Your childhood pet’s name, your mother’s maiden name, your first car. Why would a random social media quiz about which Harry Potter character you’d most relate to need to know these things? Well, there’s a chance it’s a scam. 

These types of topics are all common account security questions used to help safeguard your account against bad actors. Scammers recognize this, and they create quizzes and other games that use these kinds of questions to try and get people to give up their personal information. Don’t fall for it! The more information you share, the more you risk it being misused. Scammers will then use any information they’ve collected to try and reset accounts, giving them access to online banking, email, or other accounts. 

One of the best things you can do to protect your personal information is to steer clear of online quizzes, or at least don’t give real answers about yourself. And for accounts that require you to set a couple of security questions and answers, you can make those answers up too. “In what city were you born?“ Jupiter. “What was your first car?” DeLorean time machine. You can treat these like secondary passwords, and using random answers can help protect your account security if scammers were to ever get ahold of the real answers somehow.