Flintshire Trading Standards : Scammers using fake missing person and animal Facebook posts

Here's how it works: You see a Facebook post about a missing person and/or animal, so you share it. More and more people share this post until it has a far reach. When this happens, the scammer edits the post to show a scam with phishing links. In many cases they change the post to advertise surveys or housing websites, which enables them to gain money.

As you have shared it, your friends may inadvertently click them thinking you’re recommending it. Often the comments on these posts are disabled as well so other users can't warn you.

Before sharing any post take a good look at it, sometimes you can tell by what’s in the background that the picture was not taken in the UK e.g. cars with foreign registrations, types of houses and trees.

Look at the original posters profile this will often be a new account with no friends and just a single profile picture and their location may state they live in a different country.

Please report these scams to Facebook so that they can be removed and to Action Fraud https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/

Photos by Timothy Hales Bennett and  Erik Mclean on Unsplash