While pirates present no major threat to cruise ships, land-based criminals have targeted Carnival Cruise Line customers.
These bad actors are preying on Carnival passengers' relationship with a key figure, a bold attempt to steal money from vulnerable people.
The scheme should not work -- but it remains a risk because some people simply trust too much without applying simple common sense to the situation.
In this case, the scammers are leveraging the relationship between Carnival Cruise Line's (CCL) loyalty ambassador, John Heald, and roughly 500,000 of the cruise line's customers.
Heald runs an incredibly popular Facebook page on which he not only answers questions but also fields complaints. His style is engaging: He builds relationships, making people feel heard even if there's no actual resolution to their problems.
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He also shares pictures and videos from his time at sea and often gives people a behind-the-scenes look at new ships or other changes the cruise line has made.
And Heald hosts popular cruises, on which hundreds of people sail simply to meet him and attend events where he answers questions. He's become a beloved figure in the Carnival community -- and scam artists have been looking to exploit that relationship by impersonating the well-known public face of Carnival.
Image course: Carnival Cruise Line
Carnival's Loyalty Ambassador Shares a Warning
Heald took to his Facebook page to warn his followers about the impersonation attempt. He pointed out that while people pretending to be him isn't a new thing, a new person or group has taken the scam to the next level.
There are so many fake pages with people pretending to be me.
Now a new danger has emerged with somebody, pretending to be me and contacting people via a fake Facebook page. They are posting a Gmail account asking and requesting people pay for speciality restaurants etc through Pay Pal and other online payments.
Please, please do not fall victim to this heartless, soulless person that is doing it
Thank you and good night
Heald went on to point out that all his communication with Carnival customers happens through his Facebook page.
Posters on his page also said that while most people are unlikely to fall for this sort of scam, it's actually fairly easy for bad actors to learn a lot about people's travel plans because they share that information on various cruise message boards.
How the Carnival Cruise Scam Works
Dean Forant commented on Heald's page how easily scammers can gather enough information to seem credible.
It's actually easier than you think to target potential cruisers. As someone who has an information security background, I can speak to this. What they most likely do is look at the comments of people posting on John's Facebook page. They are mainly looking for occurrences of people posting about upcoming cruises. They then look at that person's Facebook page for any email addresses they use and then they send their fake email to those email addresses. You may say that this seems like a lot of work for someone to go through but there are automated programs (called bots) that they can use to do this work for them.
Many people on the page pointed out that Carnival contacts passengers only via emails that come from "Carnival.com." The cruise line does sometimes call passengers, usually if some key piece of information is missing, but you do not need to give out any information over the phone. You can always rectify any problems through the cruise line's website.
Heald, of course, never has any financial interactions with passengers, and any request purporting to be from him asking for money should always be dismissed as a scam.
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