Beware of "weird" scams to make money through TikTok

Although the media and authorities have warned many times, recently, many people continue to fall into the trap of fraud through social networks. The "tricks" of fraud also constantly change in methods, and the tricks are increasingly sophisticated, causing many people to easily lose large sums of money in a short time. Making money by performing tasks on TikTok is one of the forms of fraud that is currently developing complicatedly.

Beware of A person who made money through the social network TikTok lost a large amount of money after many transfers. (Photo provided by the character).

Fraudulently appropriating money by inviting followers to TikTok pages has appeared in recent years. “Just sit at home, watch videos and follow the TikTok pages of the company’s celebrities to increase traffic and increase their popularity to earn money” are the baits that “customer service” (CSKH) staff “sweetly” invite. When “falling into the trap”, participants will be instructed to do the task of watching videos, following TikTok through the social network Telegram or some intermediary websites.

According to the reporter's research, here, participants will be put into a "primary" group by customer service staff to perform tasks. Accordingly, participants only need to go to TikTok to find the name or TikTok link of the celebrity sent by the room owner and click follow, then take a screenshot and send it to the customer service staff to "close the deal" to complete the task. After completing 3 task orders, participants will be paid 30,000 VND by the company and will be transferred directly to their bank account. Each day, participants can perform about 10 - 15 tasks given by customer service staff, with the amount earned from 150,000 - 200,000 VND.

However, these are just small pieces of bait to “lure” and create trust. After that, participants will be transferred to more “advanced” groups. In these groups, along with receiving tasks with higher prices, from hundreds to millions of VND/task, participants will have to transfer the corresponding amount of money as a “deposit”. After completing the tasks of these orders, participants will be refunded the entire amount of money transferred, and receive an additional 10% commission of that amount. In this way, participants continue to be upgraded to groups that receive larger tasks and transfer amounts, up to hundreds of millions of VND.

Some participants lost large sums of money, up to hundreds of thousands, even billions of dong, after transferring large sums of money to receive the task, but immediately after that, the room owner and customer service staff suddenly could not be contacted. Not only that, some victims were also continuously led to continue to deposit money in the hope of getting back the money they had previously transferred.

According to a victim, they were led to perform tasks with the amount of money gradually increasing from 7 to 18 million VND, 90 million VND, then 250 million VND... And, the room owner side required to follow all the orders before being able to withdraw money. Because of regretting the money and because in the group there were many "bait" members who would receive all the money back when completing the task, this person blindly borrowed a large amount of money to participate. However, every time they "withdraw money", the customer service staff reported many reasons, such as: the player performed the wrong task, the wrong password and asked the participant to continue to deposit more money to verify the account... Just like that, the room owner side led the customer to deposit amounts up to billions of VND. When they woke up, the amount of money had been lost too much.

According to the recommendations of the authorities, making money online from TikTok video interactions is essentially a form of creating disguised tasks to call on users to deposit money and then suddenly not being able to contact them and appropriating their assets. Most websites operate anonymously, with unclear origins, so it is very difficult to resolve risks when they encounter them. In addition to being scammed out of money, victims who participate in surfing TikTok to earn money also risk having their personal information stolen, because when participating, the first thing they do is provide information and bank accounts for transactions, which poses many potential risks later on.

It is known that most of the victims who were scammed from working on TikTok have filed a complaint with the Department of Cyber Security and High-Tech Crime Prevention, which is currently pending. However, most of the accounts receiving money are accounts that scammers use other people's ID cards or citizen identification cards to register, or accounts that have been hijacked. This money will be quickly transferred to other accounts, even foreign accounts, so it is very difficult to "recover" it. To protect themselves, social media users need to be extremely careful, especially when working through these platforms. In particular, they need to be especially vigilant about profitable investment issues to avoid falling into the trap of "making money online" cakes.

Article and photos: Tung Lam

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