The Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, Colm Im­bert is alert­ing the pub­lic to what he calls a dis­turb­ing trend of fake Face­book pro­files and fake so­cial me­dia ac­counts be­ing set up with vari­a­tions of his name and match­ing pho­tographs for the pur­pose of fraud­u­lent ac­tiv­i­ty and scams.

In a state­ment Min­is­ter Im­bert said to date ap­prox­i­mate­ly eight (8) fake Face­book ac­counts have been iden­ti­fied with unau­tho­rised pho­tographs of him, all at­tempt­ing to ei­ther so­lic­it mon­ey from un­sus­pect­ing per­sons or steal their dig­i­tal iden­ti­ties through phish­ing scams.