A phishing scam is circulating on Facebook Messenger, and it only requires four phrases to fool individuals into providing their personal information. The fraud is distributed through friends’ and family’s hacked accounts, with the harmless remark “see what I discovered.” It’s followed by a link, not a nice picture of a raccoon in a party hat.
The user is prompted to log in to Facebook again after clicking the link, but it isn’t the actual Facebook; instead, it is another website meant to steal your data, install malware on your computer, or take over your account. This is only one of several such scams that have emerged in recent years, and many individuals are unaware that they have fallen prey to them. On Instagram, there have been a number of frauds attempting to get people to invest in cryptocurrency, as well as posts on Facebook and Instagram encouraging people to send a message to the author if they need financial assistance – one of which was especially harsh.
It’s not always easy to recognize a con. If the message is strange or unexpected, or if the grammar is incorrect, proceed with caution. If you believe a real profile has been compromised, ask what the link is about, double-check that it is a valid profile contacting you, and contact the individual via alternative means. When the user clicks on it, it redirects to a malicious webpage that requests the user’s Facebook log-in credentials in order to collect sensitive information or install malware on the device.
The hoax has been around for a while, but it now looks to be spreading rapidly. It’s one of a slew of frauds that target Messenger users. Another example is when a buddy sends a message asking, “Is this you in this video?” or something similar.
“Messages that appear to come from a Facebook friend are much more likely to result in clicks than messages sent by strangers,” Leslie Sikos, a cyber-security expert from Edith Cowan University, told 7NEWS.com.au. “People might only or primarily focus on the sender’s name at first rather than the message content, regardless of whether that has red flags.”
“Because there are so many frauds of this type, there is no particular appearance or behavior that consumers can learn to avoid.” “It’s worth noting that even if someone is duped by a message and clicks on a scam’s link, they may not be victims in the end if they can spot the scam by watching the website loading process, which would expose the redirection to a malicious website.”
