The Quiz Scam is usually found on Facebook and comes with a challenge by one of your friends, or via some other group post, possibly just from one of the random feeds that Facebook serves you up to keep you on the website. They will challenge you to answer the questions, “it will be so fun, and get your friends to do it too, and pass it along by sharing it too!”
The quizzes are usually in the form of a series of questions like these;
- Where did you grow up?
- Favourite colour?
- First pet’s name?
- Street you grew up on?
- Lucky Number?
They are all meant to gather information that you might have used to either answer security questions on an account, like your email, when you first set it up. The same questions you need to answer if you forgot your password, or, can be used to guess your password.
There are other types of quizzes, like the following –
Choose Between Two Things
You add your reaction for your choice (Elvis of course).
What Type of <Insert Object Here> Are You?
Here is what they can do with that information
- Use it for pure fun, possible, but not worth the risk
- Use it to get your reaction on a post, which they then choose later to something else – could be used to scam others down the road
- Get to know you better by knowing what you like and don’t like
- Facebook then sees, you like this type of content, and guess what, serves you up more
Protecting Yourself
Don’t react to posts like this and don’t answer any quizzes with any information that can help identify you, your security answers or used against you.
