Ask the Admin: How to prevent getting scammed on Facebook

With the proliferation of race entry scamming I asked Demitri Baroutsos, group admin of the popular Cape Town Runners Community, for his advice and insights on how to prevent being a race entry scamming victim.

This is part of series of articles aiming to educate and prevent scamming.

READ MORE: A List of Known Race Entry Scammers

1. What advice do you have for runners to avoid scamming?

• Look up and confirm the event/race conditions for substitution by going to the official event website/page on the events management page where you purchase entries/tickets (e.g. TopEvents, Entry Ninja, Webtickets, etc.). Some events are explicit about substitutions not being allowed at all. If someone is offering you tickets/entries to an event that has this specified, they are for certain attempting to scam you.
• Where an event/race allows for substitution, they will also clearly denote the terms of the substitution. For example, some events/races offer a certain window period for allowing substitutions to take place (x-days after an event closes/sells out and usually x-days before the event takes place). If anyone is offering you tickets/entries and it is outside the valid substitution period for that event, they are certainly attempting to scam you. 
• The bigger/more popular events like Two Oceans Marathon, Comrades and Cape Town Marathon are those the scammer targets the most because people are “desperate” for entries. These bigger events/races have online portals for handling the substitution as well as handling the money (payment from new entrant, substitution fee, as well as refund of the original entrant). The idea is that “no money changes hands between entrant and the substituting entrant”. In these scenarios if you are being asked to pay for the substitution directly to the person (for the same face value, or often they try and do it for less to seem more appealing), then they too are certainly trying to scam you. 
• For the “regular” races/events, often where substitutions are not handled by the event organizer these also become easy targets for the scammers. These events allow you to substitute your entry but the onus is on you to pay the person offering the substitution or get paid by someone taking your entry off your hands. Howler managed the Cape Town Marathon substitutions through their member/entry portal but as of last year decided that it would let entrants exchange money and simply handle the name change in their database. 
• Many of the bigger races listed above, allow you to check that someone who is offering their entry up for substitution is an actual entrant. The “regular” races that use a third party timing system, often you can find entrants in the results page to confirm they actually do have an entry. This allows you to check the legitimacy of someone offering a substitution. The fake profiles on Facebook are usually created with fake names or using someone else’s name and profile picture they stole off their profile to re-create their fake scammer profile. 
• A scammer’s M.O. is also to request you pay them via e-wallet or directly to their mobile number via your banking app. This is a major red flag. For one, you cannot reverse the transaction after it has been completed, should you suspect/find out you have been scammed. Secondly, without bank account details, you can not verify the person actually a) has an account at that bank and b) has the same name as the person you’re trying to purchase the entry/ticket from. 
• Almost always the scammer will attempt to give you details and initiate the transaction over WhatsApp so they post their mobile number and ask you to DM/WhatsApp them. This is where a mobile app like TrueCaller is your friend. You can quickly look up their mobile number and TrueCaller will show you if someone has labelled them as a scammer and/or added comments to that profile on TrueCaller stating they have been scammed before and others should be careful dealing with this person. If you attempt to lookup/add the number on your WhatsApp you can also see whether the name of the profile also matches the name of the Facebook profile. 99% of the time there is a mismatch. When you are seeing posts for entry/ticket offers with an individual’s name but when you go to add their number on WhatsApp it shows a different name and it shows up as a business account, this is a huge red flag that they are likely a scammer. 
• Use Facebook’s search feature and search for the mobile number and then filter results by Recent Posts only, and you can also add a year/month using the Posts From filter. More often than not one or more posts will come up with the same scammer profile offering the same event/race entry substitution. Look at the wording of the other posts, you’ll find they are written in almost exactly the same way, the only change is the event name and/or date and the amount. 
• When looking for a substitution for yourself or someone else, stop making posts using the words “urgently looking” or “desperately looking” as you instantly become a target for scammers.

2. Can you explain what you do as a group admin to prevent scammers from joining and scamming from occurring?

• In group settings, ensure you enable Participant Approval (whether your group is public or private)
• If you have anonymous participation enabled, make sure you also enable post approval for nicknames and anonymous posts (not applicable if you have already turned on post approval for everyone).
• Also ensure to also turn on post edit approval (without it a benign post can be added and approved, and then later edited with something else entirely).

