You know you have made it when scammers start impersonating you - Unknown
Influencer/KOL impersonation scammers are on the rise. These scammers will create almost identical social media accounts and then follow famous influencers and then try to scam the influencer's followers.
I was following a famous finance influencer on Instagram for a while and out of the blue it seem like someone with the influencer's Instagram account starts following my account and will randomly put "likes" on my posts once in a while. After a few months, the impersonator influencer will try to reach out to me on my social media (eg Instagram) chat.
I was curious and I thought that the message was from the actual influencer himself so I responded to the influencer and the conversation started normally but the scam giveaway that it was an influencer impersonation scam was when the conversations started shifting towards cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency investment platforms. While I'm aware that this particular influencer dabbles in cryptocurrency but I'm quite sure it's not his main investment so I started suspecting already. I'm very sure the impersonator was trying to make be part with my money on their syndicate's fake investment platform. I blocked the impersonator swiftly after that. The modus operandi of this scam is almost like the classic pig butchering scam but using an influencer's identity to attract. I knew that big names like Bill Gates, Elon Musk always have scammers impersonating them but I didn't expect a smaller and more local kind of influencer also are targeted by scammers.
I got to give thumbs up to this scammer as I initially didn't see through the veil of this scam. By the way, normally famous enough influencers won't directly initiate message as they are too busy networking with their peers and equals and they don't have time to waste to suddenly give their followers a direct message. I get for a moment I was the naΓ―ve one.