Anonymous wants you to spend hundreds of dollars on sport-betting tickets that guarantee huge wins. Anonymous understands you may be reluctant, so Anonymous has prepared a cocktail of underhanded tactics to convince you.
Key takeaways:
- The fraudulent Anonymous network pretends to be affiliated with a hacktivist movement that goes by the same name in order to win the trust of potential victims. There are hundreds of pages on Facebook using this tactic. Many of them post the same content.
- The network regularly shares disinformation, conspiracy theories, wild speculations, and manipulated content to attract new audiences and gain credibility. It then asks followers to pay huge sums for sports betting tickets guaranteed to bring significant yields.
- Available evidence indicates that those behind the network are mainly Nigerians and people based in Nigeria.
- The network relies on sock puppet accounts to maintain an aura of legitimacy. These accounts leave flattering comments under its posts and help to plant some of its disinformation.
- Accounts of victims posted on Nairaland and Facebook between December 2020 and March 2023 confirm that many people who fell prey to the network’s tactics were defrauded.
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You, too, can become wealthy overnight. All you have to do is give us a hefty sum to bet on our fixed football matches. Don’t believe us? Then how come we know these many well-kept secrets? How come, sometimes, we are even able to predict the future? Why do so many people send us testimonies of how their lives have turned around since they played our games?
This is the strategy of a scamming network that has spread its tentacles all over Facebook and is passing off as Anonymous, a decentralised movement of hackers that emerged in the early 2000s.
The original Anonymous became a global sensation because of its use of cyber-attacks for activism and anti-establishment stances. It is commonly associated with two things: the Guy Fawkes mask and the tagline, “We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.” It has recently protested against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, police brutality in the US, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and so on.
Because the group is faceless and leaderless, it can be difficult to authenticate online materials presented in its name. The scamming network on Facebook is exploiting that very loophole. By latching onto the Anonymous brand, it gains credibility in the eyes of its followers, many of whom believe it has the means to somehow correctly predict or influence football matches.
Just how big is it?
Information gathered from the social media website using Instant Data Scraper revealed at least 240 Anonymous pages with similar traits and modes of operation. The pages — most of them created or co-opted between 2022 and 2023 — have a combined 2.89 million followers. While some have become inactive, many of them post several times a day.
The names are typically variants of the following: Anonymous, Anonymous Collective, Anonymous Ghost, Anonymous Groups, Anonymous Squad, Anonymous Team, Anonymous Tips, etc. They also use the words ‘Legion’ and ‘Hacktivist’ often.
You will find the “We are Anonymous, we are Legion” tagline in many of their bios. Sometimes, they add that they are committed to changing the world and making it better.
The various pages also frequently repost, reference, and follow each other.
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