If you’ve been using Facebook for more than five minutes you’re surely familiar with all the ads that show up in your Newsfeed and over in the sidebar.
And if you’ve been using Facebook for more than an hour you probably know that a good portion of those ads are actually scams.
Well, there’s something you should know about those scam ads…
A relatively large percentage of the fraudulent ads that are displayed on Facebook are actually purchased using hacked accounts.
What’s more, the rightful owners of those hacked accounts are often footing the bill. Even worse, the fraudulent charges are often in the five figure range!
Here’s the gist of the matter…
If you have a credit card or debit card attached to your account and a scammer manages to hack into it, he/she can use your account to create and run scam ads in your name and have Facebook charge YOUR card for the payment.
And if the hacker is on the ball he/she will be able to intercept the notifications Facebook will send you about the ads and delete them before you have a chance to see them.
That means a hacker could potentially run scam ads from your account for at least a month before you find out about it because Facebook won’t charge your card until the end of the month.
This is why it’s very important to do two things:
1 – Take the steps necessary to lock your account down tight to prevent it from being hacked, primarily by selecting a strong password for it and enabling Two-Factor Authentication on it.
2 – Remove any credit or debit card from your account that you don’t use to pay Facebook for the use of any of their premium services.
The good news is unless you’ve run Facebook ads yourself in the past or played any games that require a payment you have probably never added a card to your account. If that’s the case you’re in the clear in regards to this particular scam.
However, if you do have a card attached to your account I strongly recommend that you take the steps required to prevent hackers from breaking into it and/or remove the card info from your account.