A Blackburn agency owner is warning the trade to be vigilant after a “scam artist” managed to restrict access to her business’s Facebook page and tried to extort more than £400.
Facebook applied restrictions to The Holiday Shop’s page after a social media user made numerous complaints alleging certain pictures had infringed his copyright.
Owner Marina Marsh, who is confident her agency had the right to use all of the posted pictures, which included one she had taken herself, entered into an email exchange with the social media user, who invited her to pay €500 to have some of the complaints withdrawn.
“Maybe it’s because we’re a small business, he thought we would pay it,” she said, going on to urge fellow agents to be on guard for similar ploys.
The Holiday Shop was prevented from publishing images on its Facebook account for 30 days after the complaints were lodged.
A total of eight complaints were submitted by the same social media user within 48 hours, Marsh said, but when challenged by email, the person was unaware how many complaints he had made and was unclear as to which pictures he had flagged.
He offered to retract complaints to allow The Holiday Shop a chance to more quickly regain full access to its account if Marsh paid him €500.
She refused and instead accepted 30 days of restricted Facebook access, which she feared would harm trading.
“I really expected us to be down on the previous year, but we were actually up – I don’t know if it was just a lucky month,” she said.
Marsh said she and her staff understand copyright rules and best practice on the use of images.
She contacted Facebook many times to let the site know what had happened, she said, but had not received a response. She also reported the incident to Action Fraud. Marsh added: “There are scam artists all the time and we’ve got to catch them out.”
Travel Weekly contacted Facebook’s parent company, Meta, for comment but received no reply.
Barry Gooch, chairman of Prevention of Fraud in Trade (Profit), said: “Agents need to be aware this is a potential issue on social media.”