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I recently received a tip-off about a number of scam Facebook pages operating under the name ‘Humanitarian Financial Assistance’ or some variation of it. The pages were noticed by scamfighter Kristen who helps manage ScamAdviser’s Facebook group Global Scam Fighters. I decided to delve further to understand how people are being scammed through these pages.
A search for ‘Humanitarian Financial Assistance’ on Facebook brings up a number of pages claiming to be associated with the United Nations and the United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHSS). The pages have almost no likes and have been created in 2021 or 2022. They have profile images of US politicians and have set the page category to ‘Government Organization’ or ‘Financial Service’.
Following are the pages I found:
Scammers know that the more desperate a person is, the more vulnerable they are to scams. These pages seem to be targeting people who are in urgent need of money. Therefore, it seems that these pages are created to lure those who need financial aid into Advance Fee Scams.
The contact details given on the pages make it evident that they are not related to any organization. Free email IDs and virtual phone lines are being used, both of which are staples of scammers operating from Africa and Asia.
The pages contain emotional video testimonials supposedly from people who have received financial aid from these pages. However, it is a common practice by scammers to demand videos from victims if they want to receive the (non-existent) grants. The videos are generic and can be found on multiple pages.
The above video has a heart-wrenching comment by someone who is looking to the scam page for help after being duped of $1,500 by a different set of scammers. The humanitarian aid scammer tries to trap them by lying that the other pages are run by ‘online scam artists’.
The most popular page is one called ‘Humanitarian financial aid’ with 183 likes. I found a post on the page written in Russian mentioning a French phone number used for WhatsApp texts.
However, checking the page information reveals that it is managed from Benin, a country in Africa infamous for Advance Fee Scams. This virtually confirms the theory that these pages exist for the purpose of scamming Facebook users who are in desperate need of money.
The page details show that some of these pages have been operating for more than a year. Even though it is obvious to anyone with a trained eye that the pages are scams and do not exist to provide financial aid, they continue to stay up even after being reported.
In my previous article 4 Reasons Why It's Almost Impossible to Shut Down Online Scams, one of the major reasons discussed was inaction on part of tech companies including social media platforms. The pages named in the article have been reported by several scamfighters but continue to stay up. It would appear that Facebook does not agree that they are scams or is not concerned about the safety of its users. Their sophisticated anti-spam and anti-fraud algorithms are clearly not working well enough.
Scammers always tend to be a step ahead of scamfighting technology but there’s no excuse for a decades-old scam like this being allowed to operate openly on Facebook.
Unfortunately, taking the pages down is completely at Facebook’s discretion. The only action that users can take is to report the page. You can report pages by following these steps:
After this point, whether the page is taken down is stays up is completely in the hands of Facebook but you can rest easy knowing that you have done your part.
