IS THIS REAL?

I saw a post on Facebook from a man saying he wanted to help 5 people with P3,000.

All I need to do is tell him something reasonable I can do with the money. Do you think this is genuine?

Yes. It’s genuine. It’s a genuine scam. I’ve seen several of these messages on Facebook and many people have tried to post them in the Consumer Watchdog Facebook group. As you can probably guess, it’s not true. People don’t give away large amounts of money to total strangers just because they ask. They really don’t.

I’ve chatted with these scammers several times, pretending to be an innocent potential victim and every time the story is the same. There was always the promise of money and all I needed to do to get it was to prove my identity. However, instead of wanting to see my ID documents, they wanted something else. One told me, “You’ll got to verify with a Traction control now that you’ll the one accpecting the giveaway”. They then asked for my name, address, date of birth and “Facebook phone number”. I gave them fake details and they then said, “A verification code has been sent to your email send it to me so that we can verify you immediately”.

This is what it’s all about. That code was a Two-factor Authentication code that Facebook sends when someone tells Facebook they’ve forgotten their password. If I sent it to them, they’d be able to sign on to my Facebook profile, change the password and then do whatever they want with my profile. The real tragedy is that once someone has given their Facebook profile to a scammer, it LOOKS like it’s the victim who is the scammer. Do we really want our friends and relatives thinking WE are running scams?