Hackers hijack Arizona woman’s Facebook page, defraud her friends

PHOENIX (InvestigateTV) — An Arizona woman says her Facebook account was hijacked. Now, the hackers are scamming her friends out of thousands of dollars and even sending the victims to her home.

Melissa Stombaugh is fed up with Facebook after hackers reportedly took over her account.

Posing as her, they posted messages claiming she had to put her father in assisted living, and she was forced to sell his stuff.

“My dad sent me a text, trying to be funny,” she said.

“Like, ‘hey, you’re not going to wait till I’m dead to start selling all my things?’ And I’m like, what are you talking about?”

That’s when Melissa checked her Facebook account and saw a post with a list of items for sale, all very cheap.

“Everything from a truck, (to) a Peloton. Pretty big-ticket items,” she said.

Melissa’s friends started sending money, thinking they were helping, but all the funds ended up in the hacker’s Venmo account.

When Melissa’s friends started arriving to pick up their new belongings, they were surprised to learn that the items didn’t exist, and it wasn’t Melissa they had been communicating with.

“She showed up and I was like, hello? She’s like, ‘oh, my husband’s out here looking at the truck.’ And I said, the truck? ‘Yeah, the one that we put the deposit on that you have for sale.’ I had no idea.”

The hackers changed the email address and devices on Melissa’s account, so she was completely locked out of her own Facebook account.

She even tried reaching out to the scammers directly.

“I set up a fake account attempting to access them,” she said. “I went on and chatted with them like I was a fake person in an attempt to see if I could get them to try to sell me something.”

Melissa and her friends reported the bogus sale post to Facebook, telling them it was a scam. Even that didn’t help.

“Facebook’s response to me was, we don’t see anything wrong with this post,” she said. “It didn’t go against any standards. So we’re going to leave it up.”

That’s when Melissa decided to contact our investigators.

Multiple attempts were made to reach Facebook regarding Melissa’s issue. Facebook did not respond to the inquiries.

How to Prevent This from Happening to Your Account

“Someone said, ‘well, did you have the two-factor authentication turned on?’ And I said, no, what’s that?”

Two-factor authentication links your devices to your Facebook account, so scammers can’t take over even if they have your password.

To set this up:

• Go to “Settings” on Facebook
• Then select “Passwords and Security”
• From there, it’ll walk you through the process of setting up two-factor authentication

Melissa has it set up on her other accounts now and wishes she had known about it earlier.

“Because at this point, if I could delete all of my Facebook, I would delete it myself and just be done with Facebook,” she said.

“Which is sad because I really did enjoy sharing our family’s, you know, memories and stuff with people, but not at this cost.”

Read more of Melissa’s story by clicking here.