• PHOTO: Sandra Harrison has been disappointed to watch a popular local community notice board she helped create on Facebook become a home for online scammers in the last few months.
COONAMBLE residents have voiced their building frustration over an increase in spam posts clogging up their Facebook newsfeeds in recent months.
The majority of the posts seem to be coming from public community groups, however the people in charge of these groups say it is almost a job in itself to try and stay on top of them all.
One of the groups with the biggest followings is the Coonamble Notice Board, which has been around for about eight years and built up a following of just under 3000 members.
Group co-founder Sandra Harrison said for the majority of its existence, the group has been a great method of sharing community information, however this had changed within the last six months.
“The random posts started around the beginning of this year or a bit earlier, it wasn’t that long ago,” Mrs Harrison said.
“Unfortunately, I would say a large percentage of the page is now made up of mostly useless information and clutter, whether it’s people trying to sell things or these weird ads to win a Walmart gift card.
“It’s very disappointing because none of the information is actually relevant to our community and the whole idea of making the group was for the community to put up event notices.”
The Coonamble Community Notice Board is not the only community-based group to have been hit by the scammers in recent months.
Angela Hanigan from the Coonamble and District Education Foundation (CDEF) said the group’s Facebook page was hacked in the lead up to the event which caused her a lot of online headaches.
“Some person made a fake Classic Wallabies event on the same day as ours and made us a host,” Ms Hanigan said.
“We deleted it as soon as we saw it but in the week leading up to the event, there were some suspicious people posting saying they had tickets to sell because they couldn’t go anymore as well as others posting a link to watch it live, which wasn’t even an option on the day. It wasted heaps of my time deleting and blocking them all.”
Earlier this year, online financial broker Savvy released a report in May about increases in cybercrime in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the report, more than $72 million had been lost in scams by May this year, while one in four Australians have fallen victim to identity fraud.
Noting the recent spike in scam posts on the Coonamble Community Notice Board, Ms Hanigan said she wouldn’t be surprised if a few people from Coonamble may have fallen prey in some form or another.
“As someone who uses the internet a lot, I can spot them as scams quite easily, but there are lots of people out here who don’t use it as much and might click on the links and give away their bank details or other information. It makes me sad,” she said.
While Mrs Harrison is not a regular Facebook user, she has been trying to address the issue since mid-May with Tara Naden, attempting to both block the scammers and even delete the page altogether.
However, she said she has been hindered from doing anything because she doesn’t have access to the account which originally created it.
“The group was originally set up through an account created for the RTC (Rural Transaction Centre), but I don’t have any passwords for it,” she said.
“The other frustrating thing is that I can’t actually get onto the Facebook security team to help out. I’ve sent off six emails explaining the situation and the only reply I’ve received said my ID didn’t match the account linked to the group.
“I did end up finding a phone number on the help centre page but I’ve tried it about 15 times and it isn’t connected.”
The unending scam posts have already seen at least one community group close their social media after the Facebook group run by the Coonamble Touch Football committee to post game times and scores was overrun.
Committee member Emily Ryan said the scam posts began appearing towards the end of last year and once they began, they continued to build until it took up the majority of the page’s content.
“It was a public group that everyone could join which made it really easy to get in,” Ms Ryan said.
“Unfortunately, no matter how many times you deleted them, they would still come up. Eventually, it got too much and the committee decided to create a new page and move over to that.”
While she was initially nervous that creating a new page would mean they would have to rebuild their following from scratch, she said it actually ended up working out in their favour.
“I run a lot of other community pages, and I’ve noticed there are less scammers on the admin-run pages rather than the group pages,” she said.
“We did see a bit of a drop off, but that was mostly because there were people on there who no longer played and the new page has ended up with all the current players.”
Mrs Harrison indicated unless she finds a way to rid the Coonamble Community Notice Board of the spam accounts, it is unlikely the page will continue to be recognised as a community page for much longer.