Police Warn of Social Media Scam Close to the Capital Region

Maybe you've seen the post going around Facebook about a missing child in the area. It has reportedly popped up on a number of different accounts saying:

Found this girl wandering behind our apartment today. I can not find her parents and my neighbors are clueless how she got here, please help me find her parents good people

Attached to the post is a photo of a young girl. CBS 6 looked into it further and found a few different accounts with the same post, but different photos of the girl.

The Bennington Vermont Police Department addressed the issue on their Facebook page Wednesday. They say its been brought to their attention through different garage sale groups and other buy/sell/trade groups on Facebook.

Police say the scam is happening nationwide, but making its way into groups in and around the Bennington area, so don't be surprised if you see it in the Capital Region.

So what is it all about? CBS 6 talked to Sonjay Goel, a professor of IT and Digital Forensics at UAlbany about why someone would do this.

There are many different reasons why people do that. For some reasons, they do it for market manipulation. In some other cases, they would put this information to make people click on links, which obviously have malicious codes associated with that. And in the third case, they can use it for extorting money, gaining the sympathy of people and then based on that try to get money from people or make them do things.

He says your best bet is to not click anything suspicious or and to be on the alert if a message comes from an unverified account.