HANNIBAL – A new Facebook scam seems to be on the rise and lately directed to tugging local heartstrings.
Community pages have seen upticks in posts that appear to come from local people who have found lost animals and request help searching for the owner. Other posts have featured pictures of unidentified elderly individuals who have shown up at nursing homes or unidentified children who have been in accidents.
The post often asks for shares and some request people to react to it, in order to bump it up on the page. Whoever makes the posts will often have a Facebook profile with only a few, if any, friends listed on the page with no local connections. The poster also tends to turn off commenting.
Many of the scam posts in Hannibal groups have been using #Hannibal. Scrolling through the posts with this hashtag will reveal various scam posts from free diaper giveaways to warnings of criminal activity.
One of the posts in a local group was from an emergency services page, with no local connections, pictures a baby who is claimed to have been dropped off at the gate of a home and they in search of parents. The commenting for the post has been turned off and it has nearly 200 shares.
The Better Business Bureau (BBB) has been warning of similar scams they are calling “bait-and-switch” which has many variations. BBB reports on their scam alert site that “the commonality is the emotionality or urgency of the message that encourages concerned people to share the news with their friends.”
BBB said it’s important to check the source before sharing posts like this and to check local media to see if anything has been reported.
Things Happening in Hannibal, Mo. is a Facebook group for the Hannibal community with more than 33,000 members. Administrator for the page, Lou Barta, has been working to remove scam posts that have been appearing in the group.
Barta has noticed that “the common denominator seems to be a visual form of phishing for personal contact information.”
“They all seem to appeal to people’s emotions, leading them to contact the person posting the information, thereby providing them with an active or live prospect, so to speak,” he said. “As with emails, this is a difficult thing to filter out. Neither the social media companies nor personal settings seem able to prevent or screen out these attempts on group social pages.”
“The commonality is the emotionality or urgency of the message that encourages concerned people to share the news with their friends,” BBB reported on their scam alert website.
The posts are generally shared in groups with an established and trusted community so members already feel comfortable sharing posts from the group.
Once the post is shared, the scammer changes the original post to a deceptive rental ad or sometimes to a link pointing to a survey that “guarantees” a cash prize, leading friends to think you recommended the content.
“These bait-and-switch ads aim to either get a deposit for a rental property before the user gets a chance to see the home- or get your personal information, which could lead to identity theft,” the BBB reported.
Although most page administrators work to take down the scams, Barta said there will always be those who work against them.
“Hopefully, once we are past this year’s holiday season these attempts will slow down,” he said. “However there will always be a small group of people trying to prey on others.”
BBB offers these tips to avoid being scammed by a bait-and-switch Facebook ad:
- Do a bit of digging before resharing a post on your profile. Read the information carefully and look at the profile of the person who created and shared the original post. If the profile is from Florida but shared the post in a Canadian group, it may be a red flag of a bait-and-switch publication.
- Find out when the poster created the Facebook profile. Scammers always create profiles when their old one gets banned. If you click on their profile, it will tell you how long they have been a member of the group. You can also find additional information on their public profile.
- You should see it in the news. If a child goes missing or a tragedy occurs, you’ll most likely see it on different news outlets or shared by law enforcement, not on a random post.
- Do a reverse image search on Google. That will allow you to find out if the pictures you saw were used on other ads or websites in different cities.
- Find similar posts. Copy and paste the text from the post into Facebook’s search tool to see if other posts with the same text and different pictures show up.
- If you suspect a post is a scam, report it to Facebook.