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Series: Fake Judy

Would the real Judy Eliassen please stand up

Would the real Judy Eliassen please stand up

I recently received a friend request from Judy Eliassan, the office admin for the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists - an Auckland-based organisation I'm involved with that fights for secularisation of our country. This friend request was odd, as I was a little surprised that I wasn't already friends with her. But at first glance the account looked legitimate, as we already had a mutual friend. So, not thinking too much of it, I clicked the Accept button. A couple of hours later I realised that, no, I was already Facebook friends with the real Judy, and the account I had just friended was a cloned account (the cloned account is on the right below):

Running out of Steam: The fake Judy scam, part 2

Running out of Steam: The fake Judy scam, part 2

This is the second part of an article detailing an online scam, which started when I accidentally accepted a friend request from a cloned Facebook account. This led to me talking to a second Facebook account named “Agent Patrick Smith”, and being offered up to $100,000 by Publisher's Clearing House in the US. At the end of part one, I showed off my 9 year old daughter's amazing forgery skills when I asked her to recreate my driver's licence so that I could send it to the scammers as proof of my identity: