Scammers are now using a simple photo of people’s cars to con social media users out of their money.
San Diegans drive their cars every day, to work, to dropping the kids off at school, perhaps not realizing that someone might be photographing their car to trick the owner into thinking it was stolen and ask them for a reward.
“My trust has been violated, my privacy has been violated,” said the victim of one such fraud incident.
That’s what an SUV owner felt when he saw this photo of his car on the Facebook page called “Tijuana Linea Roja,” which read: “One THOUSAND DOLLARS reward, robbed at gunpoint on Boulevard Insurgentes. They pointed at the driver’s head and then he took the car and fled.”
The owner of this vehicle claims that the post is a complete lie and that his vehicle was not stolen in Tijuana.
The woman asked NBC 7 to withhold her identity, as this photo in the post was taken in front of her home in San Diego.
“I have a family, so I’m worried about them watching us and targeting us. Our safety is our concern,” he said.
Considering the violence and crime that no one seems to be able to stop in Tijuana, the Tijuana Citizens Committee for Public Safety is not surprised by this type of fraud.
“To commit fraud, I mean this is something where you have to have some kind of intelligence,” said Roberto Quijano of the Tijuana Citizens Committee for Public Safety.
It is the intelligence and creativity that is able to convince people that a car was stolen at gunpoint with a simple photo. This post has almost 300 comments and some users even claim to have seen the same SUV in Tijuana.
“Once they get the call, they call the victim back and say, ‘I’ll give you a reward to find my car, give me your bank account so I can send you money, give me your full name ‘”, Quijano. said
Scammers may even ask you to log into a website to enter your bank account information to collect the $1,000 reward. Here’s something a cybersecurity expert said you should never do.
Never give out your bank information over social media. There are services that actually, and we have to be careful with these as well, there are services that actually allow us to log in and then connect our bank account,” said Nikolas Behar, Ph. D. and assistant professor of cybersecurity .at the University of San Diego.
The victim said she sent a message to Facebook to have the post removed. After explaining the situation, she was told that the post does not violate Facebook’s rules.
NBC 7 sent a message to the administrator of the Tijuana Linea Roja Facebook page, but never heard back.
