A friend of mine got a message via Facebook a couple of weeks ago. It was from a friend of friend, whose name he recognised. This friend of a friend wanted his phone number. Not suspecting anything untoward, my friend shared his mobile number. Next, the person told him he had lost access to his own Facebook account and needed a code, which he was currently unable to receive. Could be please have the code forwarded to my friend, as a favour? My trusting friend decided to help out. Guess what happened next?

What happened was this: my friend instantly lost access to his Facebook account, losing years of photos and posts and also losing the list of contacts on his Facebook Messenger app. The scammers had tricked him into using the phone that was linked to his account to help them change his password. His account was now in the hands of scammers.
Why did the scammers want his account? Well, the first thing they did was start flooding my friend’s friends with stories of all the money he had supposedly made trading in cryptocurrencies. I suppose that if only one in a hundred fell for this and decided to try to follow his allegedly profitable example, the hijack would have paid off.
And people do fall for cryptocurrency scams, in a big way. An elderly friend of mine – a person who had bought and sold many shares over the years and considered himself a sophisticated investor – recently lost more than $200,000 to clever scammers. Following a link to a brilliant-looking website that masqueraded as a legitimate platform for buying and selling cryptos, this friend set up an account, transferred a few thousand dollars and instructed the platform admins to buy Bitcoin on his behalf. Soon he was talking to the admins on the phone, and within weeks he could see his account balance rise greatly in value. Excited, he agreed to pump in more money and to buy different types of crypto coins. Soon he had pumped in more than $200,000 in real money but was glad since his account was “worth” much more than that.
Reality dawned when his bank intervened to prevent a transfer he was trying to make. When he asked why, the bank told him the site he had been using to “trade cryptos” was almost certainly a scam. My friend phoned the admins of the trading site who assured him this was untrue. Spooked, my friend asked to withdraw his funds. Sure, he was told, no problem. Except that was the end of all communication with the admins. My friend asked for my opinion and I quickly found evidence that the site was indeed a scam. Sadly, his money is gone and will never be coming back.
Scam websites look so slick
It’s not hard to see why the scam worked. One factor was certainly the extreme slickness and professional appearance of the site. With its wonderful graphs and charts and lovely graphics it really looked like something dependable. That’s a big part of the trick, of course, as you can see from this ABC news report.
I was telling this story to another friend just a day or two ago and she turned red and confessed that she too had fallen for a near-identical trick. Fortunately her losses were under $10,000, but that’s bad enough. In her case the scammers were even more cunning. At a certain point, early in the piece, she got cold feet. Even though she enjoyed watching her “account balance” allegedly rising by viewing it online, she had a feeling something might not be right. So she asked for her original investment of $5000 to be returned. To her great relief the money was returned to her legitimate bank account.
The return of her money allayed her suspicions and she “reinvested” the money, plus a bit more. Not all that long afterwards, when she really wanted to close her account, the scammers – probably realising she wasn’t going to commit any really big sums – simply stopped communicating with her. Her money is gone forever.

What’s the first thing you might do if you’ve been scammed by fake crypto dealers and your bank tells you that you are on your own? Would you look online for some group that might offer recovery services? Apparently a lot of people do. It turns out this is a little bit like the situation where a burglar, having cleaned out your house, comes back a few weeks later to steal all the new stuff you bought to replace what they stole the first time. It turns out that a large number (perhaps all?) of these so-called recovery services are also scams. You will be asked for a whack of cash up-front to assist in the recovery process. You might pay up too, since you are desperate and of course the website of the recovery firm looks so slick and professional . . .
Let’s face it, it’s a jungle in here, just like it is out there, or maybe even worse.
I heard the other day of a bloke on the Central Coast who got a phone call from somebody claiming to be a senior manager of the bank he uses. He was told a story about how one of the bank staff was committing fraud and the bank, rather than call in the police at this stage, was trying to gather evidence to make the case watertight. Would this bloke agree to help them trap the bad guy? Sure, why not, said our trusting bloke. All he had to do was download some software that the bank was going to use to track the bad employee’s actions.
As soon as our man downloaded this software his phone went ping. A $20,000 withdrawal – his maximum daily limit – had been transferred from his bank account. Of course the whole story was a scam. His money is gone forever.
Scammers never sleep
The trouble is that the scammers never sleep. They are always on the case, probing for vulnerabilities and dreaming up new ways of ripping people off. Meanwhile, we poor little mugs are bumbling along, trying to remember 50 million passwords, scared stiff of being cheated but not knowing who or what to trust.
Twice I’ve been tricked into clicking on links on emails that looked legit, only to have my blood run cold when I realised, almost too late, that I’d made a potentially terrible mistake. I’ve lost count of the fraudulent phone calls and texts I’ve received, trying to get information from me to be used in some ripoff or scam.
Facebook is a bit of a paradise for scammers. People are constantly having their accounts hacked (like my friend) or, more commonly, cloned. Some scammer just copies your photo from your site, makes a new account in your name, and sends out fake friend requests to potential victims. Numerous advertisements on Facebook are just bait, luring you to download malware with a “Just happened now!” report of a supposed accident or simply trying to rob you with a “too-good-to-be-true” bargain of some sort.
One system the scammers use is posting, under fake accounts, heart-rending photos of stray dogs or missing children, urging people to share widely. Often you may see the exact same photo with the exact same sob-story, circulating in entirely different towns and cities, claiming the dog or child was lost or found in Brisbane, Sydney, Newcastle, Townsville or Darwin. Apparently the scammers wait until the post has been widely shared, then edit it completely to turn it into a post soliciting victims for crypto scams. So I’ve been told.
What’s Meta, the owner of Facebook, doing about scams? Good question. Read one answer here. The ACCC is having ago at Meta too. Read about it here.
And let’s not even talk about Marketplace which, like Gumtree and other buying and selling platforms, is infested with people trying to rip others off with fake or non-existent goods for sale. A relative of mine once wanted to buy an item on Marketplace but couldn’t easily arrange a time to collect it. They agreed to deposit money into the seller’s account and pick up the item later. What a surprise when the bank called to say they were stopping the payment, since the intended recipient’s account had been flagged for previously having been used for fraudulent purposes. Naturally the seller vanished without a trace.
The massive scale of the scam industry is hard to grasp. It is truly huge and boasts its own slave trade. There are entire scam farms in poor countries where kidnapped victims are forced to work as trolls and scammers on behalf of whoever is willing and able to pay the owner of the scam farm. Read about one example here. Also this one. And this one.
To learn a bit more about common crypto scams, visit the ASIC site here.