend any time scrolling through your feed, you have likely seen one of your friends/contacts tagged in a scammy post. The posts I see most frequently are diet posts: someone posts that they lost an unbelievable amount of weight or drastically improved their health and wellbeing, and other random friends are tagged in the post. Why does this happen, and what does it mean?
It may mean that the person who made the post was hacked – someone now has access to their account and is using it to make scammy posts in hopes of luring friends to click. The best way to lure friends to the post is to “tag” friends so it will appear in more feeds and have a higher likelihood of being clicked.
The people that are tagged have nothing wrong with their account, but it can show on their timeline and create a security risk for any friends that click the post. It is best to remove the tag and prevent others from tagging you without approval. By changing your security settings to always approve tags first, you can prevent your account from being associated with scams (and this way you approve all photo tags before they go public as well!)
Here are instructions for making tags approval only:
- Click your facebook profile photo
- Click Settings and Privacy
- Click Settings
- Click Privacy (left side)
- Click Profile and Tagging (left side)
- In the reviewing section, turn on both toggles regarding tagging.
Or, follow along on our Tango tutorial – click the Guide Me button to get started.