With Brides all around the world wanting the perfect wedding day, Facebook seems like the perfect place to pick up a bargain and making it that much more doable to have the day of your dreams on a tight budget. This is probably the reason why so many scammers target brides-to-be. I’ve seen and spoken to a lot of people who have had bad experiences when dealing with buying/selling/booking through Facebook. There are so many fake profiles, posing as reliable businesses and using other companies images to pass off as their own work that it’s sometimes hard to know the genuine from the fake. It seems ever so easy for somebody to book a company through Facebook, hand over the money via bank transfer and for the business to give a fake address and come off Facebook, never to be seen again. Where does that leave the brides who have paid all their hard earned money to a fake business and have no way of ever receiving the money back? The same goes for any form of businesses, not just ‘weddings’, it could be somebody giving away a sofa and wanting you to pay postage, only the sofa never turns up. Globalisation has made it very easy for people all around the world to get away with conning people of money and this is just one way of doing so.
http://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/action/how-to-get-your-money-back-after-a-scam
This article talks about how you can go about getting your money back if you’ve been scammed online. Briefly, here are the main points it covers…
If you've paid for goods or services with a credit or debit card you have greater protection if things go wrong under Section 75 or chargeback.
If you used a debit card, you may be able to ask your bank to get your money back through the chargeback scheme.
If there is a transaction on your card you know nothing about, then you can make a claim from your bank as an unauthorised transaction.
Unfortunately, you can't always get your money back if you've been scammed, especially if you've handed over cash or you’ve paid via a wire service.
If you respond to an email from fraudsters and send money, there is no mechanism to get the money back if it's a transaction you authorised.
So, it’s not always possible to get your money back after being scammed online and so this is a huge downfall in Facebook, especially to new users who aren’t clued up on the signs. Personally, I think Facebook should better educate it’s users on how easy it is for people to scam via the site and should help people with tips on how to avoid being scammed. Either that or they should make it harder for unofficial businesses to create accounts. The only disadvantage to that may be that it may make it harder for official businesses to get customers as easily as people won’t always trust them and may be put off from buying from Facebook all together.
I really like the idea of making it harder for unofficial businesses to join Facebook and I really don’t think it would be that damaging. When you register a business with the likes of HMRC (or equivalent) you are given a unique business tax code, so perhaps when signing up to create a business fan page on Facebook, they ask you to enter in that code (which will be kept privately) so that they are then able to confirm and verify you as an existing business. I don’t think many scammers, if any at all, would register a fake business because of the information they would have to give to HMRC in order to do so. Also by doing this, Facebook would be encouraging businesses who have yet to register with the correct authorities to register with them in order to become verified as a business on Facebook and to avoid any fine for late registration or tax avoidance.
ReplyDeleteI also think that Facebook should, like you said, educate people on scammers as well. Especially to those in the older and younger (13 - 18 yrs) generation who perhaps don’t understand that they shouldn’t trust people online automatically. By doing this there will be people who use these services who are better educated about the matter, less likely to fall for these scams and then have the knowledge themselves to pass on to other people.
I totally agree with the notion of making it somewhat impossible to create false groups as cyber crime is a major problem in this era, like a post I found a while ago. I also agree with Amy with the idea of educating the younger minds of this generation however a downside to this could be that by educating them it could also teach them which is not something that we want to start, I don't think i could identify a false business and it is a point which could do with improving.
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