“I have to pay back €4,700”: Sponsored Instagram scams are still claiming victims

A month after our article on the subject, Instagram has still not removed accounts promising money for financial services, and still allows them to run sponsored ads.

The same strategies are still working on Instagram, even a month after Numerama warned the social network. As we mentioned, mysterious accounts, claiming to be able to make you a lot of money very quickly, display advertising for “their services” in the middle of the stories of your loved ones. It's not so much the attempts at trickery on social networks that are new, but the fact that accounts can now sponsor them, in order to reach as many people as possible, and to target the people of their choice.

In our previous article, we already talked about the fact that the scammers target, in priority, people who need the most money, young people, and people in precarious situations. Instagram, however, did not react, and since then, several people have been trapped again.

"easy money"

Emma*, a 20-year-old student from Reunion, is one of them. She came across one of these sponsored posts a few days ago in early June. “I contacted the person to find out more”, she explains to Numerama, “I was in need of money, suddenly it attracted me”. The account she contacts, "luxury_club2", explains to her that the company he works for is trying to pay less tax, and wishing to escape too much taxation, is looking for volunteers to temporarily house some of their money in other banks.

The technique is the same, but there is something new here: “luxury_club2” explicitly asks to go through the neobank Revolut, through Western Union, and through “PCS coupons”, rechargeable prepaid cards. After reassuring Emma by sending her screenshots of other people he was talking to, the Instagram account asks the girl for her bank details in order to make the transfer. And indeed, the next morning, Emma has nearly 8,000 euros in her account.

The “luxury_club2” Instagram account scammed Emma

She then sends 2,000 euros via Revolut, 1,100 euros via Western Union, and 1,600 euros in PCS coupons, which should have left her with a share of around 1,700 euros. However, half an hour later, she receives a call from her bank telling her that she is cheating. Accused of having stolen the check, her bank account and her card are blocked. From then on, of course, “luxury_club2” no longer responds.

Difficult to get reimbursed

For the victims of these scammers, the bad news doesn't always end there. When the banks do not directly accuse their customers of fraud, they refuse in most cases to reimburse the transfers, and people find themselves with sometimes vertiginous overdrafts, which they must recover. This was particularly the case for Alice *, who had to use an online kitty to manage to collect more than 5,000 euros in one week, the deadline granted by her bank.

As for Emma, ​​after the call from her bank, she went directly to the gendarmerie to lodge a complaint, which the officials refused to take (which is illegal). "They told me that I had to settle all this with my bank, and then come back if it didn't work," she explains. Even worse, the gendarmes tell her that she could be prosecuted, and even advise her to get a lawyer. She has not yet found a solution to her situation.

Contacted a month ago by Numerama, Instagram had replied at the time that, "as soon as [the moderators] saw fraudulent ads, the teams deleted them", and that they "worked in collaboration with the authorities in order to identify and block this type of account as quickly as possible. However, all the accounts with which we had exchanged are still active, and others have since been created. Asked again about this delay, the social network simply told us that, thanks to our report, it was going to "raise these accounts to the moderation teams”.

Is such inaction for more than a month punishable? Not sure. “Platforms like Instagram consider that they have no responsibilities, that they do not have to check what is happening on the accounts if it is not explicitly illegal content, and French law gives them reason", explains the lawyer expert in digital law Sabine Marcellin. In addition, for the practices of these accounts to be recognized as illegal, they would have to be judged as such by a court. It is only then, and if Instagram is slow to remove the content when it has been reported, that the social network could be sued for breach. For now, accounts like “luxury_club2” are unfortunately likely to crack down for a while.

*Names have been changed

This article was updated on June 12, 2020 at 6 p.m. to add Sabine Marcellin's response.

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