TikTok is rife with scams promising to fix your credit score or wipe your debt, finance expert warns — here are 3

• There's a lot of bad financial advice on TikTok right now.
• A financial expert spoke to Insider about scams she's seen on the platform.

Finance is a huge topic on TikTok, and while there is some good advice to be found there, a lot is bad or a straight-up scam.

Markia Brown, who is an accredited financial counselor, financial educator, and TikTok creator with over 200,000 followers, spoke to Insider about the issue.

The worst, she said, were people offering easy escapes from debt, often in exchange for a fraudulent payment.

She said early fall is high season for scammers, as their marks start planning their spending for the holiday period.

"The biggest thing right now is that people are trying to get their way out of debt so that they can ramp up their holiday spending," she said.

Many people are struggling, she said, and will "fall for anything at this point that sounds like it could get them out of the bind that they're in."

Sorry, you can't just decide your debt doesn't exist

One of the worst scams now encourages people to simply pretend their debt can't be collected.

"I'm seeing a lot of videos of people saying, oh, you don't have to pay your debt. The government has to pay your debt," Brown said.

That thinking is tied to the sovereignty-citizen conspiracy theory, where people believe they can reject government's authority over them and ignore the law.

"It's just a lot of gaslighting people," Brown said. "Obviously that's what they want to hear — they don't have the money to pay that stuff back in the first place. So if somebody tells you you don't have to, it's super attractive."

These videos get a lot of traction, Brown added, but they are "very, very misleading and very, very illegal."

Ignoring debts has severe consequences. First off, interest piles up and lenders add late fees.

After 120 days, the debt is likely to be sent off to a collections agency. They are more aggressive than most lenders, sending letters, emails, and call to try and get the debt settled, while adding more fees.

Going through this process will also tank a person's credit score, making it harder to get loans, credit cards, or housing in future.

The owner of the debt can also obtain a court order to be paid straight from your wages or bank account — though they are more likely to sue you.

You also can't just "wipe" your credit score

Brown said some people pose as financial experts and claim to be able to wipe your credit using the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) — for a fee.

But there's nothing actually in that act that says you have a right to dispute anything that impacts your credit score.

Another trick to look out for is people offering ways to get around debt, like by claiming they can get you approved by lenders who would usually reject you.

These scams are usually marketed as selling a credit privacy number (CPN), said Brown, which is a number formatted just like a Social Security number. They are often used to hide bad credit history.

These scammers claim they can essentially give you a new identity, which is illegal, and also doesn't work.

Brown said these scams are attractive to people because they want to start over. They think their credit is too messed up to fix, and hope they can just wipe the slate clean.

"These scams do really well on social media because it just sounds too good to be true," she said.

Fake loans, fake prizes

Other scams to be on the lookout for include people posing as legitimate money lenders but who request a deposit to be paid upfront.

They then disappear with the money. Other promote fake giveaways of cash or expensive prizes.

Essentially, anything that requires you to put down money upfront should be treated with caution.

Brown said the best way to approach any kind of financial advice online is to "trust but verify."

"Trust that what I'm telling you is the truth, but take notes so that you can go and do the research yourself," she said. "There's nothing like being able to see that answer right in front of you for you to actually believe what somebody is saying."

Social media shows you "what people want you to see," she added, so it's easy to lie and get away with it. So she recommends people turn to agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission if they are in doubt.

"If you fact check it with them, then you'll know who to trust and who not to trust," she said.