Cyberspace — In recent months, “vanilla” Instagram users have been plagued by scammers lifting images from their public feeds, then populating scam accounts on the same site pointing to unpaid accounts hosted by Wix.com with said stolen images. The kicker is that these Wix-hosted sites are mocked up to resemble various premium social media fan sites, including Loyalfans.com. Unsuspecting fans then come to these mocked up fraudulent fan sites, entering their credit card numbers directly into a phishing scam.
“We were getting multiple messages a day from irate people with no connection to the adult industry accusing Loyalfans of hosting scam accounts,” explained Loyalfans’ Support Manager Andrew D.
“Though these sites all clearly said ‘wixsite’ in their URLs, it was alarming to see how many people actually thought these were Loyalfans accounts,” he continued. “We did our best to explain the situation to anyone who contacted us and directed them to contact Wix to get the scam sites taken down, but the problem continued to grow.”
Loyalfans’ social media team began tagging the site-building platform directly in its responses to scam victims that made public queries, which eventually led to a meeting with the Head of Wix’s Policy Team/Product & Privacy Counsel.
During the meeting, representatives from Loyalfans and Wix discussed reactive — as well as proactive — measures Wix is currently taking to help stop the flood of fraudulent activity. Loyalfans offered Wix several additional strategies the site-building platform could take to help find and take down fraudulent pages. Both parties left the meeting with open lines of communication, as well as a commitment from Wix to continue to combat the issue.
“Demonizing the adult industry is a knee jerk reaction for most — and in this case, people clearly do not know the difference between legitimate platforms and egregious scams,” Andrew D. explained. “And although the individuals victimized here are not necessarily members of our community, proactively dealing with phishing scams like these is important to the industry overall.”
“By combating these fraudulent activities and doing outreach to mainstream companies, we help protect our own community from false narratives, petty attacks, and further regulations — thus protecting Loyalfans creators’ workplace and livelihoods,” he concluded.
Fraudulent content on sites hosted by Wix can be reported to abuse@wix.com. For more information about Loyalfans, contact media@loyalfans.com or go to Loyalfans.com.
