A Facebook notification on Gary Bernhardt\u2019s phone woke him up one night in November with incredible news: a message from Mark Zuckerberg himself, saying that he had won $750,000 in the Facebook lottery.<\/p>\n
\u201cI got all excited. Wouldn\u2019t you?\u201d said Bernhardt, 67, a retired forklift driver and Army veteran in Ham Lake, Minnesota. He stayed up until dawn trading messages with the person on the other end. To obtain his winnings, he was told, he first needed to send $200 in iTunes gift cards.<\/p>\n
Hours later, Bernhardt bought the gift cards at a gas station and sent the redemption codes to the account that said it was Zuckerberg. But the requests for money didn\u2019t stop. By January, Bernhardt had wired an additional $1,310 in cash, or about a third of his Social Security cheques over three months.<\/p>\n
Bernhardt eventually realized that he had been the unwitting victim of a scam that has thrived on Facebook and Instagram by using the sites\u2019 own brands \u2014 and its top executives \u2014 to lure people in. At a time when the real Zuckerberg has vowed to clean up Facebook, the Silicon Valley company has failed to eliminate impostor accounts masquerading as him and his chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to swindle Facebook users out of thousands of dollars.<\/p>\n
An examination by The New York Times found 205 accounts impersonating Zuckerberg and Sandberg on Facebook and its photo-sharing site Instagram, not including fan pages or satire accounts, which are permitted under the company\u2019s rules. At least 51 of the impostor accounts, including 43 on Instagram, were lottery scams like the one that fooled Bernhardt.<\/p>\n
The fake Zuckerbergs and faux Sandbergs have proliferated on Facebook and Instagram, despite the presence of Facebook groups that track the scams and complaints about the trick dating to at least 2010.<\/p>\n
A day after The Times informed Facebook of its findings, the company removed all 96 impostor Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg accounts on its Facebook site. It had left up all but one of the 109 fakes on Instagram, but removed them after this article was published.<\/p>\n
\u201cThank you so much for reporting this,\u201d said Pete Voss, a Facebook spokesman. He could not say why Facebook had not spotted the accounts posing as its top executives, including several that appeared to have existed for more than eight years. \u201cIt\u2019s not easy,\u201d he said. \u201cWe want to get better.\u201d<\/p>\n
Facebook requires people to use their authentic name and identity. Yet the company has estimated that perhaps 3 per cent of its users \u2014 as many as 60 million accounts \u2014 are fake. Some of those accounts are disguised as ordinary people, some pretend to be celebrities such as Justin Bieber.<\/p>\n
In congressional testimony this month, Zuckerberg said Facebook was improving its software to automatically detect and remove such accounts. Facebook officials have said the company blocks millions of fake accounts trying to register each day and analysts said the social network has improved its efforts to remove the accounts.<\/p>\n
\u201cFake accounts, overall, are a big issue, because that\u2019s how a lot of the other issues that we see around fake news and foreign election interference are happening as well,\u201d Zuckerberg told lawmakers, adding that Facebook is hiring more people to work on reviewing content.<\/p>\n
But major holes remain. Interviews with a half-dozen recent victims \u2014 and online conversations with nine impostor accounts \u2014 showed that the Facebook lottery deception is alive and well, preying particularly on older, less educated and low-income people.<\/p>\n
The Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg impostor accounts typically use the executives\u2019 pictures as profile photos and list their Facebook titles. Some post manipulated images of people holding oversize cheques. The names of Zuckerberg and Sandberg are sometimes misspelled, or use parentheses and middle names (Elliot for Zuckerberg and Kara for Sandberg) to evade Facebook\u2019s software.<\/p>\n
Many of the impersonators had dozens to hundreds of followers; several had thousands. They are aided by a network of other sham accounts with generic names, such as Jim Towey and Mary Gilbert, which purported to be \u201cFacebook claim agents.\u201d<\/p>\n
The scammers seek victims who, based on their Facebook and Instagram profiles, seem vulnerable, said Robin Alexander van der Kieft, who manages several Facebook groups that track the scams. The various fake accounts share information about successful shakedowns and continue pouncing on those victims, he said. He has traced many of the Internet Protocol addresses of these fake accounts to Nigeria and Ghana.<\/p>\n
The pitch often begins with an unsolicited \u201cHello. How are you doing?\u201d on Facebook or Instagram. The fake accounts then proceed, sometimes in broken English, to inform people of their enormous Facebook lottery prize.<\/p>\n
The charade has ensnared people like Donna Keithley, 50, a stay-at-home mom with four children in Martinsburg, Pennsylvania. In March 2016, an account with the name Linda Ritchey messaged Keithley \u201con behalf of the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg\u201d to pass on word of her good fortune: $650,000 in lottery winnings. Keithley wired $350 \u2014 a delivery fee \u2014 the next day.<\/p>\n
That began a monthlong saga. According to a 28,000-word transcript of a Facebook Messenger conversation between Keithley and the account, the scammer repeatedly played on Keithley\u2019s Christian faith to get her to send more money.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you good Christian with god fears?\u201d the Linda Ritchey account asked. \u201cCan you trust me and also have believe in me?\u201d<\/p>\n
Keithley\u2019s scammer ordered her to open new credit cards and bank accounts, and even to get a loan using her husband\u2019s 2001 Ford Taurus as collateral. Midway through the month, she said she had a minor stroke from the stress.<\/p>\n
By April 2016, she had used her family\u2019s tax refund and loans from relatives to pay the scammer $5,306.43 \u2014 much of it in money transfers to the name Ben Amos in Lagos, Nigeria.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just devastated the whole household,\u201d said her husband, Tim Keithley, a security guard who was making $10 an hour at the time.<\/p>\n
The ordeal was so costly, Donna Keithley said, the family\u2019s telephone service was shut off. They also had to go to a food bank.<\/p>\n
While Keithley still gets messages from accounts claiming to work for Facebook, she said she is now wiser. \u201cLord as my witness, no one\u2019s getting any more money from me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
After they are duped, victims may struggle with what to do next. Bernhardt, the retired forklift driver, said he didn\u2019t know how to report the scammers to Facebook. Keithley said she had called a number for Facebook she had found online, though she was not sure the number was authentic. She also reported the scam to local police, who said they couldn\u2019t help, and the Pennsylvania attorney general.<\/p>\n
A spokesman for the Pennsylvania attorney general said the office did not have a record of Keithley\u2019s report, but that it planned to contact her.<\/p>\n
Others said they regularly report scammers to Facebook, but the company can be slow to act.<\/p>\n
Bernhardt said that since he wired his last payment to the Zuckerberg masquerader in January, he has heard from two other Mark Zuckerbergs, one Sheryl Sandberg and other accounts promising him winnings in return for more cash.<\/p>\n
No conversations have gone as deep as with his original scammer. \u201cI thought we were getting real close,\u201d Bernhardt said. \u201cHe started calling me Mr. Gary and I started calling him Mr. Mark.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he had told his scammer about growing up in a foster home and his dream of owning a house on a lake.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey sucked me in because they knew my dreams,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The New York Times<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Facebook notification on Gary Bernhardt\u2019s phone woke him up one night in November with incredible news: a message from Mark Zuckerberg himself, saying that he had won $750,000 in the Facebook lottery. \u201cI got all excited. Wouldn\u2019t you?\u201d said Bernhardt, 67, a retired forklift driver and Army veteran in Ham Lake, Minnesota. He stayed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9786,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","tags":[],"news-category":[320],"yoast_head":"\n