Popular fitness trackers such as Fitbit, Garmin, Oura and Apple watches provide an easy way to measure your sleep quality, heart rate and other biological metrics and can be quite helpful.  However, as I often tell you, anything popular with the public is also popular with scammers who seek to leverage that popularity into being a tool to scam you and so it is with fitness trackers.

Scammers are creating their own fitness apps or counterfeit versions of popular fitness apps so it is very important when downloading a fitness app to get it from legitimate app stores such as the Microsoft Store,  Google Play or the App Store and make sure that you read all of the reviews.  It is also important to remember that although all of these legitimate app stores investigate apps before offering them to the public, bogus apps do appear at all of these legitimate stores.

The most common way fitness apps are used for scams is when you make friends with people in your fitness network.  Over time, scammers build trust in their communications with you through your fitness network until, after they have built a high level of trust they hit you with a scam such as an opportunity to invest in cryptocurrencies or ask you for money needed for an emergency.

TIPS

The first thing to do is to secure your account with a strong, unique password and also use dual factor authentication which you should do with any app or account that you have.  You also should limit the amount of personal information that you provide and read the privacy rules for your particular app and set the privacy settings to limit the sharing of your information.  Also, when setting up an account, do not use a photo of yourself, but rather use an avatar.  You would be surprised how scammers can take information provided by your photograph to add to other information that they gather about you to create specifically targeted scams.

As always, never click on links or download attachments unless you have absolutely confirmed that they are legitimate.

For more information about fitness app scams, check out this video of a television interview I did recently about these scams. https://www.wwlp.com/video/mass-appeal-is-your-fitness-app-putting-you-at-risk/8791788/

If you are not a subscriber to Scamicide.com and would like to receive free daily emails with the Scam of the day, all you need to do is sign up for free using this link. https://scamicide.com/scam-of-the-day/