Last week, a woman living in Reyno Ridge suddenly started receiving phone calls from her friends congratulating her on the R200 000 she had won.
The woman was bowled over, she had never entered the “Facebook lottery” which her friends were telling her she had won.
The woman asked her friends where they had heard that she had won such a large amount of money, and they told her that she had sent them messages via Facebook Messenger announcing her winnings.
According to the messages which her friends had received, not only had the woman herself won R200 000, but so did every one of her friends who had been messaged by the woman’s Facebook account.
This is the Facebook account, known as “Jenny Prinsloo”, suspected of having cloned the woman’s account, cheating one of her close friends out of thousands.
There was just one problem with all of this excitement and jubilation… The woman had never sent out any messages about winning money to her friends. She didn’t even know she had won anything.
The woman quickly logged onto Facebook to see what messages her friends were referring to, but found that no new messages had been sent from her Facebook Messenger account.
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Her account hadn’t been hacked, and she certainly didn’t send out any of these messages, so who did?
It turns out that the woman’s Facebook account had been cloned by a scam artist, who had created an account identical to the woman’s own using the woman’s photographs and status updates, and it is from this account that the scam artist started sending out messages to the woman’s friends.
The woman quickly alerted all of her friends that the messages they had been receiving from her were fraudulent, and that neither she nor any of the friends who had been messaged had truly won R200 000, but it was too late for one of her friends.
The woman was saddened to hear that one of her close friends, an older lady, had fallen for the scam.
The scam artist, using the woman’s name and profile picture, had told the woman’s friend that in order to receive the R200 000, she first had to deposit R3500 into the “Facebook Lottery’s” account.
The woman’s friend deposited the R3500, the last bit of money in her account, to the bank account indicated by the scam artist.
The person who had cloned the woman’s account had sent messages to her Facebook friends, trying to lure them into paying over money in order to “free up” prize money they’d never received.
The woman, after finding out that her friend had fallen for the scam, immediately advised her that there was no R200 000 prize to be won and that she should contact her bank that very second to cancel the payment, but it was too late.
The bank was unable to reverse the payment as the R3500 had already been withdrawn by the party to whom the bank account belonged.
“What am I going to do? That was the only money I had left this month!” the woman’s friend lamented, but there was nothing to be done and the scam artist had gotten away scott-free
The Facebook Lottery scam seems to be originating from a Facebook account which bares the name ‘Jenny Prinsloo’, and which indicates that she lives in Bloemfontein.
When the woman, whose life had been turned upside down by this conniving scam artist, made contact with ‘Jenny Prinsloo’, her only reply was a cold and heartless “Welcome to Facebook Lottery Promotion, how may I help you?”
