Winnipeg man caught in scam after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was legitimate
CBC
A Winnipeg man who says he was scammed out of hundreds of dollars when he called what he thought was a Facebook customer support hotline wants to warn others about what can go wrong.
"I just felt like I needed to say more because other people are going to fall for this. It was such a good scam," Dave Gaudreau told CBC.
Gaudreau says the scammer he called was able to access his Facebook account.
What he didn't know at the time is there is no phone number for Facebook customer support.
The problem started after Gaudreau, a former Manitoba NDP member of the legislature, got a new cellphone in April and needed to transfer his apps, including Facebook, to his new phone.
But when he hit a problem moving his Facebook account over to the new phone, his wife did an online search and found what appeared to be a phone number for Facebook customer support.
Before phoning the number, Gaudreau did a search in Facebook Messenger to find out whether it was legitimate.
The answer he got in Messenger from the "Meta AI" artificial intelligence search tool was that the phone number he found, 1-844-457-0520, was "indeed a legitimate Facebook support number."
"According to Meta, right on the Facebook app, it's telling me that this is right. So I had no reason to think it wasn't," Gaudreau said.
When Gaudreau phoned the number, he was asked for his Facebook username, the email address linked to his account, and his phone number, which he gave to the woman on the other end of the line.
She then opened his Facebook account.
That's when the call took a turn, said Gaudreau.
"She was trying to tell me that we were being hacked, that our IP address was hacked and that they were watching every keystroke," he recalled.
The woman said she would clear the hackers out, but he had to give her access to his phone through an app she had him download.
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