Red flags to look out for:

• With participant approval on, when new members request to join the group, you can see more details than normal under Participant Requests. Most notably, how long ago the user account was created on FB. This is useful for quickly weeding out scammer accounts as they are for the most part, newly created, within a day, a few days or even a few weeks ago. With enough reporting of accounts by different people the accounts usually do not last long and get removed and hence the need to create new scammer accounts with fake profiles. 
• Aside from how new an account is, the participant request also shows you what groups the user also belongs to (in common to you and others). This also allows you to check their profile out in those other mutual groups for any posts that look suspicious. People will eventually lock down their profiles so that only friends can see their posts. Nothing out of the ordinary here with people’s need for privacy. However newly created FB accounts with immediately locked down profiles are ones to be suspicious of. For those scammer accounts that are not locked down yet, the telltale signs are, almost no posts, or if they have tried to “curate” their account with random posts, you’ll see various shares from varying and unrelated content to appear “real” – they will also usually take photos of random people and use them as profile pictures. More often than not, these posts and pictures have NO reactions and no comments, regardless of how long ago they were made. The friends list, if not locked down, will also show little to no friends or followers on their account.
• When it comes to suspicious posts the M.O. is usually turning off comments once they have posted their offer to sell an entry/ticket to an event. This prevents people from commenting and calling them out as a scammer to unsuspecting victims. Additionally, they will also post anonymously in the group. Other than group admins, you cannot see who the owner of the anonymous post is. As admins you can see who it is and look through their post history or their profile to investigate further.

3. What advice do you have for other group admins?

• Pretty much try and adopt the steps above, as a group admin. It might seem daunting at first, but once you set a few things up and start looking out for those red flags, they show themselves the more you get used to it. Use the Admin Assist tools as well for example to set up that a post gets commenting turned off and pending admin/moderator review if it has been reported by members more than x-times. 

4. What would you like to see Facebook do to make scamming more difficult?

• Due to Facebook’s user-base growth it understandably has become difficult to handle the influx of account/post reporting, hence the use of AI to handle them. However, since the last 5-6 years these reports go un-answered or are responded with “we checked and this account/post does not go against our community guidelines”. Fake profile/scam reporting should be handled by actual humans. AI could even be used to filter reporting by an account that is quite old (i.e. the reporter has been a Facebook user for a long period of time) as more legitimate than an account making a report that is less than 12 months old, for example. 
• Showing the age of a Facebook user account should be visible to everyone, not only to admins on pending member requests. This allows for more transparency and more easily see how old a user account is. This already exists for Facebook Page accounts, where you can go to About on that page and then click on Page Transparency. It will then tell you when that Page account was created, and how many (if at all) name changes it went through, as well as from how many different countries the page is managed. 
  
  (Outside the scope of what you asked, but using page transparency is a quick fire way to check out the legitimacy of a page, usually associated with free offers or competition giveaways of brands they are not affiliated with (e.g. most recently a Mica Stores page, which was fake, offering car giveaways for a new store opening). 

5. Have you ever had a scammer get stroppy or aggressive with you?

• With me personally, no when I call them out they just block me, hence the need for another Facebook account to search for them. So now I don’t call them out on their posts but report them and let people know who they are.

6. Do you have any funny, weird or otherwise interesting stories about scammers on the Cape Town Runners – Community group?

• Not so much since I’m actively spotting them and blocking then before they can make posts/comments in the group. Admin features like new member approvals, comments of non-member approval helps in this regard a lot.
• Just great when others let people know too, the more spotting and flagging them, the better.
• There has been the odd “false claim” but when you check that person’s profile (who’s alleged to be a potential scammer), you can see they’re an active member in the running community and not. Caveat to that, is if someone’s account is compromised and taken over by a scammer, but you can normally tell pretty quickly that’s not their usual tone or writing style

7. Anything else you’d like to say about race entry scamming?

• With the advancement of technology and online portals, event/race organizers should have no excuse for not doing substitutions through their portal and handling the payments to avoid people being scammed. This will make it much harder for scammers, except for the few that are not aware of substitution procedures and fall victim to the scammers.
• For people looking for substitutions, be more vigilant, research and ask others if you’re not sure.

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