When the first email from a stranger in Australia landed in an international businessman’s inbox, he thought nothing of it, dismissing it as just more spam.

“Hi,” the message said. “Are you running a scam or is this a legitimate business?”

Gareth, who runs a marketing agency in London and did not wish to use his full name, was quick to delete the email.

But in the weeks and months that followed, he received a flurry of similar messages on email, Facebook and LinkedIn – all from Australians or New Zealanders reporting scams or near misses.

It turned out that fraudsters had stolen the name of Gareth’s digital marketing business and its distinctive branding. They were using it in an employment scam, offering people bogus jobs via instant messaging service WhatsApp.

The scammers then fleeced victims by convincing them to hand over money in “deposits”, stringing people along by saying doing so would unlock the payments for their work.

Thousands of Australians have been stung by such employment scams, costing them a combined $37 million from January 2023 to November last year, official figures show.

“It’s a strange one. I’m not too sure why I was picked, or how I got picked, or how I got found,” Gareth said from Dubai.

“Everything’s legit that they’ve copied. They’ve just changed a telephone number and a website. So, to the untrained eye, it’s very hard to spot that. What is scary is that they could do this to any business.”

It’s another example of how scammers exploit the world’s biggest social media platforms, including Meta’s WhatsApp and Facebook, to connect with potential victims, and of the weaknesses in big tech’s efforts to tackle fraud.

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission deputy chair Catriona Lowe said employment scams – sometimes run out of large compounds overseas – targeted those who could least afford it.

Scammers may initially contact their victims via WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram or LinkedIn, and offer a work-from-home job that pays well with low effort, according to the National Anti-Scam Centre.

Lowe said most of these scams involved people being promised money to complete tasks, but once the target was close to being paid, an issue would arise.

“An obstacle might be introduced,” she said.

“So they might need to ‘level up’ or unlock certain features of the program that they’re using to do the work, and that’s really the point at which the money changes hands, and commonly through crypto payments and things of that kind.”

Alastair MacGibbon, Australia’s former e-safety commissioner, said while WhatsApp couldn’t monitor encrypted messages between individuals, the companies running messaging services should be able to recognise other signs of fraudulent behaviour.

Now the chief strategy officer at cybersecurity firm CyberCX, MacGibbon said messaging services were failing on that front.

“While they can’t stop usually victim zero or victim one, they can certainly stop subsequent victims by noticing a pattern of activity and then taking action by blocking accounts, removing messages, etcetera, and they largely choose not to,” MacGibbon said.

‘I am broken and broke’

Gareth said he had been contacted by about two dozen Australians since September, including 10 who had lost money to the criminals after being duped into believing they were doing work for his company.

Among them is Jane, a former television production worker from Sydney who did not wish to use her real name. She said she had $50,000 stolen from her after she was contacted by a scammer on WhatsApp and offered work as a contractor.

Months’ worth of WhatsApp correspondence, spanning 128 pages, shows how Jane desperately tried to claw back deposits she had made with the fake work platform, only for the goalposts to keep shifting, requiring her to hand over more and more money.

She told the scammer she was at risk of being evicted from her home, that she had been forced to go to a food bank so she could eat, that she was suicidal and “broken and broke”.

In response, the scammer ignored or berated her, asked if she was stupid, and told her she just needed to try harder to find the money.

“I’ve tried to help you by putting myself in your shoes, but what I see is that you don’t want to solve this problem. You’ve been telling me from the start that you have no money, rather than saying you’re trying to find a way to get it done,” the scammer wrote.

Jane replied: “I have exhausted all my avenues. I don’t even have gold [jewellery] to sell!”

The scammer responded: “You know this isn’t my problem.”

Jane said the initial message on WhatsApp, on September 23, had caught her at a vulnerable time.

She had been made redundant from her job in August, and despite a varied career in television production and retail sales, she was finding it challenging to get new work.

“I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just look for a little online job.’ I’m 66 years of age. I don’t have a lot of superannuation. I’ve hardly got any super now,” she said.

And I thought, ‘I just want enough money to be able to pay my rent and pay my bills and not dip into my savings.’”

After realising she’d been scammed, Jane said she reported the account used by the scammers to WhatsApp, including the business profile impersonating Gareth’s company – but the accounts continued operating.

Gareth said he had also reported the WhatsApp “business account” impersonating his firm.

As of January 2, the profile was still responding to messages, and still using the name, logo and address of Gareth’s company.

Then, after this masthead contacted Meta, the accounts were removed.

‘It’s all on WhatsApp’

This masthead spoke to another three Australian victims who had lost smaller amounts – from $40 to $1600 – to the same group of WhatsApp scammers.

Liesel Albrecht, an event organiser from Gippsland in Victoria, suspects the criminals got her contact details when she clicked on a Facebook ad spruiking jobs you could do from home. As with WhatsApp, Facebook is operated by Meta.

When Albrecht was subsequently contacted by a scammer offering her freelance work, she was suspicious – but decided to see what would happen if she gave them the $40 they claimed would allow her to start the online work.

“It’s all on WhatsApp,” she said “They get you to sign up to this platform, which is basically clicking links to testimonials.”

Some jobs might earn 30¢, others $300, Albrecht said – but you can only get paid if you upload your own money first and put the account in “credit”.

The theory is you get the deposit back once the job is done, though the victims never get repaid – or their supposed profits.

“I didn’t get that far because I wasn’t willing to upload that amount of money,” she said.

Albrecht said she too had reported the accounts associated with the scam impersonating Gareth’s business to WhatsApp.

She said Meta needed to do a better job of preventing criminals from using its advertising services.

“I use social media for my whole business, so [it’s] amazing like that, but… it’s sucking people into scams who could potentially lose a lot of money.”

In December, Meta promised to introduce tighter rules on advertisers to tackle scam ads targeting Australians on Facebook and Instagram after an investigation by this masthead revealed the tech titan was accepting money to push ads promoting notorious scams to tens of thousands of Australians.

The Albanese government has proposed new scam laws that would result in direct messaging services facing fines and being forced to pay compensation over scam-prevention failures.

A special taskforce has also been set up involving the ACCC to disrupt the criminal groups posing as businesses or recruitment agencies and advertising bogus jobs.

The ACCC’s Catriona Lowe said social media continued to be a “gold mine” for scammers targeting Australians. In the September quarter, reports of financial losses linked to social media increased by 146 per cent, she said.

‘No accountability’

Gareth has chosen to tell potential new clients about the swindle using the name of his business and also post a warning about the scam on Facebook – knowing it could lose him work.

He said big tech companies needed to take more accountability for fraud facilitated by their platforms and provide a clear way for people like him to report scams.

“At the end of the day, the person that’s been scammed has now been wronged, the business that’s been scammed has been wronged, and the platform that’s facilitating that [shows] no accountability.”

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Meta did not provide an on-the-record response to questions about the WhatsApp scam targeting Gareth’s business.

For Jane, the scam has consumed her life since that first message in September. The stress jolts her awake in the middle of the night.

“I owe friends thousands, my bank account is stripped, I have had to lie to banks and people, I have lost friends over this,” she wrote to the scammer in November, as she begged him for help.

“It has really screwed up my life.”

If you or anyone you know needs support, call Lifeline on 131 114 or Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636.

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