Meta plays us for Zuckers on scams
Two recent incidents in my hometown give lie to the marketing myth peddled by Facebook that social media is making the world a more sociable place. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The first involved a funeral for a beloved soccer player at a popular amateur football club in our southern suburbs, where a mate of mine also used to play. The second involved a home burglary where the victim happens to be a local TV journalist, whom I also know.
The family of the soccer player had arranged to have his funeral livestreamed on the Centennial Park Cemetery’s website so that mourners who were interstate or otherwise detained could still pay their respects.
This is where the scammers came in. They used the man’s name, which out of respect I will not use here, to create a bunch of fake funeral pages on Facebook headed “Celebrate the life of (Name)”.
The scammers targeted mourners by rifling through the deceased’s list of online friends, methodically duping them with a fake link to the funeral livestream.
When people innocently clicked on the fake link, they were prompted to enter their credit card details to watch the funeral. The entire thing was, of course, one big scam and it prompted the football club to post this warning on its own homepage:
“We understand there is a fake memorial that has taken our picture of (name) and is adding club members to its page – please ignore!”
In the second case, when the local
TV journo had his house robbed, not only did the thieves post videos of themselves on social media upending his house, they even went to the trouble of tracking down the journo via his Instagram – owned by those sociable people at Facebook – and uploading the videos to goad him. It’s hard to imagine more sinister and anti-social behaviour, as if to tell this man that they knew who he was and to think twice about pursuing them.
When I talked about the funeral scam on the radio, I received a text from the owner of one of our biggest real estate firms saying he wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear it. He explained that, with demand for rents at a record high and housing stock so low, Facebook is being used by scammers to con people desperate to find a place to live.
The scammers lift photos of real homes available for rent off reputable real estate websites and create fake rental pages, where they arrange to meet prospective renters at the property to show them through and take a deposit to secure the lease.
When the meeting occurs, the scammer apologises and says they forgot to bring the keys, but that if the prospective tenant could just pay the deposit anyway, they’ll secure the property, and that they will meet them back there the next day to give them the tour. No prizes for guessing how this story ends.
At least all of these stories involve nothing more than financial loss. What about the horrible and heartbreaking story this week of the young man in NSW who took his life after falling victim to a sextortion scam over Instagram, where the African-based perpetrators were threatening to release explicit photos of him they had obtained after tricking him into believing he was chatting to a flirty young woman.
The great cop-out of Facebook and Instagram on this stuff is to argue that they’re not responsible for the worst of human behaviour.
It’s a joke. They have built systems which enable all of this shocking conduct to occur. And they have made enough money in the process – genuinely vast amounts of money – to be prevented from arguing that they’re unable to do more.