Like and scare

Local retailers are battling against the growing scourge of fake Facebook pages out to scam their shoppers.

By Gaelle Walker

---

Scam, sham, cheat, con: dirty-sounding words that describe dark and dirty dealings. Not the kind of words that any local retailer would want uttered in association with their business, and certainly not by their shoppers. The problem though, is that this is exactly what is happening – and the problem is getting worse.

Retailers today are trading against a backdrop of unprecedented levels of cybercrime – and fraudsters have local retailers and their shoppers in their sights. A recent survey of 7,000 shoppers by cyber security company F-Secure claims that “cybercrime has never been more prevalent,” with 85% having received a digital scam attempt in the past 12 months.

The F‑Secure survey, which questioned shoppers from seven countries including the UK, also found that 36% said that they get more scam attempts now than they did 12 months ago. And it seems that social media is a key medium of choice for scammers.

Another survey conducted by F-Secure earlier this year, revealed that 80% of people who had encountered a digital scam in the last month, had done so on social media, with 62% of Facebook users saying they encountered scams every week.

The findings echo the experiences of independent retailers – increasing numbers of whom are being plagued by scammers trying to impersonate their stores’ official social media pages – with a view to scamming unwitting shoppers.

In fact, a straw poll of Scottish local retailers by SLR found that four out of five retailers had experienced the problem of fake social media accounts pretending to be their stores in the past year.

Daniel Malone, Implementation Manager at Socio Local, the company behind the Socio Connect platform which helps retailers manage their social media pages, is all too familiar with this problem.

“It’s something that we see somewhat frequently, based on cases reported to us,” he tells SLR. “The rationale is simple and the same as other phishing attacks where a fraudster might pretend to represent a corporate business or government entity to trick people into providing private or financial information. Though in these cases, they leverage the reputation of a local business on social media,” he says.

The danger that these types of scam attempts pose to legitimate retailers are clear. “They can create doubt for a store’s audience, who may be distrustful of content from that store in the wake of that page being impersonated – and rebuilding that trust can take time,” Malone explains.

Trouble in Tranent

One retailer who is sadly all too familiar with the troubles that fake accounts and social media scams can inflict on your business is Anila Ali. Shoppers at Anila’s Premier Ali’s Convenience Store in Tranent were targeted by online scammers last autumn, after the store, which became Scotland’s 500^th Premier in July 2023, launched a ‘like and share’ competition for shoppers to win a bottle of AU Vodka.

Just hours after the competition was posted on Facebook, a number of shoppers who had liked and shared the post started to receive messages from a Facebook page claiming to be the store. The fake page informed the shoppers that they had ‘won’ the competition and encouraged them to provide their bank details to claim their prize.

Anila explains what happened next: “One of our regular shoppers, who is also a local radio DJ, came in to tell us that he’d been contacted to say that he had won the prize. He was suspicious because he’d also been asked for a number of personal details. We instantly knew something was wrong as we hadn’t even drawn the winner yet!

“Shortly after his visit we received a couple of phone calls from other shoppers to say that they had received messages from the fake page telling them that they had won the prize too.”

Anila acted promptly. “We immediately told those shoppers that it was a scam page,” she says. “We would never reveal a prize win in that way, and we would certainly never ask for customers’ personal details!

“It was really disheartening because we love to run these types of competitions. They’re a fun and simple way to generate a bit of a buzz and our shoppers love the prizes, so it’s horrible when that gets marred.

“Thankfully none of our shoppers did fall for the scam but if a vulnerable shopper had done so, the outcome could have been terrible.

“We’re just a small business so having to deal with things like this is really unpleasant and quite scary.

“The other worry that we had is that shoppers could misunderstand the situation and think that it was us running the scam! We are hardworking community retailers and just don’t want to be associated with anything like that.”

And Anila is far from alone. A quick trawl of Facebook revealed numerous examples of stores impacted by the problem of fake Facebook profiles including Natalie Lightfoot’s well-known Londis Solo Convenience store and Premier Whitehills in Banff. A fake account for the SLR award-winning store surfaced in November 2023 featuring images of its café and highly prized local delivery service.

