Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Hackers hit small business owners through phishing scam
ENTREPRENEURS who conduct most of their business transactions through Instagram have been warned to implement all available security measures or risk falling prey to hackers.
Several business owners have been left reeling after hackers took control of their accounts, leading to massive losses in revenue and customers.
A number of small business owners who fell victim to phishing attacks through fraudulent messages seeking their passwords and login details lost thousands of rand when their Instagram accounts were hacked and they were not able to speak to their clients or followers, sometimes for months.
Just over a year ago marketing manager Casey Davies and her husband started decor business Stone Sloth, which manufactures premium concrete candles.
Davies said at the time she wasn’t too familiar with social media and it took about a year to build up a good following on Instagram.
“I was very proud that we finally got to about 1 800 followers. And because we sell a product, I do reach out to people and people do reach out to me,” said Davies.
On October 31 she received a message from a potential client. Davies said the person asked for her cellphone number and promised to be in touch.
She thought the manner in which the message was phrased seemed weird but shared her number anyway.
Almost immediately she received notifications via Instagram direct messaging saying, “there has been suspicious activity on your account”.
Another message followed: “This is Instagram, put in this code so that we can stop the suspicious activity.”
She said the prompt to put in the code was a fake, but it looked very “professional” and was sent to her cellphone number. She tried to log into her account and a message said she no longer had access to it.
Davies soon received messages from followers telling her the hackers had posted photographs of her on the account with messages saying she had made lots of money by trading in Bitcoin.
The one saving grace was that although the hackers could access her credit card details, the card had expired and was no longer valid.
Davies was worried that by hacking into the Stone Sloth account, the people and companies she worked with would also fall prey to the hackers who never made any demands for money or contacted her personally again.
She has still not been able to regain control of her account, despite sending countless messages to Instagram and parent company Facebook for help.
“Other people got messages saying pay us and get your account back. We were never been contacted by the hackers and they didn’t make any demands. But we also never got our Instagram account back,” she said.
Finally, someone at Facebook told them to “cut your losses” and move on. She stressed the importance of using the two-step verification available on Instagram to protect your account.