The Herald has seen several similar clones in recent days. Photo / File
The Herald has seen several similar clones in recent days. Photo / File
The holiday season has spelt a rise in Kiwis reporting having their social media pages cloned by scammers hoping to deceive unsuspecting victims.
Finance and investing platform, The Curve, is just one of the many Instagram profiles that have been copied in recent days, as New Zealand’s internet safety agency revealed it receives an increase in this type of scam reports over holiday periods.
The Curve Co-founder Victoria Harris said she had a “long night” on Tuesday evening after being informed of the spam account at 9.30pm.
“We put a lot of hard work into building our brand, our Instagram, our followers, and for that to be at risk of being taken away instantly is really concerning and scary.”
Given the nature of The Curve, Harris said they were nervous the scammers may ask their audience for money or request their bank numbers.
“When you’re dealing with money it is scary because people could be very trusting and therefore give their details to an untrustworthy hacker.”
Several other online impersonations seen by the Herald in recent days used a similar tactic, and the false account explicitly asking followers to report the user’s real page as being “hacked”.
Those behind schemes like this create a new profile using the exact same images and following the same people as their victim, making it difficult for other users to differentiate between the real and fake page.
Netsafe chief online safety officer Sean Lyons told the Herald these scams ramp up over holiday periods, particularly over Christmas and New Years, when scammers play on victims’ distraction.
“If someone gets a message from their bank in April say, and nothing is going on, and the bank says, ‘I need your email and password right now because you’ve been compromised.’ Well, probably most of us are going to smell a rat.”
However, if this happened at 4pm on Christmas Eve, he said people may not be as focused on spotting the deceit.
“Cloning of other people’s profiles and then kind of front footing with the, ‘I’ve had my profile cloned’, and then trying to shift the blame to the original, you can’t help but have some admiration for the people, and the technique.”
Netsafe online safety operations manager Sean Lyons. Photo / Supplied
He said the holidays make it harder for people to conduct the same checks they usually would do when confronted with potentially dodgy activity.
“If you impersonate that person and then reach out to a colleague on a Tuesday in April they’re going to look from one side of the office to another and go, ‘oi did you just send me a message about your fake instagram profile?’”
Lyons told the Herald it was “hugely common” for Netsafe to receive reports about impersonation scams.
“They’re trying to build on an existing trust relationship with the person that they’re impersonating. We know scams go a whole lot better for the scammer if everyone thinks they trust each other.”
He said these types of scams are often for the “long game”, allowing those responsible to build up a network and make the profiles look as authentic as possible.
Harris told the Herald the scammers were copying their content every five minutes so it was hard for users to differentiate between the pages.
“They have definitely got a lot more sophisticated and they keep changing their handle, and it’s very distracting and frustrating.
“We should be flattered that someone would want to copy our account, but actually, I think in this day and age as well Instagram is effectively a shop front for a lot of businesses and if that’s compromised, you lose that way to access customers.”
Lyons said people who have been impersonated should report the incident to the platform where it exists.
“You may need to go through some steps to prove you are you, but it does mean that ultimately you and your family and friends are better protected, and the scammers time and effort has been wasted.”
