Pennsylvania woman loses $247,000 in Facebook scam over three years<\/p>\n
A Westmoreland County woman is warning others after losing nearly $247,000 in a Facebook scam that preyed on her empathy and spanned more than three years. <\/p>\n
You can view News 8 headlines in the video player above.<\/p>\n
A Facebook message leads to a stolen account <\/p>\n
The woman said the scam began three years ago when she received a Facebook message from a profile claiming to be a family member who needed her account details for an emergency. <\/p>\n
“I said yes. They sent me a code. I gave them that code. Then, they took my account,” she said. <\/p>\n
Fake Meta representative demands payment<\/p>\n
After being locked out of her Facebook account, she received a message from someone claiming to be from Meta, Facebook’s parent company. The individual offered to help recover her account for a fee of $1,200, which she paid. However, the fees continued to escalate, eventually turning into demands for gift card codes. <\/p>\n
The woman purchased hundreds of gift cards for brands like Apple, Foot Locker, and Walmart, sending the codes to fake phone numbers that texted her daily. <\/p>\n
Promises and threats keep the scam going<\/p>\n
“Maybe the reason I continued was because at every turn, they’d tell me you’d get the money back,” she said. <\/p>\n
She added, “They were threatening to contact all of my family members. At that point, I’m thinking that I’m done.” <\/p>\n
The emotional and financial toll<\/p>\n
“Mental health was more important at this point. I was losing it. I was truly losing it. I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to function,” she said. <\/p>\n
Earlier this year, she reported the scam to state police. By then, she had paid out $247,000, which she is unlikely to recover. <\/p>\n
Officials warn against common payment scams<\/p>\n
In a release about the scam, the Westmoreland County District Attorney’s Office reminded the public to never give out personal information or issue payments in the form of gift cards, wire transfers, Green Dot cards, or cryptocurrency. <\/p>\n
Additionally, Meta would never contact users in such a manner or request money to resolve account issues, according to the company’s policies. <\/p>\n
The woman said she is no longer active on Facebook.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pennsylvania woman loses $247,000 in Facebook scam over three years A Westmoreland County woman is warning others after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258667,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7802,109803,95878,28,30,29,23258,44356,109804],"class_list":["post-258666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-apple","tag-facebook-scam","tag-foot-locker","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-walmart","tag-westmoreland-county-district-attorneys-office","tag-westmoreland-county-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}