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Funeral directors are warning of an alarming increase in funeral livestream scams on social media platforms.
The scams circulated for funerals of high profile people, such as the late Green Party MP Efeso Collins last year and Dame Tariana Turia’s tangi in January.
But criminals are also targeting other funerals by creating a fake page for the event, sending friend requests, then asking family and friends for money to watch the stream.
They also appear to be targeting younger people’s funerals, often those with lots of Facebook friends, or people who were well known in their community.
Families are being advised to message friends and family about the livestream, rather than creating their own page to avoid it being scammed.
Funeral Directors Association chief executive Gillian Boyes said she knew of about 50 funeral home businesses that had dealt with the scams.
She said fees for livestreaming funerals were paid as part of a funeral package, and no other member of the public should be paying.
“They [the scammers] do it quite subtly, so they might not say money for the livestream, they might say ‘money to support the family’ but this means you can view the livestream,” Boyes said.
“So just be really careful of anything connected with livestreams that’s asking for money.”
Netsafe’s online safety officer, Sean Lyons, said there was a 34 per cent increase in reports of public livestreaming scams between July 2023 and June laat year, and a sharp increase in recent months. He said it was likely the scammers were based overseas.
Lyons said platforms like Meta could do more to target scams, including upgrading their technological infrastructure to automatically detect the scams.
Artificial intelligence was being used to find suspicious patterns, but it was also being used by scammers to swindle more money from people.
