Many people around the world were enthralled by the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. In a world were the news is so often grim, the royal wedding was, for many people, a breath of fresh air. But even the royal wedding can be exploited by identity thieves. Facebook quizzes are very popular, but they can be exploited by identity thieves. A good example of this was the “10 Concerts, but there is one act that I haven’t seen live.  Which is it?” Facebook quiz.  While this may appear harmless, the information you provide may tell more about you than is safe to make public.  It may provide information about your approximate age and preferences in music which can then be used by a scammer to send you a phishing email tailored to appeal to your particular interests that you may trust and click on a link contained in the email that contains either keystroke logging malware that can be used to steal your identity or ransomware.
The royal wedding quiz has appeared in many forms, such as “In honor of the royal wedding, use your royal wedding guest name this week. Start with either Lord or Lady. Your first name is one of your grandparents’ names. Your surname is the name of your first pet, then ‘of’ followed by the name of the street your grew up on. Just for fun, let’s do this. Post below. Then cut and paste it into your status.” So for example, you might become Lord Johnson Rover of Beacon. The problem is that while some people may see this as just a game, identity thieves can harvest that information to use to answer security questions thereby enabling a hacker to change your password and gain access to your bank account, email or other sensitive material.
TIPS
We all tend to put too much personal information on social media that can be exploited by scammers and identity thieves to our detriment. My advice is to avoid the problem entirely and not play these online games. However, if you, as many people do, find this game and other similar games to be fun to play, you may want to just adjust your privacy setting to “friends only” so that you limit who gets to see your answers.
If you are not a subscriber to Scamicide.com and would like to receive daily emails with the Scam of the day, all you need to do is to go to the bottom of the initial page of http://www.scamicide.com and click on the tab that states “Sign up for this blog.”