Carnival Brand Ambassador John Heald is one of the most popular figures in cruising when it comes to social media. The big personality who talks all things Carnival has nearly 500,000 Facebook followers.
Each day he shares details on what’s happening with the cruise line, conducts lots of polls regarding what people like and don’t like on a cruise, and generally offers up lots of interesting tidbits.
But now he has a warning for his followers that involves a scam designed to fleece Carnival passengers out of their money.
According to Heald, there are fake Facebook pages that pretend to be him. Someone impersonating him is contacting users and asking passengers to pay for onboard items.
In a post from Heald, he says:
There are so many fake pages with people pretending to be me.
Now a new danger has emerged with somebody, pretending to be me and contacting people via a fake Facebook page. They are posting a Gmail account asking and requesting people pay for specialty restaurants etc through Pay Pal and other online payments.
Please, please do not fall victim to this heartless, soulless person that is doing it
Thank you and good night
You can see the full post here:
While most people are unlikely to fall for this sort of crude scam, there are some ways to keep yourself safe.
For one, while Carnival does accept PayPal for payments on cruises, Carnival will never require you to pay via PayPal. It allows several different payment options. As well, the cruise line will NOT ask you to send payment to a Gmail account.
In addition, you can expect any notification of payment due from the cruise line to be done through an official Carnival account, not via Facebook. And those payment requests will never come from John Heald (or someone posing as him).
If you are unsure if a request for payment is legit, remember that you can always login to your account via the Carnival website. If you prefer, you can also call the cruise line to speak with a representative to see what payments are due.
Taking just a simple step like this can help you avoid being a victim.