Another store fighting the battle against fake accounts is Pinkie Farm Convenience Store in Musselburgh. Managing Director Dan Brown told SLR that a number of fake accounts purporting to be his well-known store had surfaced over the years – generally always after he had posted a genuine ‘like and share’-style competition on Facebook.

“It’s a huge problem!” Dan says. “Obviously the last thing you want is for your shoppers to be scammed. It’s also incredibly time consuming to delete the scam comments or fake accounts and ultimately none of that actually stops the problem from recurring again.”

Socio Loco’s Malone agrees that competition posts, such as ‘like and shares,’ tend to be the hook that scammers hang their fraudulent activities on.

“In the last year, we mostly see fake accounts appear when a business runs a competition. The fraudsters use the same page name, profile pictures, and business information (address, opening hours, etc) to make a surface-level copy of the page. They then post the same competition posts but would ask for direct messages looking for personal information. Any business should make the terms of the competition abundantly clear and that they’ll never seek personal information to enter or win competitions or giveaways,” he says.

What to do

So, what should you do if scammers create a fake Facebook page pretending to be your store?

“First and foremost, retailers should immediately report that account or page,” Malone advises. “For Facebook, they can be reported as a Fake Page or as a fraud or scam, as appropriate.

“On Instagram, they can be reported as ‘Pretending to be someone else’. We’d also recommend they inform their followers of the impersonating page/account and ask them to also report it, which helps get these fake accounts taken down.”

Speed is also of the essence, Dan Brown adds. “When it happened to us, I was really quick to act. The only way to deal with these types of problems is to get on top of them quickly before they spiral.

“It’s vital that you have access to your Facebook page at all times but especially just after you post anything and particularly if it’s a post about a competition. As soon as I post anything, I constantly keep tabs on the page to see what’s coming up in the comments.

“We had an instance a while back where we had five fake accounts created in the space of about 10 minutes! It was in response to a ‘like and share’ post that we did when Prime Energy was first launched.”

The post received around 1,000 likes – the most Pinkie Farm had ever had. “But we ended up having to delete it all,” Dan says. “Since then, as a general rule we have now stopped posting ‘like and share’-style competitions altogether.

“Unfortunately, I think that any competition designed to generate likes these days just runs the risk of attracting scams – so we now try to avoid that as much as we can. This approach does challenge us to be a bit more thoughtful about how we grow our audience – by coming up with more innovative social media content that also drives shoppers into store.

“After all, you don’t want to end up in a situation where you’ve got a lot of people that are just entering competitions on your Facebook page and not actually ever visiting your store.”

Dan cites the example of a successful competition Pinkie Farm recently ran to celebrate its 10-year anniversary: “We put a post up on Facebook inviting shoppers to ‘buy any Irn-Bru product from our store to enter a draw for the chance to win a full Irn-Bru supporters kit!’

“We also make sure that any posts relating to competitions make it abundantly clear that winners will never be announced in the comments. We also post regular advice on how shoppers can identify our official Pinkie Farm Facebook page – which has more than 6,700 likes and 7,100 followers.

“It’s important that our shoppers understand that if they see a Pinkie Farm page that only has two or three likes, it’s a fake!”

Malone agrees with this approach and says that retailers can go one step further.

“To help your audience differentiate which page is the original, Facebook Pages have an ‘About’ section where one can find ‘Page Transparency’. This tells you the creation date of the page, if the page is running adverts, and which Business Manager owns the page. While fraudsters can mimic a page name, PFP, and opening hours, they can’t fake a Page Creation Date,” he explains.

Fortunately, since Anila’s store was targeted, no further scam attempts have taken place. “After the first scam happened, we put out a series of posts to explain what had happened to our shoppers,” she says.

“We actually have continued to run some ‘like and share’ promotions but we now ensure that we add a disclaimer to every single post warning shoppers to ‘be careful of fake accounts,’ and that we would never ask them for any personal details.

“We also tell them that the winner will only ever be announced on our official Facebook page and the date on which the announcement will be made. We also post a nice picture of the winner with their prize after the event.

“Thankfully we’ve not had another incident since that one, but we now remain ultra vigilant.”