As you probably know, some scams seem to come and go, often disappearing completely before they come back some time later with a vengeance.
One such recurring scam is making the rounds again, and it’s pretty dangerous.
This is a Facebook-related scam, but it isn’t actually perpetrated on Facebook. Instead, the scammers send a fraudulent message directly to your phone via text message or email.
The text of the fraudulent messages vary a bit, but they usually read something like this:
“Recently there have been reports citing copyright violations of your Facebook posts, so we require you to urgently contact Facebook Support to resolve this issue before we shut down your page.
Get in touch with Facebook Business Support:
https://somefraudulentwebsite.com (Note: The URLs vary to reflect the URL of this scammer’s site).
This notice is valid only 24 hours and if you don’t take action we will suspend your account without further notice.”
If you take the bait and click the link in the message you’ll be taken to a fake, but authentic-looking Facebook login page.
And as you can probably guess, if you try to log in to your Facebook account by entering your login credentials on the fake login page you’ll end up handing the virtual keys to your account over to the scammer.
Once the scammer gains access to your account he/she can do literally anything with the account that you can, including use your account to scam the people on your Friends List and place fraudulent ads on Facebook in your name (and charge them to your credit/debit card).
Bottom line: If there is ever any kind of issue with your account, Facebook will alert you to that fact either when you try to log in to your account or after you have successfully completely the login procedure.
They won’t be sending you any emails or text messages telling you to click a link in the message to log in to your account and contact Facebook Support.
If you receive a message similar to the one mentioned above, it’s a scam. Guaranteed. Simply delete it and ignore it.