To celebrate his pharmacy’s 25th anniversary, Joe Myers thought that he would hold a social media giveaway, but it wasn’t long before he started getting phone calls from customers saying that something wasn’t quite right.
“We opened in 1997 on April 5 and we decided we’d have a competition online — which we do regularly on our Facebook page… — and then people share and pass it on and comment, congratulate us,” Myers, who runs Joe’s Pharmacy in Campbell River’s Merecroft Village shopping centre said. “It’s a nice way to celebrate our 25th and gets a lot of people involved.
“It was going very well for a few days, and then yesterday we just started getting all these calls from our customers asking us if we were asking for their credit card information. We realized it was a scam,” he said. “Someone had taken our page… in a very professional way. They copied our actual Facebook page, they copied the photos that we had of our celebration, me in 1997, the picture of our store, everything was exactly like we had it. Then they said ‘congratulations you won the prize!’ It sounded all very legitimate, but there was an area to click on, asking people to register and give their credit card number.”
Joe’s Pharmacy has since awarded the competition prize and has told followers to disregard any communications received about the competition. They have also complained to Facebook, who, according to Myers, said that the fake page did not…
