A trusted friend caring for a loved one and asking for help.
Facebook friends responded when a woman was helping an aging relative sell cars and jewelry to pay for a nursing home.
The problem was that it wasn’t her.
The hackers took advantage of all those pictures saved onto the Facebook page and used AI to create new fake photos that fooled Kelly McCormack’s friends, she told Channel 2 Consumer Investigator Justin Gray.
The photo had her face and a flight attendant uniform like the one she wears to work, but it was not her loved one in the bed or her Gucci purse.
“They said it was my uncle, was not my uncle. I don’t even know this man,” she said.
The AI picture was posted by a hacker to McCormack’s Facebook page just days after her father died.
In a post, the imposter told friends her uncle was moving into a personal care facility, so she was selling the cars from his used car dealership and his watch collection.
“My friends were texting me saying, ‘Hey, are you selling this car?’ ‘Are you selling these Rolexes? I didn’t know you had 10 Rolexes.’ Neither did I,” she said.
David Schofield sent his friend a $3,000 deposit through Zelle.
“She had just lost her father a week before this. And we’re like wow, you know, this is terrible. What else is she gonna go through? So be glad to help her out,” he said.
McCormack now knows multiple friends paid those $3,000 deposits to the hacker after exchanging messages with who they thought was a trusted friend
“You’re taking advantage of friends that you would never want to take advantage of,” she said.
“I mean, if this was Facebook Marketplace, I would never put down a deposit. Absolutely never. Right? But now these evil people are even getting us to not trust our friends,” Schofield said.
McCormack says she got nowhere with Facebook.
Even friends who reported the fraud were told by Facebook it did not violate community standards.
“There’s no one to talk to, to say this is not me because you can’t get in because your email is not associated,” McCormack said.
Justin Gray reached out to Facebook, and a contact there is working to resolve it.
Multiple police reports have been filed, with at least three different people who lost $3,000 to the hacker.
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