CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) – Imagine losing the business you spent years building in the matter of minutes.
That’s what happened to a North Carolina content creator who was documenting history on Facebook.
“I photograph abandoned farm homes, neglected historic buildings, ghost towns, cemeteries,” Laura Stotts said.
Stotts created her “Diary of Abandonment” on Facebook nine years ago. A few months ago, she was just starting to monetize it.
“I’ve worked really hard to get there, and so it was a big milestone for me,” she said.
That all changed when she received an email invitation to be a guest on a Facebook LIVE event with another influencer.
They set up a Zoom call so she could learn how it works.
“He’s instructing me to push this button and that button, and the buttons that he’s telling me to push are not there,” Stotts said. “I don’t use Zoom often so I’m feeling frustrated thinking that, like, I don’t know what I’m doing. He’s getting frustrated and he says, ‘OK, let’s just switch the Zoom call to your phone.’”
That’s when he asked her to flip her phone camera around, showing him her account information on the computer screen.
“There was something that popped up on my phone that needed me to accept something, but it wasn’t like two-factor authentication,” she said. “It wasn’t anything that made me suspicious. The second I clicked on that is when they were able to add these two new e-mail addresses. They removed my e-mail address and at this point my account went on lockdown. There was nothing that I can do because they’ve got me marked as inactive.”
She was quickly removed as the administrator and lost all control of her account.
“I hung up immediately,” she said. “And then I went into, you know, panic mode.”
She watched as the scammer set up another page with the same title and stole her 218,000 followers.
“As my follower count is going down, theirs is going up,” she said. “So in real time I am watching my account get drained.”
Then, her page was deleted.
“It felt like the equivalent of having somebody coming into my shop, holding me at gunpoint, clearing out the register, stealing my business, all of my customers, and then shutting it down and kicking me out,” she said.
She reported the hack to META and asked her followers to do the same, but that didn’t stop the hacker.
“They backdated it, made it look like they had owned it since 2018,” she said. “Whenever I go to file a report with META … they look like they’ve owned my page since 2018 and I look like I’m the scammer.”
Once her followers realized the page was hacked, the scammers continued their efforts.
“They created a second fake page and then migrated my followers again,” she said.
Theresa Payton, a cybersecurity expert and CEO of Fortalice Solutions, said this is a common scam.
“These people study the operational processes of social media and they study us and they just know how to be one step ahead of us,” Payton said. “They’ll actually point you to credentials that are legitimate credentials of somebody else’s. A real podcast show, a real influencer, a real organization. So it all looks legit … and then they take over the account and then they monetize the account.”
Stotts had to start all over again, working to build up the following she lost.
She’s sharing what happened so it does not happen to other creators.
She continues to receive emails offering her collaboration opportunities on other Facebook LIVE podcasts.
“I know how much it impacted me and kept me awake at night, because I had just gotten monetized and was making some kind of decent money from it,” she said. “I can’t imagine what it would be like if it was my full-time gig and this is what I was using to support my family.”
WBTV contacted META for comment but did not receive a response.
Payton also offered the following advice:
- She says to be wary of any invitations like this that you receive, even if it appears that a legitimate content creator is involved.
- As soon as someone asks you to show them your screen or share credentials, that’s a red flag. She says you should ask them for another way to go about it. If they are legitimate, they will come up with something and if they don’t, you just saved yourself from becoming a victim of a scam.
Watch the full report Sunday night on WBTV News at 11 p.m.
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