Aussie woman’s warning after ‘devastating’ scam message

An Aussie small business owner already hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic was dealt another devastating blow after being duped by a disguised message.

A Victorian family has been left devastated after their business, already decimated by their state’s many lockdowns amid the Covid-19 pandemic, then had their social media account hijacked by Turkish scammers.

Alyce Gorgievski, 35, runs Hire A Kombi with her husband in the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria’s south.

In May this year, she fell for a cleverly disguised scam email that saw the company’s Instagram account hacked — and she hasn’t been able to regain control since.

She launched Hire A Kombi in 2012 and had grown the Instagram page to 30,500 followers. The majority of her customers and collaborations came through the social media platform.

“It’s a massive blow,” she told news.com.au.

“I put everything into that platform, from the beginning of our business. It’s really about our story and the emotions that go into what we’ve done.”

The hackers got in touch demanding Ms Gorgievski pay them $500 in bitcoin and threatened to turn her account into a porn site if she didn’t.

The mum-of-two was advised not to pay the money.

Months later she still doesn’t have access, and the scammers post regular stories and links onto her Instagram encouraging her followers to invest in a bogus business.

She received this message in May, hours after she clicked a scam link.

The scammer originally asked for $500 in bitcoin, then changed that number to $300.

Ms Gorgievski is warning other business owners to watch out for the scam.

The hackers gained control of her Instagram account after sending her an email that looked like it was from Instagram.

In the email, it said she needed to enter her login details so that her business page could be verified and receive a blue tick on the account — something she had applied for a while earlier.

“I got an email from what looked like Instagram. Everything that made it look like Insta,” she recalled.

Following the prompts, she put in her username and password.

“At five o’clock in the afternoon, I got a WhatsApp message saying we’ve got your account, we want $500 in bitcoin,” she said.

“My heart just sunk.”

The first thing the scammers did was replace her mobile number with theirs — meaning that when she tried to reset the password, the pin code went to their phone rather than hers.

Originally they asked for $500 in bitcoin and then dropped this number to $300.

The Gorgievski family is ‘devastated’.

The scammers changed the page’s profile picture and the bio. They have lost a few thousand followers.

Ms Gorgievski has been fighting hard to get back her account and in the meantime has started a new Instagram page with the handle @hireakombi_aus.

It so far has 2500 followers.

The still-hijacked account, @hireakombi, has lost 2,500 followers since it was taken over in May; she suspects almost all have gone to her new page.

Multiple customers have contacted her to let her know that she’s been hacked.

“I want that page back. It feels really yuck that they (the hackers) have got that,” she said.

She tried to appeal to the scammer’s humanity.

The man thought she was rich because she was Australian.

She reported the page to Facebook, which owns Instagram, and had to go through a lengthy verification process to prove her identity.

“I never heard back from Facebook after that,” she said.

“It’s bloody stressful, there’s no help, there’s no number you can call.”

In total, she says she has submitted a request to Facebook five times that her account has been hacked.

News.com.au has contacted Facebook for comment. A spokesperson said Facebook is currently investigating the allegations.

Alyce’s kids, aged six and eight.

Pictured below: The new Instagram account

The hacking drama is a triple whammy for the Gorgievski family.

Due to the six lockdowns in Victoria, their income is down by 95 per cent according to Ms Gorgievski, as the ability to travel and go on holiday has been severely impacted.

To top that off, the family were recently kicked out of their home, and were in the process of finding a new place to rent.

That was when they were hit with the scamming email.

“We’ve got two kids, we started with nothing, started with one kombi, built our way up to a fleet of six, worked really hard for that,” she said.

“It feels like it’s been taken from us. When you’ve got a passion and you make it your life and your business, it’s just devastating.”

They have six kombi vans in total and “live simply” on a farm.

The farm doubles as their base of operations, with customers parking their vehicles there while they swap with a kombi van. They have had to find a new farm over the last few months.

Although regional Victoria came out of lockdown on Thursday, the entrepreneur says that 80-90 per cent of her customers from Melbourne, interstate and internationally.

The family have refused to pay the ransom.

The scam that tricked Ms Gorgievski is a type of identity theft known as phishing.

According to the latest data from ScamWatch, identity theft scams saw Australians lose more than $2.2 million in August.

Across the year, $7.3 million has been lost to identity theft scams.

Australians have now lost more money to scams in the first eight months of the year than in the entire 12 months last year – $192 million year-to-date compared to $175 million lost in 2020.

Originally published as Aussie woman’s warning after ‘devastating’ scam message