Facebook Scam: Acts on behalf of the European Commission

The Fraud Fund claims to be cooperating with the European Commission. You can come across the site on Facebook. EPA / AOP

A scam site has appeared on Facebook that claims to be eligible for financial support from the Family Support Fund. The site claims that the fund is working with the European Commission. The profile of the page is quite credible, even though it is full of typos, and is probably built using a compiler.

Working as a journalist Marja Nyman started correspondence with the webmaster to see how the scam works in practice. He tells Iltalehti about his findings.

The webmasters were hardworking, with dozens of messages coming in during the week, and the editor’s messages were responded to quickly. Large amounts were promised in euros. A family with five children would receive almost a hundred thousand euros in money without collateral and no obligation to repay, and little would have to be done.

All you need is a registration fee

For those who acted as money distributors, it was enough to send them a copy of their ID and bank account number in the email provided by the site. After that, however, the journey took a turn. Before the euro could be withdrawn, the beneficiary had to put a registration and tax stamp fee into a Lithuanian account. The fee was 890 euros and could be paid in two installments.

At this point, Nyman asked for more information about the organization. It would have been nice to know the address of the organization and get some phone number for the office because there were so many questions. The answer came almost immediately. The Finnish office of the international organization was located in Tampere, but the telephone number went to France. The bank account was in a Lithuanian bank. The money went to an account of a woman named Grete, who is the leader of the organization. The Finnish office was headed by Maija-Liisa from Finland, whose photo was sent to confirm the matter. However, the office’s e-mail was created in g-Mail, and unexpectedly the street address was not provided.

To avoid any ambiguity, Nyman also received two photographs of the transfers, which were intended to show that the organization was indeed distributing the money to those in need. Almost 90,000 euros had been paid into S-bank’s account and Tuula had also received almost 80,000 euros. However, there was also a payment in the account statement to K-market Huettivuori, whose name is not available in Finland. According to the organization, the money had already been distributed to more than ten Finns. At least the office was active, as there were a lot of messages late in the evening and also on the weekends.

However, Nyman was not convinced by the moderately skilful image manipulations and asked more questions. The scammers were quite tenacious and answered their best inquiries. Eventually, he had to report that he could not afford to send even half of the registration fees requested.

The conversation ended with a bitter message from the scammer:

“If you can’t do what I ask of you, it’s not worth continuing with you because you’re wasting a lot of our time.”