The approaching Christmas brings not only an atmosphere of peace and generosity, but also an opportunity for fraudsters. In this period, profiles that try to deceive people with touching stories, invented diseases or dramatic life situations appear more and more frequently on social networks.
They play on feelings, abuse trust and take advantage of the fact that before the holidays people are more willing to help. It is all the more sensitive when it turns out that behind the tearful statuses and pleas for financial help, there is only an ordinary effort to get rich quickly.
Actress Petra Dubayová should also have fallen for such a scam. In good faith, she shared the profile of the lady who was supposed to sell beautifully decorated honey pots on the social network. In the end, however, it turned out to be a fraud. However, Dubay’s followers did not know about this and wanted to support the lady. The actress apologized to her followers for the whole situation.
“Today I want to share with you a big disappointment and at the same time apologize. I recently shared a lady who bakes gingerbread and is an oncology patient. Neither seems to be true. You wrote to me that you didn’t receive the honeydew from her and neither did you get your money back. I am honestly very sad about it. I don’t understand how someone can lie like this and abuse the good of people, even at this time,” she wrote disappointedly.
She did it with good intentions. “I don’t usually share things like this, fundraisers, promotion of some sale, what you send me in messages (because there is really a lot of it), but I told myself that Christmas is coming and maybe I will really help someone. Now I know that it was a mistake and that I should have checked the lady better. I don’t know how. Maybe I just shouldn’t have shared it,” Dubay blamed herself for her actions.
The actress takes it personally. “It’s a lesson for me. I have a profile on which many people follow me and therefore I also have a social responsibility. Please forgive everyone who is affected (the lady is also changing her profile names, you can’t even write her a message from me anymore…),” she explained.
People want to solve an unpleasant event. “Also about the case of “Medovníky” from an unknown person who turned out to be a fraud: many of you have written to me. I am terribly sorry that you were deceived and cheated, and at the same time it fills me with joy that so many people wanted to support a good cause with a purchase. It’s good. There are many of them. There are many more of you than this one lady. If you are interested, write to Janka P., she was also dressed like this and when a lot of you are picked up, it can be turned over to the police. So hopefully something can be done about it,” she informed her followers.
Apparently, actress Monika Hilmerová drew attention to the same fraud. The lady was supposed to write to her husband Jaro Bekr. “Be careful! The lady wrote to Jar, she was nice, pretending to be an oncology patient. Unfortunately, this is one of the reasons why we only work with charities and cases we know personally… Here you can see the communication,” she wrote on the social network and published the messages that the fraudster wrote. You can read them in the gallery.
