EMILY MCCORMICK: Get-rich-quick scams often hit those most vulnerable, promising outsized gains for small initial investments of time and money. These kinds of scams are proliferating online, and Instagram has been one key forum where users have been targeted. Yahoo Finance's own senior reporter Alexandra Semanova is here with the details. So tell us, Alexandra, how widespread of a problem is this?

ALEXANDRA SEMENOVA: Well, Emily, if you use the social media platform Instagram at all, it's likely at some point you've seen users post endorsements for get-rich-quick investment schemes. Maybe you've even received a message directly saying that you could double your money in an hour if you just invest in some sort of new cryptocurrency. But these money flipping endorsements are all part of an elaborate scam that has become widespread on Meta's social media platform.

How it works is hackers will steal a user's account, take elaborate measures to impersonate the user using their own photos, reach out to friends and loved ones, and get them to wire over money to them, promising that they'll get some sort of big investment returns on the scam. So once they convince someone to wire the money over, they then tell the user that they have to record a video of themselves in order to get that money back, essentially blackmailing them into recording these hostage-style-like videos promoting the same exact scams.

And once the hacker does that, they use that video to then impersonate the new victim and do the same with their network, and that cycle continues. Now, the people that I spoke to whose accounts were compromised described it being impossible to get any sort of help from Instagram in order to retrieve their identities back. Each of these users said that they desperately contacted Instagram's Help Center and never received responses.

One person even told me that her account was used for an entire two months to reach out to friends and loved ones, telling them to wire money over for these types of investment scams before she actually got the account back. And it wasn't directly through the social media platform. It was through a friend who happened to work at Meta. Now, I reached out to Meta, and a spokesperson acknowledged to me that although they are working to stop these types of bad actors, they could be doing more to prevent these types of scams. Emily.

EMILY MCCORMICK: Wow. So why are these scams so prevalent on social media platforms?

ALEXANDRA SEMENOVA: Well, one of the cybersecurity experts that I spoke to told me that social media platforms are a goldmine for criminals because of the amount of personal information that they have. So these types of heavily targeted attacks are particularly successful for scammers because there's the component of the hacker impersonating someone that the victim knows and trusts to lure them in. So once they do that, they can say pretty much anything and can get them to open any type of link by gaining access to their trust and getting their personal information.

And this is evident in the data, too. The FTC said earlier this year that more than 95,000 people in the US have reported about $770 million in losses on social media fraud specifically in 2021. That's 18 times the amount of losses in 2017. And of those losses, 37% of them were investment scams specifically. So social media users need to be cautious about who they interact with on the platform, what kind of links they open, and be wary of who they're providing personal information to as these types of scams are on the rise. Emily.