Scamming the poorest

Workers with the homeless describe how scammers impersonate them.

Transcript

00:00It's really distressing to get phone calls from people that are absolutely destitute.

00:04Here at St John's Care, basically we want to give people food and dignity,

00:08but at the moment what they're actually getting is thinking that they're going to get a loan,

00:12and then the reality is they've been totally scammed. We've had people calling from all

00:16around the country that have basically given all their details, including their banking details and

00:20or their MyGov details, and they've been scammed all the money that they have. If you think about

00:25it, you've got nothing already, and the only thing you've got is coming in is your next sentiment

00:30payment, maybe in two or three days time, and that's gone. These people have been left with

00:34absolutely nothing. It's destroying to see this and destroying to hear it.

00:38What have your dealings with Meta been?

00:41Yeah, look, unfortunately over the last 15 months or so, I've been dealing with them

00:45probably a couple of times a week, trying to get these imposter pages taken down.

00:50Sometimes they come down quite quickly, other times they're up there for weeks and months at a time.

00:54At one stage we had up to 15 different imposter pages all impersonating our organisation at one

01:00given time, and obviously you can understand that the reach that these pages have, they're able to

01:05reach so many community members and unfortunately take their details from them.