Preying on tragedy: Scammers use TikTok, Twitter to defraud donors contributing towards Turkey-Syria quake survivors

Ankara: Scammers are making profits from the devastating earthquake that killed 36,000 people in Turkey and Syria. People are being tricked into making donations towards quake-ravaged Turkey and Syria. Instead of passing the collections to charities, scamsters are channelling the money to their own PayPal accounts and cryptocurrency wallets. United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths said Monday the rescue phase in both countries was “ coming to a close ”, with priority now switching to rehabilitating the survivors. Scammers receive digital gifts on TikTok Video sharing platform TikTok has become one of the crime hubs. On TikTok, content creators usually receive money in the form of digital gifts, but as per BBC, the company extracts 70 per cent of these proceeds. Scammers are creating fake TikTok accounts where they post old pictures of devastation, looped footage and TV reports of rescue operations. **Also read: WATCH: Nurses risk their lives to save newborn babies as earthquake shakes Turkey hospital** The content is accompanied by captions like “Let’s help Turkey”, “Pray for Turkey” and “Donate for earthquake victims” to make the posts seem believable. One such account live-streamed a pixelated aerial image of destroyed buildings with explosion sound effects in the background for three hours. A male voice laughs and speaks in Chinese in the video off-camera. Another account showed a picture of a distressed child with the caption “Please help achieve this goal” – a plea to receive digital gifts. A reverse search of the image in question revealed that it dated back to 2018 and referring to a city in north-western Syria where Turkish forces ousted a Kurdish militia. Taking cognizance of the situation, a spokesperson for TikTok told BBC, “We are deeply saddened by the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria and are contributing to aid earthquake relief efforts. We’re also actively working to prevent people from scamming and misleading community members who want to help." Twitter and crypto wallets Meanwhile, scammers are using Twitter to post Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated images to deceive donors alongside links to their cryptocurrency accounts. One such account posted a crypto address that has been linked with scam and spam tweets from 2018. A Twitter account, which has now been suspended from the micro-blogging platform, called “Turkey Earthquake Relief” had been asking people to donate money to a PayPal account. The account had $900 but more than half of it was issued by the creator of the page to make it look authentic. According to an analysis done by “BleepingComputer” – a website covering technology, the current batch of scammers have gone a step ahead to use legitimate links that redirect users to authorised payment platforms to make their ploy look convincing. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.