New business owner issues warning after scammers set up fake facebook business page

THE owner of a new café in Stockton Heath has issued a warning after scammers set up a fake facebook business page in a bid to get credit card details from people entering a competition to win £50 vouchers.

Serdar Altındağ ran a competition on his own business page earlier this month offering three people a chance to win £50 vouchers at the new London Road café to help promote the new premises.

But first scammers targeted his page with comments and when he lost access to his own page, they set up a fake account offering the same competition, asking people to provide credit card details to verify themselves.

Mr Altındağ, who has struggled to get facebook to resolve the scam said: “We only opened on August 2nd and there was post on our page that we shared before we opened offering 3 people the chance to win £50 vouchers.
“However someone opened fake pages and started commenting on people comments and sending links out.
“Once I noticed I reported and deleted the comments and shared a warning on our page.
“Then a few days later we have lost access to our facebook page and I woke up this morning and saw that another fake page had been created and sending fake links out to scam people.
“We now have no access to our page this is why I can only send messages to people as much as I can. But there are 500-600 people commented on the post so its huge and we hope that no one will be effected and no one will get scammed.
“We are waiting a response from Facebook Meta business as they are working on this case since August 6th and they have not take any action since, even though we have been letting them know people are under potential fraud risk.
“It’s really sad for us while hackers are scamming people using our brand or pretending to be us!”

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— Warrington Trading Standards (@WTStds) August 19, 2023