MIAMI — The first email came in early September, around the time the Haitian-American Facebook page began posting about the Trump campaign’s falsehoods about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating their neighbors’ pets.
Too busy to look at the email invite at first, Wanda Tima, the founder of the social media page with a half-million followers, finally decided to give it a read. It was an invite to a Zoom call to set up a podcast interview series on Haitian-American entrepreneurs.
Tima, who is also the founder of L’union Suite, the South Florida-based social media platform and entertainment company that promotes positive news about Haiti and Haitians, got on the phone and the caller on the other end began walking her and her assistant through a series of screens and links. Unbeknownst to them, however, it was a phishing expedition. After a series of clicks, the two had given hackers access to 470,000 Facebook followers and an estimated reach of 7 million through Tima’s business portfolio on the site.
In the weeks since, ads against Kamala Harris and favoring Donald Trump have been popping up — and Tima’s phone hasn’t stopped ringing, with irate followers accusing her of promoting the Republican candidate to her cadre of mostly Democratic and liberal followers.
Tima discovered the attack when followers of the page began sending her screenshots of the pro-Trump ads. The posts are all backdated to October 2023 dates, so they are buried in the page’s timeline, but they have been appearing in the feeds of followers, an indication that hackers have been targeting her demographics.
The Haitian American Facebook page has been hacked, says founder Wanda Tima.
Courtesy of Wanda Tima Carlos Perez, who works with the cybersecurity firm TrustedSec, said Tima was the victim of a two-part attack. The initial hook was the email to get in contact with her. But the other was a social-engineering attack in which they were able to convince her through a ruse to provide access.
“They probably just went under her profile and asked for a targeted ad campaign,” he said.
That explains why Tima hasn’t been able to see the backdated ads. Perez said that on Facebook users can request campaigns targeting specific people from certain cities or communities “and then Facebook will only show ads to that demographic that you want to target for the ads.”
Perez said he usually sees these kinds of attacks in corporate and intelligence settings.
“This is a cyberattack on a whole community,” said Tima. “They just want to use it to spill hate towards one party.”
From the promotion of a widely debunked rumor about Haitian migrants to a mysterious hacker trying to direct hundreds of thousands of Haitians to conservative news sites promoting the Republican nominee for the presidency, Haitians say they feel under attack— even while also feeling slighted by Democrats’ lackluster response.
“People are telling us we’re not important, we’re not high priority,” Tima said, referring to the Democratic Party’s lack of campaign spending on the Haitian-American vote. “If we aren’t high priority, then why would a hacker do all this work…to take over the account?”
The Miami Herald has reached out to Facebook and did not hear back before publication. Tima said she has also been unsuccessful. In trying to understand what has happened, she has learned that she is a victim of a highly sophisticated phishing scam that has snagged others. But while some people have had ads for merchandise take over their pages, hers is very much targeted towards the elections.
“Every ad is pro-Trump,” she said, adding that her followers “are mad.” “We’ve just been reporting the stories about what’s going on.”
Tima said she’s intentionally steered clear of running any ads on the Haitian-American since she created the Facebook page 13 years ago to promote positive news about the Haitian community. Seeing someone else making money off the page—and not being able to get help from Facebook — is beyond frustrating, she said.
“This is not just affecting a page, this is affecting a business,” she said.
Jeff Bruno, a talent manager in South Florida, says while Tima’s attack appears to be very targeted, he knows other people who have fallen victim, including himself. In his case, he had to get the Attorney General’s Office in California involved after someone used malware to post malicious postings on his Facebook page after he clicked on an ad selling baby items.
Tima said she has done everything to protect herself, including setting up two-step authentication.
Perez said Tima’s gripe about not being able to get someone from Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is a common complaint about all of the social media companies.
“We know that this has been reported to them, but they don’t take action because it hasn’t hit their bottom line,” Perez added. “It hasn’t affected them in such a way where they go, ‘Oh, this is very important….’ So they just don’t take action on it. They see it as part of business.”
For now, Tima said she just wants someone from Meta to respond to the attack on her page. In the meantime, she is trying to see if she can steer her Haitian=American Facebook followers to the L’union Suite Facebook site.
“I had somebody just come in and say, ‘Hey, Haitian American stop lying. Just be honest and let us know that you know you’re being paid by the Trump campaign,” Tima said. “This should be a crime. This is something that they should want to fix.”
By JACQUELINE CHARLES/Miami Herald
