Beware “Podcast Invite” Scam Emails and Messages
If you own a blog, vlog channel, website or popular social media page, you’re a potential target for the “podcast invite” scam, which sees potential victims invited to participate in a well-known podcast, only for scammers to trick them into giving away access to their online accounts.
Receiving an invitation to participate in a popular podcast to discuss your life and work – while being financially compensated for doing so – is certainly going to be an opportunity that few will pass up. It would, after all, be a great way to get some great exposure for your brand while making a few bucks in the process. What’s not to like?
The problem, however, is that the good old online adage of “if it appears too good to be true, it probably is” applies in these cases, because if you do receive such as invitation, it’s probably going to be a scam.
Take, for instance, this email below that fell in our inbox this week, asking us to be a guest on “The Rachel Hollis Podcast Show“. While we not familiar with the podcast, a quick Google search reveals it is a popular business and lifestyle podcast with tens of thousands of followers. The problem, however, is that this email didn’t come from Rachel Hollis, or anyone working for her. The email came from scammers.
There are a couple of giveaways that immediately crop up. Firstly that it was addressed to our page name and not any individual. And the From email is a free web-based Gmail address, popular with online crooks and phishing scammers.
But how can an invite to join a podcast lead to us being scammed? What is the “endgame” here?
After “baiting” the scammers, it soon became apparent that what the scammers were really after was access to our Facebook page, which is how they came across us in the first place. After replying pretending that we were interested, the scammers asked us over an audio-only Zoom meeting to invite them to join our Facebook Business account on the pretence that this was a “test” to ensure we could mutually live-stream the podcast from our page when it was time to actually do the podcast.
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The problem? Inviting them to our business page in such a manner would actually give the crooks administrative access to our Facebook page. From there they could boot us out and take control of the page, posting scams and spam to our followers. So not ideal.
It’s just a more audacious version of the spammy and archaic “can we pay you to post links from your page” scam which we discussed years ago which also aims to trick page admins into handing over admin access to their pages.
In our case they crooks were using the “The Rachel Hollis Podcast Show” as bait. But other popular podcasts are also used, including the Chill Network, Travis and Jason Kelce’s New Heights Podcast, the Bobbi Althoff Podcast and pretty much any popular podcast you can think of. Of course none of the genuine podcasters have anything to do with these scammers.
So beware – watch out for Gmail addresses (genuine podcasters won’t use them to invite you) and NEVER send out invites from the Facebook Business section of your account.
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