News May 6, 2020

Virtual Gold Coast Music Awards inundated with scammers during live broadcast

The 2020 Gold Coast Music Awards would have gone off without a hitch last week if it wasn’t for a slew of credit card scammers compromising the event.

The virtual awards video presentation on the official Facebook page last Thursday night (30th Apr), was a star-studded celebration of Gold Coast talent. Rising country music star Casey Barnes took out Artist of the Year, while roots duo Busby Marou, Eliza and the Delusionals, DVNA, Tijuana Cartel, and indie pop newcomer DENNIS. all received gongs.

While the winners were being celebrated across almost two hours, generating 20,000 views, the Awards organisers were feverishly deleting hundreds of comments from scammers aiming to take credit card details from those in attendance.

The scammers used similar copy to the copy organisers used to set up a Facebook event in the lead up. Over 400 posts were made using the text: “Watch the 2020 Virtual Gold Coast Music Awards LIVE” with links to a paywall.

Because some of these 400 posts were made as comments in the Facebook Event page, every person who indicated ‘going’ was notified. The other posts were made in the actual video broadcast in the newsfeed, keeping organisers extremely busy throughout as they deleted hundreds of comments.

Gold Coast Music Awards director, Samantha Morris, said:

“We were so focussed on the mechanics of broadcasting our event that we weren’t aware of the sheer volume of scam comments in our feed. It wasn’t until someone commented that they’d been asked to enter credit card details to access the stream that we realised what was happening.

“We then had team members trawling comments to delete and block accordingly and there would have been several hundred of these by the end of the 1hour 40min broadcast. Scammers were posting from multiple accounts. We would no sooner ban one and another would pop up.

“It wasn’t until the next day that we realised that the same scammers had filled our event page with the same content.”

Samantha Morris

How can event organisers curb the issue of scammers on Facebook?

For anyone planning a free virtual event, Samantha Morris’ advice is to include the word ‘FREE’ in the event title. She also advises changing post permissions in the event to ‘Only admins can post’ just before your event.

“It’s also important to have team members ready to monitor comments particularly for scam posts directing people off social media to access the stream,” she added. “If artists are live streaming, they may not be across comments until well after their stream has ended.”