Sally Newall, seen here with son Ted, has been locked out of her Facebook business Kiwi Country Kids for months. Photo: RNZ / Alexa Cook
Kiwis are being warned to be extra careful online, with the rise of a scam targetting social media businesses that lures them with an advertising opportunity and then takes over their account.
One of its victims, Hawke's Bay vet and farmer Sally Newall - who runs a Facebook business called Kiwi Country Kids - has been trying for four months to get her account back.
She is raising three boys on her Hawke's Bay farm and educating the public about farming through her Kiwi Country Kids Facebook page.
It has taken her years to build up the business and her 40,000 followers, but in May it was all taken away by scammers who hacked her account, then blocked her from it and started posting clickbait videos and naked images.
"Because they are posting this explicit content it's very damaging to my reputation. I'm a vet and a farmer and I spend my days trying to help educate people about farming and what we do on the farm, now when people look up our name on Facebook they see images that are nothing to do with farming and nothing to do with me," she said.
It began with the scammers messaging her on Instagram, wanting to pay Newall for some advertising, which is a normal request for a social media business. She clicked a link they sent to allow the ads to be posted on her site, but in doing so the hackers gained full access and took over the administration of her account.
Online scam targets social media business
Since that happened, they have kept messaging her through Instagram.
"They're being very blatant about what they are doing. They've admitted that they've stolen my page, they've admitted they are making money off my page and that's why they've stolen my page.
"So they're basically trying to lure me into more scams at the moment. Even ongoing they're contacting me and saying 'if you agree to our terms we'll let you back on your page and give you 20 percent of the revenue from your page but we'll continue posting our videos'. They want me to keep posting so the page has some legitimacy," she said.
'Increasingly common'
Social media expert Katie Brown told RNZ that this type of scam was rife at the moment.
"Unfortunately I have seen a lot of this happening and it is becoming more common so it seems to be the current annoying thing that scammers are doing at the moment," she said.
Netsafe chief online safety officer Sean Lyons has also seen an uptick of these cases.
"Certainly it is increasingly common - we've had a number of individuals and organisations that have found themselves in this position," said Lyons.
He said regardless of how scammers got your details, the intent was the same - to gain control and access of your followers.
"The message for people is if you find yourself in this position then keep going in terms of trying to wrestle back the control of those places and spaces," he said.
Newall has been trying to wrestle that back for the past four months, but despite her and hundreds of her followers reporting the issue to Facebook - no action has been taken.
"It's just impossible. It's impossible to get hold of Facebook. You can't get hold of a human being at Facebook so I haven't gotten anywhere with trying to gain access to my page or even stop them posting all this nonsense that they're posting on the page," said Newall.
She said it was beyond frustrating that Facebook was not responding.
"They need to get on top of it. I'm not going to go back to using Facebook now - I've had an absolute gutsful of it.
"If they're going to make money off you, and they make plenty of money off my platform and off advertising on my page, then they need to have some responsibility when things like this happen," she said.
Netsafe and Brown are encouraging anyone in the same situation not to give up, and to keep persisting through Facebook's official complaints and reporting channels.
"They do need to go through that process for Meta to review that account and then they can restore it, and I've seen that with a number of people I've talked to - they've eventually managed to get through to Facebook and they're given their accounts back," said Brown.
Facebook - which is owned by Meta - did not respond to RNZs queries about this story.
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