Scammers are making profits from the devastating earthquake that killed 36,000 people in Turkey and Syria.Scammers use TikTok, Twitter to defraud donors contributing towards Turkey-Syria quake survivors.
People are being tricked into making donations towards quake-ravaged Turkey and Syria. Instead of passing the collections to charities, scamsters are channelling the money to their own PayPal accounts and cryptocurrency wallets.
United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths said Monday the rescue phase in both countries was “coming to a close”, with priority now switching to rehabilitating the survivors.
Video sharing platform TikTok has become one of the crime hubs. On TikTok, content creators usually receive money in the form of digital gifts, but as per BBC, the company extracts 70 per cent of these proceeds.
Scammers are creating fake TikTok accounts where they post old pictures of devastation, looped footage and TV reports of rescue operations.
The content is accompanied by captions like “Let’s help Turkey”, “Pray for Turkey” and “Donate for earthquake victims” to make the posts seem believable.
One such account live-streamed a pixelated aerial image of destroyed buildings with explosion sound effects in the background for three hours. A male voice laughs and speaks in Chinese in the video off-camera.
Another account showed a picture of a distressed child with the caption “Please help achieve this goal” a plea to receive digital gifts.Scammers use TikTok, Twitter to defraud donors contributing towards Turkey-Syria quake survivors.
A reverse search of the image in question revealed that it dated back to 2018 and referring to a city in north-western Syria where Turkish forces ousted a Kurdish militia.
Taking cognizance of the situation, a spokesperson for TikTok told BBC, “We are deeply saddened by the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria and are contributing to aid earthquake relief efforts. We’re also actively working to prevent people from scamming and misleading community members who want to help.”
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