Our Director Amber Moncrieff and Practice Manager Jessica Laing are featured in the Newcastle Herald today warning of social media scams impacting local businesses, including Hunter Plastic Surgery.
This week we posted to our social media that patients and friends had let us know that copycat pages were sending them messages asking for nude photos and bank details!
And we quickly found out we were not alone with followers from other local businesses also being targeted, including our friends at Bao Brothers during a recent Instagram competition.
Thank you to Anita Beaumont at the Newcastle Herald for helping share the message for people to be wary of these copycat accounts and their scamming attempts.
Let’s hope Facebook and Instagram act to crack down on these criminals!
Ways to be safer on social media
1: Never give private financial or medical information over social media including in direct messages. We love getting patient selfies after surgery but our patients know to cover up the private bits and send to the right account: @HunterPlasticSurgery on both Facebook and Instagram.
2: Be on the lookout for copycat accounts - they will often have the same images as the person or page you are actually interested in, with only a letter or symbol different in their account name. Poor grammar and spelling is a common hallmark of scammers, although not always.
3: Look for verified accounts. Facebook and Instagram need to be more proactive in this space as currently it is often only pages with tens of thousands of followers which are awarded a "blue tick", even pages which have bought most of their followers! We call on the social media giants to at least offer some other form of account verification, perhaps something like a “grey tick” which shows the page has submitted identification documents and passed security checks.
See the full article
You can read the whole article in the paper today (with Amber and Jessica looking very cross with those scammers on the front) or online.
