The Pairi Daiza park victim of identity theft on Facebook

The ransom of success. On Facebook, you can find anything and everything, and that’s probably what makes the strength of this social network. This is also its weakness, the platform being one of the favorite playgrounds of scammers. This time, it was the Belgian animal park Pairi Daiza who paid the price, through an identity theft to scam its fans.

According to the management of the park, a Facebook page entitled “Zooparc Pairi Daiza fans” was put online in mid-April. With this carrier name, the page quickly accumulated up to more than 7,000 followers. An enticing post offered to enter a contest to win four entries for the park. To participate in the contest, all you had to do was comment “happy birthday” under the post and wait to be drawn… Of course, all those registered were winners. Finally losers finally. Because to be “validated” as a winner, the lucky one was redirected to a fake website asking for their banking information. A classic.

” God bless you “

The management of the (real) park quickly reported the scam to Facebook, which took down the page. Except that others have appeared on the same model. The scammers fed the comments under the “contest” post with fake Facebook profiles, which were quickly identifiable by carrying out a simple Google image analysis. There are also many clues common to this type of online scam, such as spelling mistakes, dates of creation of recent pages, phrases like “God bless you”.

Despite everything, Pairi Daiza affirms that some people have fallen into the trap and that they “have seen their account debited by a few tens of euros”. A complaint has been filed with the police. For the scammed, it will be necessary to carry out this process personally without much hope of recovering their money, scams of this kind being generally piloted from abroad.

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