Yes, we were targeted with a Facebook phishing scam…
Yes, The ThatsNonsense.com Facebook page was targeted with a phishing scam this week. The audacity! Don’t worry – it wasn’t successful.
We must admit, trying to scam an anti-scam Facebook page is pretty audacious. We suppose we’d be quite the scalp for many a cyber-criminal, but you’d have to do better than these scammers, who tried to catch out our social media admins with what was basically a pretty run-of-the-mill phishing scam.
Of course, seeing these scams all the time – albeit via other people – our alert admins knew straight away that something wasn’t right. But for the sake of educating our readers (many of whom are page admins themselves) here is the scam that targeted us and how it would have worked if we fell for it…
The phishing scam was designed to target Facebook page owners. It starts with a message sent to the page, which you can see below…
We received reports that you’re making copyright violations on your Facebook page. Please review your posts and become more careful about your posts.
If you think this is a mistake, please verify your page on the link below. This would indicate that your page does not have a violation in terms of use. We will immediately review your page appeal.
https://apps.facebook.com/REMOVED
Note : If within 48 hours, you have not verified your page on our link, then you have ignored our notifications and your page will be suspended.
Sincerely,
Facebook Support Team
Now, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, this could certainly appear to be quite the alarming message. There is no apparent name, and the logo next to the message could perhaps be an entity related to Facebook. Have the Facebook Support Team really just threatened our account with suspension?
Well, no. And luckily our admins knew that straight away. But… playing devil’s advocate, we clicked the link in the message anyway. You know… just to see…
It’s actually a very similar scam to one that we’ve reported before. The link – as you can see from the web address – took us to a Facebook app. This particular app was asking for our information, including our Facebook password, in order to “verify our page”.
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We’ve warned about dangerous Facebook apps many times on this site. Since apps are not vetted by Facebook, they can be scams, just like this one. In this case, any information entered into the app is going to be sent straight to the scammer. If you don’t have login approvals from unrecognised devices enabled, the chances are high that you’ve just given a scammer everything they need to access your Facebook account. And since you’re likely a Page admin, control of your Facebook page as well.
Don’t enter your Facebook password into apps, and be sceptical of messages like the one we received that threaten your account with suspension or removal if you don’t click a link, as they are highly probably scams.
And what did we reply back to the scammer who messaged us? We told him that he must have been either brave or foolish to try and scam an anti-scam site and to expect to see his little con published on our Facebook page later in the week.