LOS ANGELES — Loyalfans announced that company reps recently met with Wix.com’s policy team to discuss combating fraudulent activity on the mainstream site-building platform.
“In recent months,” a rep explained, “Instagram users have been plagued by scammers lifting images from their public feeds, then populating scam IG accounts, pointing to free [website] accounts hosted by Wix, with said stolen images. The kicker is that these Wix sites are mocked up to resemble various premium social media fan sites, including Loyalfans.”
Loyalfans’ Support Manager Andrew D said the company was “getting multiple messages a day from irate people with no connection to the adult industry accusing Loyalfans of hosting scam accounts.”
“Though these sites all clearly said ‘wixsite’ in their URLs, it was alarming to see how many people actually thought these were Loyalfans accounts,” he continued. “We did our best to explain the situation to anyone who contacted us and directed them to contact Wix to get the scam sites taken down, but the problem continued to grow.”
Loyalfans’ social media team began tagging the site-building platform directly in its responses to scam victims that made public queries, which eventually led to a meeting with the Head of Wix’s Policy Team/Product & Privacy Counsel.
According to the rep, during the meeting, representatives from both companies “discussed reactive — as well as proactive — measures Wix is currently taking to help stop the flood of fraudulent activity. Loyalfans offered Wix several additional strategies the site-building platform could take to help find and take down fraudulent pages. Both parties left the meeting with open lines of communication, as well as a commitment from Wix to continue to combat the issue.”
Andrew D noted that "demonizing the adult industry is a knee jerk reaction for most."
"In this case, people clearly do not know the difference between legitimate platforms and egregious scams," he said. "Although the individuals victimized here are not necessarily members of our community, proactively dealing with phishing scams like these is important to the industry overall."
"By combating these fraudulent activities and doing outreach to mainstream companies, we help protect our own community from false narratives, petty attacks and further regulations — thus protecting Loyalfans creators’ workplace and livelihoods,” he concluded.
Models and users are directed to report fraudulent content hosted by Wix to abuse@wix.com.
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