Don’t let fake Zuckerbergs take your cash
Scam accounts on Facebook, Instagram prey on older people to pay in order to win a ‘lottery’
SAN FRANCISCO— A Facebook notification on Gary Bernhardt’s phone woke him up one night in November with incredible news: a message from Mark Zuckerberg himself, saying that Bernhardt had won $750,000 (U.S.) in the Facebook lottery.
“I got all excited. Wouldn’t you?” said Bernhardt, 67, a retired forklift driver and army veteran in Ham Lake, Minn. He stayed up until dawn trading messages with the person on the other end.
To obtain his winnings, Bernhardt was told, he first needed to send $200 in iTunes gift cards.
Hours later, Bernhardt bought the gift cards at a gas station and sent the redemption codes to the account that said it was Zuckerberg. But the requests for money didn’t stop. By January, Bernhardt had wired an additional $1,310 in cash, or about a third of his Social Security cheques over three months.
Bernhardt eventually realized that he had been the unwitting victim of a scam that has thrived on Facebook and Instagram by using the sites’ own brands — and its top executives — to lure people in. At a time when the real Zuckerberg has vowed to clean up Facebook, the Silicon Valley company has failed to eliminate impostor accounts masquerading as him and his chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to swindle Facebook users out of thousands of dollars. An examination by the New York Times found 205 accounts impersonating Zuckerberg and Sandberg on Facebook and its photo-sharing site Instagram, not including fan pages or satire accounts, which are permitted under the company’s rules. At least 51 of the impostor accounts, including 43 on Instagram, were lottery scams like the one that fooled Bernhardt.
The fake Zuckerbergs and faux Sandbergs have proliferated on Facebook and Instagram, despite the presence of Facebook groups that track the scams and complaints about the trick, dating back to at least 2010.
A day after the Times informed Facebook of its findings, the company re- moved all 96 impostor Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg accounts on its Facebook site. It had left up all but one of the109 fakes on Instagram, but removed them after this article was published.
“Thank you so much for reporting this,” said Pete Voss, a Facebook spokesperson. He could not say why Facebook had not spotted the accounts posing as its top executives, including several that appeared to have existed for more than eight years.
Facebook requires people to use their authentic name and identity. Yet the company has estimated that perhaps 3 per cent of its users — as many as 60 million accounts — are fake. Some of those accounts are disguised as ordinary people, some pretend to be celebrities such as Justin Bieber.
Interviews with a half-dozen recent victims — and online conversations with nine impostor accounts — showed that the Facebook lottery deception is alive and well, preying particularly on older, less educated and low-income people.
The scammers seek victims who, based on their Facebook and Instagram profiles, seem vulnerable, said Robin Alexander van der Kieft, who manages several Facebook groups that track the scams. The various fake accounts share information about successful shakedowns and continue pouncing on those victims, he said. He has traced many of the Internet Protocol addresses of these fake accounts to Nigeria and Ghana.