This story appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald two days ago. Looks like a pack of bottom feeders on social media and copying legit business websites and hawking dodgy jobs to the unemployed.
When the first email from a stranger in Australia landed in an international businessman’s inbox, he thought nothing of it, dismissing it as just more spam.
“Hi,” the message said. “Are you running a scam or is this a legitimate business?”
Gareth, who runs a marketing agency in London and did not wish to use his full name, was quick to delete the email.
But in the weeks and months that followed, he received a flurry of similar messages on email, Facebook and LinkedIn – all from Australians or New Zealanders reporting scams or near misses.
Fraudsters had stolen the name of Gareth’s digital marketing business and its distinctive branding. They were using it in an employment scam, offering people bogus jobs via instant messaging service WhatsApp.
The scammers then fleeced victims by convincing them to hand over money in “deposits”, stringing people along by saying doing so would unlock the payments for their work.
Thousands of Australians have been stung by such employment scams, costing them a combined $37 million from January 2023 to November last year, official figures show.
“It’s a strange one. I’m not too sure why I was picked, or how I got picked, or how I got found,” Gareth said from Dubai.
“Everything’s legit that they’ve copied. They’ve just changed a telephone number and a website. So, to the untrained eye, it’s very hard to spot that. What is scary is that they could do this to any business.”
It’s another example of how scammers exploit the world’s biggest social media platforms, including Meta’s WhatsApp and Facebook, to connect with potential victims, and of the weaknesses in big tech’s efforts to tackle fraud.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission deputy chair Catriona Lowe said employment scams – sometimes run out of large compounds overseas – targeted those who could least afford it.
Scammers may initially contact their victims via WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram or LinkedIn, and offer a work-from-home job that pays well with low effort, according to the National Anti-Scam Centre.
Lowe said most of these scams involved people being promised money to complete tasks, but once the target was close to being paid, an issue would arise.
Gareth said he had been contacted by about two dozen Australians since September, including 10 who had lost money to the criminals after being duped into believing they were doing work for his company.
Gareth said he had also reported the WhatsApp “business account” impersonating his firm.
As of January 2, the profile was still responding to messages, and still using the name, logo and address of Gareth’s company.
Then, after the SMH contacted Meta, the accounts were removed.
The SMH spoke to another three Australian victims who had lost smaller amounts – from $40 to $1600 – to the same group of WhatsApp scammers.
Liesel Albrecht, an event organiser from Gippsland in Victoria, suspects the criminals got her contact details when she clicked on a Facebook ad spruiking jobs you could do from home. As with WhatsApp, Facebook is operated by Meta.
When Albrecht was subsequently contacted by a scammer offering her freelance work, she was suspicious – but decided to see what would happen if she gave them the $40 they claimed would allow her to start the online work.
“It’s all on WhatsApp,” she said “They get you to sign up to this platform, which is basically clicking links to testimonials.”
Some jobs might earn 30¢, others $300, Albrecht said – but you can only get paid if you upload your own money first and put the account in “credit”.
The theory is you get the deposit back once the job is done, though the victims never get repaid – or their supposed profits.
“I didn’t get that far because I wasn’t willing to upload that amount of money,” she said.
In December, Meta promised to introduce tighter rules on advertisers to tackle scam ads targeting Australians on Facebook and Instagram after an investigation by this masthead revealed the tech titan was accepting money to push ads promoting notorious scams to tens of thousands of Australians.