Getting a company's attention over Twitter is becoming an easy and often effective way for consumers to achieve what they want, when they want. Yet the increase in hackers creating fake accounts to interact with consumers — and "phish" for private information — is a growing concern.

It goes something like this: Someone tweets at a company because they may be upset about an issue. A fake account on Twitter replies directly to that person, and asks them to log in to a fake website. The victim then exposes their personal information to hackers.



A 2014 report by EMC noted that various phishing scams cost companies a combined $5.9 billion in nearly 500,000 separate attacks. Meanwhile, cybersecurity experts at Kapersky Lab found that last year, more than a quarter of phishing scams targeted users' financial data.

Proofpoint, a cybersecurity solutions firm, is just one of the companies seeing a significant increase in fake retail banking and retail customer service accounts phishing for bank account credentials. These breaches are becoming especially prevalent on Twitter and Facebook. A representative for Twitter did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.



Devin Redmond, vice president at Proofpoint, said that as more businesses adopt to social media to address customer concerns, other people with bad intentions are also watching.

"The bad guys go wherever the conversation is," he told CNBC. "The bad actors know they can actually leverage that to steal and defraud people."



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