Facebook Phishing…

[Heather Holm]

Wearing another hat of mine: I’ve been working with web design clients for many years now (I’m not taking on new web clients), and often get asked about suspicious messages. 

A few items to look at in the screenshot above, and any such message you get on Facebook, by email, on the phone or any other means, that indicate phishing:

– The “sender” of the message, “X AI 80487”, is not even trying to be called “Facebook” official anything. The “AI” in the name makes me laugh, but maybe it actually is AI, lol.

– “Dear FanPage admin” – I don’t think ANY Facebook Pages are even called “FanPage” anymore, if they ever were. And if you’re running an actual business and have a Page, it certainly isn’t a “FanPage”.

– “Facebook’s community standards and guidelines” is a clue to anyone with a legal eye. Facebook’s actual Community Standards are capitalized like that. If you were getting a legal-type message from Facebook, it would be capitalized, and there would probably be some reasons given – though I’ve only seen fake messages to that effect, so I don’t actually know what they’d say. 

– A real such message from Facebook would probably come by email (though I’ve never seen a real one) and would at least name your Page.  I have seen fake emails of this type, however. I think a real message would also show up in your Meta Business Suite. EDIT: But fake ones can show up there as well.

– The link provided, generated by a URL shortener service (“snip.ly”) is designed to obfuscate the real URL. It’s not a Facebook URL, and Facebook would not use a URL shortener service. 

– In emails, one thing to look for is the email name and address of the sender (which can be faked, so if it looks real it’s not conclusive), as well as any links they’re asking you to click on. Depending on what app you use for email, if you hover over a link in an email, you should see the link at the bottom of your window.

– I have in the past seen emails on the cleverer side which at first glance seem real but they’ve substituted a lowercase letter “l” for “i” in a font that makes it hard to distinguish, or something similar. Watch for that. 

If anyone HAS received a REAL message from Facebook about their page violating Community Standards, other than on your feed (which I have seen), please share. It would be good to know. 

[Natalia Ruiz]

Thank you for sharing this information. Last week, I had a similar message on my Meta Business Suite, indicating that my page has violated copyrights and will be soon deactivated permanently unless I follow the steps on the link they provided. The link was very suspicious as well. So this was a total scam to me! I deleted the message…

[Marie Savage]

Thank you everyone for the information.