Auctioneer’s Facebook farce

Auctioneer Warwick Savage doesn’t have a personal Facebook profile.

But someone pretending to be him set one up – and that person or persons stole his identity. They had amassed 1500 friends by yesterday – the vast majority of whom were none the wiser that the man on the screen was not who they thought he was.

The profile first came to the attention of the Nelson auctioneer late last week, when a friend of his stepdaughter’s commented that she had accepted Savage’s friend request.

‘‘And [my stepdaughter] said, ‘He doesn’t have a Facebook page. He doesn’t have a Facebook profile’. So all of a sudden it came to the forefront,’’ Savage said.

What was bizarre about the fake profile is how sophisticated it was. Few of Savage’s close friends twigged when sent a friend request.

The photos had been taken off the website of his business, Lipscombe Auction House, and the posts, promoting auctions, appeared to be legitimate.

Lipscombe Auction House has a genuine Facebook page for the business, and the fake and genuine pages looked similar.

Yesterday, after queries from Stuff, Facebook’s owner Meta

removed the page for ‘‘for violating our policies’’.

A spokesperson said it was ‘‘committed to safeguarding the integrity of our services’’, and ‘‘worked hard to protect our community from fake

accounts and other inauthentic behaviour’’.

Meta continued to invest in AI to improve its enforcement and strengthen its review systems, the spokesperson said.

Savage said he was happy that the page had finally been removed, but frustrated that it had taken so long.

Savage reported the fake profile to the police, who referred him to

Netsafe. Multiple friends also wrote to Facebook asking for the page to be removed, only to receive the message that ‘‘ultimately, we decided not to take the profile down’’.

‘‘We take action on profiles that pose a danger to other people or that are harmful to the community,’’ the Facebook Support message read.

Savage said there should be more accountability from social media.

The profile appeared to have been uploaded on November 26, 2022, but the majority of the account activity had been this year,he said.

Several of the people who accepted the friend requests were Nelson City councillors and other well-known people in Nelson.

Before the media got involved, Savage said, there hadn’t appeared to be much interest from Facebook in doing anything about it.

‘‘And I think it would be a huge worry for anybody. Because basically, they’ve stolen my identity.’’

He said he was ‘‘obviously’’ concerned about reputational damage. But he was also concerned about having his business targeted.

‘‘It all looks very harmless at the moment, but why would a person bother creating this to not have an end objective?

‘‘Are messages going out to people there who are friends that aren’t nice messages?’’

Savage said the situation had left him feeling ‘‘stressed’’, and particularly worried about the possibility of the person using his name posting something nasty. ‘‘I don’t want to be going around trying to defend myself and Lipscombe’s to 1000 people.’’

‘‘It would be a huge worry for anybody . . . they’ve stolen my identity.’’

Warwick Savage