Meet the Westerville mom trying to stop Facebook scams before they happen

Amanda Prior-Grissinger starts her mornings like many moms of young children: She breastfeeds her 1-year-old daughter and sips some coffee. Sitting on the couch in the living room of her Westerville home, Prior-Grissinger looks at social media.

Her regular routine includes reviewing applicants to several local Facebook groups she manages — many of which are fake accounts, she suspects.

Many of the applicants appear not to be locals just trying to sell old baby clothes or patio furniture. Instead, she suspects some are people from overseas who are pretending to be someone else. Many of these fake — or hacked — profiles can lead to scams on unsuspecting group members.

On the internet, people can pretend to be someone else and take advantage of people from afar. Prior-Grissinger is trying to stop scams before they can happen.

Why Prior-Grissinger cares about scammers

Prior-Grissinger’s cousin lost $1,300 when she was trying to sell a dining room table on Facebook.

“That's how a lot of people will learn about these (scams): They learn the hard way,” Prior-Grissinger said. “These Facebook groups should be a safe place.”

Prior-Grissinger cares for her two young children, ages 1 and 3, and runs a photography business. She first got into Facebook group moderating after volunteering to help a local administrator who said she was overwhelmed.

She has gradually been added as a moderator in more than two dozen local Facebook groups, sometimes after reaching out to other administrators about suspected fake profiles.

She has also created a coalition of other local Facebook group moderators in central Ohio in a private Facebook group, where she and other admins post screenshots of fake profiles.

How scams work, in principle

Scammers are successful when they can convince their victims that they’re someone else they could trust — such a “friendly neighbor” or someone else, said Divya Ramjee, an assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology and researcher at the ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute.

“Successful scams rely on the scammer's ability to convince victims to share personal information using a 'trustworthy' or 'authoritative' persona,” Ramjee said.

Also, in local organizations, some members can be less wary of potential scams, compared to groups with more people.

“We tend to lower our guard a bit, believing that nobody's going to bother targeting a small group — and scammers know that,” Ramjee said.

Scammers can also bounce around in different groups where they can be the most effective, said Thomas Holt, a professor in the school of criminal justice at Michigan State University.

“When an offender realizes there's a market that they can tap into that's either poorly monitored or minimally policed, whether by the site or by the individuals who manage the group, then it's an easy playground to work within,” Holt said.

Many scammers are experts, said L. Jean Camp, a professor of computer science and informatics at Indiana University.

“This is a business for them; they're professionals. They come into their job, and they do this every day,” Camp said, adding that victims of scams can be “capable, intelligent people.”

“It’s not your job not to be scammed,” Camp said.

Some organized crime rings that have been running scams for decades have adopted a similar format for social media, Camp said. Scammers sometimes develop a “remote social network” where they exchange tips and tricks about what works and what doesn’t.

Many scammers can also be working in small groups; they know each other from an expat community or online, Holt said.

Filling in the gap from Facebook

Prior-Grissinger said Facebook sometimes will flag innocuous posts as “potential spam” but won’t catch others that she suspects are spam posts.

Facebook did not respond to a detailed request for comment.

Facebook has some measures in place for flagging newly created fake accounts, but the platform has less of a role after the initial process, Ramjee said: “Once a fake account makes it past the automated flagging during account creation, the burden shifts more on users to report fake profiles.”

“The internet gives access for anyone to be able to conduct these types of scams, and social media platforms are perfect targets for scammers across the world to find potential victims,” Ramjee said, adding that she wasn’t surprised that people from overseas could target local Facebook groups.

Facebook could do more location-based verification of new accounts, Camp said, since not having any location-based authentication is “extremely problematic.”

The social network could do more to remove fake accounts, she added, but that would be expensive, and they would lose out on ad revenue from having more accounts on the platform.

Facebook’s automatic attempts to automatically delete fraudulent content and users create false positives and false negatives, Holt said, but we don’t know how effective they are since the company does not publicly share detailed data. And the automated tools can get “overwhelmed” by the sheer number of users — there’s 3 billion active Facebook users around the world.

Then, criminal accountability for smaller kinds of fraud and cybercrimes can “fall through the cracks” of law enforcement.

“We're at kind of a messy point where it's not big enough for the feds, but it's also not within the jurisdiction of state/local (law enforcement),” Holt said.

How scammers evolve

Prior-Grissinger is organizing group admins from around central Ohio to educate others on the warning signs of scammers and fake profiles. But as she tries to stop scams before they happen, the people behind the profiles are also evolving.

Scammers will try to adapt their language to sound as “convincing” as possible, Ramjee said. She and Holt said the expanding frontier of artificial intelligence tools could help scammers without high degrees of English competency.

“The thing that will likely change in the next few years will be the integration of AI into fraud schemes because that will help to ensure really good English, regardless of whether the person is a native speaker or not,” Holt said.

Prior-Grissinger recently noticed that multiple profiles were commenting on an air duct cleaning post in a Westerville group that she suspects is mostly run by scammers. She directly messaged one of the commenters, warning them of the potential spam.

But after warning of the potential scam, one of the people sent back a slew of disparaging messages laden with explicit language — some misspelled.

Prior-Grissinger suspects that scammers have created other fake profiles to “keep up appearances” and legitimize spam posts.

“I thought I was helping somebody. Well, it turns out the person I was helping is part of the problem,” Prior-Grissinger said.

Awinfrey@dispatch.com

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Meet the Westerville mom trying to stop Facebook scams before they happen