No, I don't have a secret investigation that Stuff won't publish
Wednesday, 13 August 2025
The link on Facebook seems like a great story: that I, as a journalist, have been working on a sensational investigation but Stuff won’t publish it. If you click the link, you’ll find out what it is! Or you might find yourself scammed out of your hard earned cash. Paula Penfold investigates “Paula Penfold”.
My phone has been pinging non-stop this week with links and screenshots of posts and ads on Facebook and Instagram, featuring me. There are various versions but one consistent theme: that I have been conducting a secret investigation since October 2024, but the news organisation I work for, Stuff, won’t publish it.
So apparently I have gone to RNZ to get them to tell the story.
“EXPOSÉ,” screams one headline. “Paula Penfold vs Stuff.co.nz - why was the scandalous ‘Stuff Circuit’ episode destroyed?”
This particular version of the “story” goes on to reveal that the secret investigation I worked on with colleagues along with a financial analyst and a technical specialist was to expose “the enrichment schemes of energy giants”.
It quotes entries from my supposed diary. “The topic is standard: how large corporations profit from a cost of living crisis … It’s interesting to trace where the billions go while ordinary New Zealand people can’t pay their electricity bills. We started with public reporting but quickly realised the interesting stuff happens in subsidiary structures.”
(Spoiler alert: If I did have a diary, the entries in it would not read like this.)
The “story” goes on to quote supposed informants, contains screenshots professing to be from my bank account, and an apparent legal letter from a Stuff lawyer instructing me to “immediately suspend all work on this subject”.
Cue another diary entry: “They told me to destroy all materials and personally controlled the deletion of files from servers. I feel like a criminal, even though I haven’t done anything wrong.”
Dramatic!
And as you’ll hopefully have guessed by now, not true. Not even remotely. An elaborate hoax.
I’m the latest in a string of New Zealanders with something of a public profile to have our names, faces and professions incorporated into scams that circulate on social media, in this case Facebook and Instagram.
My former colleague, journalist Eugene Bingham, has also been dragged into it, with posts titled “Forbidden broadcast for the truth” also appearing on Facebook.
Such scams have operated for years including one featuring the Prime Minister’s image, which led to a Taranaki woman losing $224,000 after being manipulated into investing in cryptocurrency.
Was that the aim of this week’s Fake Me scam?
The first hint that’s where it’s going comes in a “quote” from me, about the supposedly kiboshed story.
“We weren’t disclosing any state secrets - we were simply telling people about the opportunity to improve their financial situation with the help of [a finance app]”.
Apparently we had spent months studying its operation and found the technology “impressive”.
Carry on down the page and Fake Me helpfully provides several links through which you can sign up.
The page ends with a comments section full of “readers” who have — “Oh my god, this is unexpected!” — made truckloads of money from the site.
(Adding to the ruse, some are grateful to Fake Me for risking her career “for the truth”.)
But surely, surely by now nobody falls for this stuff when it seems so obviously fabricated?
Well, seemingly there is still a risk they do, judging by some of those who forwarded it to me asking if it was real. Even someone who works in the scams field thought the supposed RNZ story was legitimate.
I asked a security consultant what’s likely behind it.
He suggested four possibilities:
- A legitimate finance site that gets you to buy into something on the promise of high returns, only for them to run off with the cash.
A “referral scam”. A legitimate trading or cryptocurrency site that pays for referral sign ups. That is, the scammer goes to the trouble of setting up the elaborate page (although with AI, now much less trouble than it would have been a year or two ago) and if people sign up they get paid, kind of like a commission.
Phishing. A fake login page for a real site and if people attempt to log into it, their credentials are harvested. Funds within the legitimate site can then be stolen by the fraudsters.
A crypto scam. This one is less likely in this instance, but would involve someone attempting to “pump up” their particular crypto coin by convincing people to buy it and then do a “pump and dump”.
It’s a sickening feeling to contemplate that anyone might lose money through trusting this is authentic.
I lodged a complaint through Facebook’s internal processes but did not hear anything back, so, since I’m a journalist I went to their media team, a step obviously not available to most people who want to report a scam. I asked for Meta’s response to the fact that my name, image and reputation had been appropriated for this scam, what action will be taken to have it removed, what Meta is doing to address the quantity of such scams, and what advice Meta has for anyone who has fallen for it and lost money.
Meta had not responded before deadline.
After publication, they sent a statement, saying, “ We have removed the pages for violating our policies. Meta doesn’t want scams on our platforms and we are continuing to invest in tools and technology to prevent them. The safety of our users is of utmost importance, and we continue to work with industry, the government and law enforcement to protect New Zealanders from scams.”
In February, Meta introduced a requirement that financial advertisers in Australia are verified.
There’s no such requirement here.
In July, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Scott Simpson launched what he said was “important progress in the fight against online financial scams,” saying it was “unacceptable that so many Kiwis are swindled by scammers every day”.
That initiative, the New Zealand Anti-Scam Alliance is a new national effort “that seeks to reduce the number of Kiwis falling victim to online financial scams”, which the Minister said according to some reports cost the economy up to $2 billion annually.
For The Post, financial writer Janine Starks called the initiative a “fizzer”. “The entire thing is so poorly structured, it’s a national embarrassment,” she wrote.
So I asked Simpson, the “lead Minister against scams”, what progress had been made since the launch in July, and what advice he had for me in trying to get this Fake Me scam sorted.
“Impersonation scams are against the law,” he said. “However, they are often used to trick people into parting with their money.”
He said a key part of the Alliance’s work will be to “improve disruption and education on scams,” so people are less likely to fall victim to them, “and to increase enforcement activity when they do occur”.
He said members of the Alliance had already taken several actions, including the banking sector announcing new protections for consumers from November 30 this year; the telecommunications sector announcing a review of its Scam Prevention Code; Google introducing verification for financial services advertisements on its platforms; and Apple introducing 1-click scam reporting of text scams on iPhones.
He did not mention Meta, on whose platforms fake Paula Penfold is trying to suck people in.
In my mind, the scammer is pimply and sweaty and lacking in Vitamin D and I would like to tell him (yes, him, in my mind) that I am pissed off at being used in this way.
But there’s not much chance of that.
The links quickly disappear or are redirected, probably because the hosting, domain or routing companies notice what’s happening and pull them.
Then they re-emerge, cropping up like cordyceps on The Last of Us, but not for long enough to allow any real tracing.
If it appears in your social media the security consultant’s advice is simple: Don’t click the link. Aside from risking falling into a financial scam nightmare, you’re opening the door to a malware infestation.
Anyway, I promise if I really do have a secret investigation, I’ll tell you all about it.