Logos from Air New Zealand and Auckland Airport are used in the common scam.
Logos from Air New Zealand and Auckland Airport are used in the common scam.
Queenstown Airport has said a purported “$3 luggage sale” its is a scam, warning travellers that adverts circulating on Facebook claiming to be a lost property sale are fake.
Adverts claiming to be from the airport state that “due to overcrowded airport lockers” unclaimed lost luggage was being sold at $3 a lot.
“Queenstown Airport never sells lost property or luggage,” said an airport spokesperson.
Despite bearing the contact details of Queenstown Airport, a warning was issued on Friday saying that anyone who had tried to buy a bag should contact MBIE’s Scamwatch for advice.
“We’ve been made aware of Facebook pages pretending to be Queenstown Airport,” said the airport. “Please report the pages when you see them.”
There were at least 15 adverts bought in the airport’s name, which were still live as of Monday.
The adverts attracted dozens of comments from apparently “satisfied” customers, with photos of what they claimed to be the contents of cases bought in the bogus lost property sale.
Photos of piles of flight cases next to yellow signs bearing Air New Zealand’s Logo are similar to many copycat scams that appeared earlier this year, targeting Australian and New Zealand travellers.
At the time, one woman said she ordered a suitcase from the site for $3.19 but it never arrived. A few days later more than $80 was taken from her account. She reported the fraud to her bank to stop further payments.
A similar hoax targeted Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport with doctored photos of luggage piles, claiming to be a sale from the airport “Luggage Department”.
A baggage scam has been circulating on Facebook.
The $3 luggage hoax
The Queenstown Airport page, originally created with the name Tajim’s Media four years ago, changed its name to the airport last month and began posting.
The page’s owner, a Bangladeshi national, told the Herald that they had never even been to Queenstown.
“They hacked my page and renamed into Queenstown Airport,” he said but claimed to have no idea about the scam.
This familiar scam has reused photos from other airports.
In a report by AFP earlier this year, many of the doctored “sale” photos were identified as having appeared on similar hoax pages targeting Denver Airport.
It appears that the scam targets hacked Facebook pages which were then quickly renamed and used to buy seemingly legitimate adverts via Facebook.
There are at least two hoax Facebook pages claiming to be Queenstown Airport, one previously belonged to a Bangladeshi tech company and another was a Mexican poetry group.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta were not able to provide comment on the matter but said that users of Instagram and Facebook were able to report adverts the believed to be fraudulent.
