Beware of scams impersonating race events

Recently, scammers have created many fake fanpages on social networks impersonating prestigious, large-scale running events to call on people to transfer money to register to participate. Many gullible people have become victims of these sophisticated scams.

A recent example is the International Marathon. Ha Long Heritage 2025 has been impersonated by some fanpages. These pages post information about recruiting participants, calling for payment to buy BIB (registration number) to register. Meanwhile, the Organizing Committee affirmed that the official BIB sale is only done through the website: www.halongmarathon.com, not through any intermediary fanpage.

Fake fanpage of Ha Long International Heritage Marathon 2025.

To gain trust, scammers create fanpages that illegally use logos, images, and official information of reputable races. Many fanpages also impersonate charity races, support cancer patients, help students in difficult circumstances, etc. Among them, many accounts also use the "blue tick" mark to deceive people. When people register to participate, the subjects will ask them to transfer money to complete the application, buy a registration number, and then invite them to a closed chat group to perform the "mission" of receiving free gifts. Here, the subjects use extremely sophisticated psychological tricks, enticing people to buy gifts, the initial value of the gifts is only a few hundred thousand VND, then gradually increases to tens of millions of VND. When the victims want to withdraw money, the subjects give many reasons such as "wrong syntax", "not qualified" to ask for more money. Many victims have been scammed out of hundreds of thousands of VND to tens of millions of VND.

Although the authorities have discovered and handled many fraudulent fanpages and issued many warnings to the people, the situation of impersonating running races to scam people is still quite common. To avoid being scammed, people who want to participate in races need to go through many different channels to carefully check information about the event, contact the organizers directly to verify before registering; only register to participate in races through official channels announced by the organizers. People absolutely do not provide personal information, bank accounts or OTP codes to strangers; do not join chat groups from suspicious fanpages to perform the "task" of transferring money.

When detecting cases with signs of fraud and property appropriation, people should go directly to the nearest police station to report the case to resolve the case according to regulations. In addition, people should regularly share warning information with relatives and friends to raise vigilance.

Source: https://baolangson.vn/canh-giac-voi-thu-doan-mao-danh-giai-chay-de-lua-dao-5066272.html