TikTok mobile app faces growing number of scams

TikTok is now the third most profitable video sharing application. Although it is not yet 3 years old, the mobile application,created by the Chinese ByteDance, saw up to 53.5 million additional installs last month. A record.

But with its billion users,video sharing platformis far from being entirely secure, and more and more cyber risks are being identified. For some time now, numerous cases of scam have been noted, even though the majority of user profiles are only between 13 and 18 years old. Without seeking to fraudulently recover bank details, malicious accounts take advantage of a young and easily manipulated community.

Many scam accounts on TikTok

The platform is indeed experiencing a growing number of malicious accounts, seeking to make you spend money to gain more subscribers, or to make you subscribe to adult sites.“They use techniques that have been popular for 10 years on all social networks by redirecting to paid sites, the only new thing is that they no longer hesitate to appropriate the profiles of popular personalities,”explains Satnam Narang, cybersecurity expert and author of our article.

According to the expert's report, scammers mostly create accounts using Instagram or Snapchat content from well-known personalities, in order to gather a significant number of subscribers. Once reached a sufficient level (on average, the accounts only have 650 subscribers and 1,744 likes for videos), they implement their scam plan, with a call to action, via PayPal.

A number of accounts that continues to grow

Even though the researcher noted that many accounts are deleted by TikTok on a daily basis, these scams continue. According to their report, using the “For You” tab allows these accounts to be visible to users, targeting their interests and favorite personalities.

Pessimistic, the expert wishes to warn users (and their parents).“We expect these scam activities to only increase as TikTok continues to dominate the App Store market”, he expressed. It must be said that the application is currently number 1 on Apple's application download platform, and number 2 in Google's Play Store, according to figures from the analysis firmSensor Tower.