Yesterday I had a very strange experience, Facebook-related. A scammer is pretending to be me, commenting on my show page, as me, telling commenters that they’ve won a cash prize. Apparently, fake me is giving away $20,000 in cash prizes. All you need to do is give ‘fake me’ your credit card details. 

Trust me, if I had 20 thousand dollars to give way right now, it would be to Ukrainian refugees, not people on Facebook.  

So this fake Kate Hawkesby, which has pictures of me ripped off Google, is out there in the wild west of the internet trying to scam people. I only got clued into this when people started messaging me yesterday on Instagram telling me they were so excited to have been selected. I asked them to send me the link, and thus unravelled the fake news trickery that’s out there in my name.  

Here’s the really awful bit. Facebook won’t believe me that it’s a scam.  

My boss contacted our security team here at NZME, he contacted the digital people, he reported the fake account and the scam to Facebook itself and included proof of the real me page versus the fake me page.  

Seems like enough good evidence to me. But not for Zuckerberg. His Facebook bots or support team - whoever they may be – came back to us hours later declaring in all their wisdom, that upon investigating, they’d discovered that the scammer was in fact me. I kid you not. 

Facebook tells me there’s nothing to investigate because their insightful probing shows I am indeed the fake account. How is this possible? More to the point, how is it advertisers are happy to part with thousands if not millions of dollars to advertise on this platform – which can’t even patrol correctly what’s fake and what’s real? How could you ever trust Facebook? And why would brands want to align themselves with such a shoddy platform?  

Mainstream media like us have to be beyond reproach, scrupulous, jump through many regulated bureaucratic hoops for our advertisers. We have to be clean as a whistle. Yet, Facebook, it seems, can do what it wants. It can literally leave up a fake scam impersonating someone, attempting to rip people off, all because it can’t tell the difference between real and fake. How worrying is that?  

As I sit here now, fake me remains out there messaging people who comment on our show page, that they’ve won thousands of dollars. I spent a good chunk of yesterday messaging people back explaining sadly they'd not won anything. But I can understand their confusion, scammers are clever, the pictures are mine, the ZB logo is there, it’s got ripped off sponsor IDs stamped all over it.. it looks legit.  

In fact, when alleged winners are contacted by fake me, they’ve asked ‘is this for real?’ and the scammer has replied ‘yes it’s legit – you win!’. 

So, who really wins here? Not us as Facebook users, not Facebook because they lose credibility, not advertisers because who’d want to be part of this shambles. 

The only winner is the scammer – the fraud. 

Worst of all, Facebook’s approved it.