A California woman says scammers drained her life savings after she accepted what she believed was a remote job tied to Facebook’s advertising platform.
The victim, 60-year-old Brentwood resident Dawn Furseth, says she was contacted after finishing a contract with a Bay Area software company and searching for new work in October, reports ABC7 News.
The opportunity appeared to be a part-time remote role connected to Facebook’s ad management center.
Furseth says the financial damage mounted quickly. Within roughly six weeks, she lost a total of $176,000, wiping out everything she had saved.
“It just infuriated me… But learned a lesson for sure, and that’s why I wanted to share it… because these scams are getting so sophisticated so quickly for people…”
According to Furseth, a woman calling herself “Lily” claimed the role involved placing ads as part of Facebook’s AI testing. Furseth says the explanation sounded credible because it mirrored language she was familiar with from her own software career.
“You get these emails that say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a part-time job for you, remote situation, and you only have to work a couple of hours a day.’ In the situation I was in, it sounded like, OK… let me try it.”
Furseth says she was assigned a “training mentor” who guided her through onboarding. Aside from one phone call, all communication took place on WhatsApp. She says she was instructed to wire money from her bank into a crypto platform, then transfer those funds into what she believed was a Facebook app to place ads.
“So I had to take money from my bank… via wire transfer into a crypto platform… and then transfer that in the Facebook platform app. And it sat there in a digital wallet that I would pull from to place the ads.”
Despite later recognizing this as a red flag, Furseth says the app appeared authentic. When she logged in, she saw what looked like her real Facebook account and messages, reinforcing the illusion that the job was legitimate.
“It looked totally like it… I checked the URL, made sure everything looked fine… logged in with the same credentials as my normal personal Facebook. It was all the same.”
Over the following weeks, Furseth says she placed numerous ads and watched what appeared to be large profits accumulate inside the app. When she attempted to withdraw funds, the scheme collapsed.
“I used to think I was smart… but they tricked me!”
“All I wanted to do was to pull out $400,000… and they said, ‘Oh you didn’t do it right. You were supposed to pull everything.’”
She says the scammers then masqueraded as Facebook customer service representatives and threatened to block access to her funds unless she paid a 20% penalty.
“I didn’t have anything left… This mentor started getting really personal. And the fur on the back of my neck stood up.”
Furseth says the person she believed was mentoring her ultimately suggested she sell her car and personal belongings at a pawn shop to try to recover the frozen funds.
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