Te Kete o Karaitiana Taiuru (Blog)

In a new threat to Māori online,  a new scam is increasing where scammers are creating false social media accounts as death notices and online funeral streaming accounts.

Facebook and other social media has become an essential way of communications, particularly with Māori. Many of us find that if we stop using social media, we become disconnected from whānau and friends, especially those who live away from our homes. So we need to address this issue now. The growth of AI and in particular Chat Bots and LLM’s such as ChatGPT, will give scammers more options and power to create sophisticated scams that may sound like our whānau, speak and write in te reo Māori and as I witnessed today, a ChatGPT that uses mātauranga from a kaumātua that can answer many common pepeha questions.

This new trend of online scammers creating fake social media usually calling the account something similar to “Person X, online tangi account” and similar words. This is predominantly on FaceBook, but I suspect this will if it has not already, be using emails and other ways to connect with the whānau pani (grieving family).

The scammer/false accounts use the same photos of the deceased person that the whānau pani have used to announce that their loved one has passed away.

These fake accounts will then go through all of the grieving family members FaceBook accounts and add their friends. The scam then occurs when the scammer account asks for a koha to a bank account and sometimes for a credit card to access the online live stream of the tangi.

Reporting these face accounts to FaceBook has proven to be slow and ineffective, leaving our vulnerable friends and families who are often not in a position to physically attend a tangi, to friend the scammer account and provide their credit card details and koha.

The biggest risks will be with prominent Māori who pass away. It will be very difficult to manage online scammers and create a need for online Māori Wardens (online activists).

Some suggestions to assist whānau pani from false accounts.

Below are some steps to avoid your bereaved whānau member being used to scam their and your loved ones and hopefully this will assist the grieving whānau some peace in a very emotional situation. I will update this with others feedback.

1. When announcing on social media and emails of a death, make a special mention that there is either no online streaming or if there is, to use the funeral directors web site. Noting that many Māori will prefer to not have an online option.
2. Try to avoid asking for online koha. If you do ask for online koha, maybe speak to your bank or use an authoritative and well known online service.
3. In the original announcement, add a specific contact for updates, notices etc. This may be the marae phone number or church. But make sure that you people can verify the contact is legit.
4. Make your FaceBook Profile ‘private” so that non friends can not see your friends.
5. Remove people from your social media that you do not know.
6. Assign to a trusted person to monitor social media for scammer accounts and ensure that where possible the whānau pani send updates out about false accounts.
7. Iwi, hapū, marae and whānau could/should discuss new tikanga for online announcements and processes and adopt and share them.
8. Where possible, text someone you know in the whānau or check the Death Notices in the deceased person local newspaper (usually available online).

Tikanga Māori evolves, and it is important that we all adapt and are aware of these new technologies.