Scammers created a fake page for the event, sending friend requests then asking family and friends for money to watch the funeral livestream. (File pic) Photo: 123rf
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 in March 2024, and Dame Tariana Turia's tangi in January.
But criminals are targeting people's funerals throughout the country.
Nelson funeral director Alastair Hebberd said his clients were first targeted a year ago.
Scammers created a fake page for the event, sending friend requests then asking family and friends for money to watch the stream.
"About ten minutes before the service started, I had the family come to me very upset to be honest, and they initially started thinking that we set up this page, and we were going to charge people to view it.
"I had to explain to them there's no way - there's only one fee for the livestreaming and that covers as many people as what's wanted to view."
Hebberd has had about eight livestream scams hit funerals he's organised in the past year.
He said the scammers were picking out younger people's funerals, often those with lots of Facebook friends, or people who were well known in the community.
"It's horrible to be honest, families get very upset, they get very frustrated, it's not nice at all.
"It just appears there's no boundaries any more."
He now advised families he worked with to message friends and family about the livestream, rather than creating their own page, to avoid it being scammed.
Chief executive of the Funeral Directors' Association Gillian Boyes said she knows of about 50 funeral home businesses that have dealt with the scams.
She said fees for livestreaming funerals were paid for as part of a funeral package, and no other member of the public should be paying.
"They 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.
"So just be really careful of anything connected with livestreams that's asking for money."
Complaint to Facebook
One Wellington woman said her young family member's funeral was hit by a scam in mid-January, and she tried to report it to Facebook.
"It caught other people, including family members. Quite a lot of younger people probably wouldn't even have a clue that you don't pay for livestreams of funeral services.
"I complained to Facebook and I got one of their mealy-mouth replies saying we've decided this does not contravene our community standards."
RNZ has seen a screenshot verifying this. Facebook's parent company Meta said it couldn't confirm whether the scam post was taken down without a link.
Buried in 'transnational cloud'
Netsafe's online safety officer Sean Lyons said there's been a 34 percent increase in reports of public live streaming scams between July 2023 and June 2024 - and a sharp increase in recent months.
He said it was likely the scammers were based overseas.
"They've worked out really cleverly, that you can appear to be in one country, you can set up in another country, you can target your victims in a completely different country and you have to some degree buried yourself in a transnational cloud, and it becomes very difficult for the victims to recover their lost funds."
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.
A Meta spokesperson said the company was improving its scam detection, and said people should keep reporting them.
"Scams are unfortunately used to deceive, defraud, and manipulate people across the internet.
"That's why Meta, alongside our industry peers, continues to take steps to improve detection and enforcement. We encourage anyone who sees content that might violate our policies to report it so we can investigate and take action."
