SCAM – “Your page has violated copyright information.”
I manage a large handful of Facebook pages for various clients I work with. One thing I have seen a huge increase in is scams coming in from notifications of messages on the Facebook platform.
Recently, I received an email from “Facebook Pages <pageupdates@facebookmail.com>” letting me know I have a new notification with one of the accounts I manage. This link seemed legit so I opened the email and here is what I saw.
The crazy thing is that Facebookmail.com is a legitimate email from Facebook/Meta, and they are simply sending me an email to tell me a page mentioned us in a post.
Here’s what might start to have you worried though, inside of this email is a Facebook logo with the words next to it, “Support Complaints” and the text ends with “Your page has…”
So at a quick glance, this email looks legit and there might be a problem with your page.
How to easily confirm this is a scam without clicking any links
What I did here was go to my Facebook account directly, meaning, I did not click anything in the email and used my browser to pull my client’s Facebook account.
From there I went to notifications and found this…
Here you have a notification stating that our page has violated copyright information, and the account needs to be verified or it will be deleted forever, Signed Meta Business Services. Right…
Sadly, I can see a lot of people falling for this because the scammers have successfully created a pseudo panic, seeing as that you only have 15 days to click the phishing link or your account will be “deleted forever.”
But what the heck is that URL!? Recover-ryc-what? If you haven’t caught on yet this is a dead giveaway, Facebook will never ask you to verify your account via post, comment, message. If you want to know more about a link without clicking it you can also try a tool like CheckShortURL. This free tool will inspect in more detail what the link actually is without you having to click it.
But you want to see how silly this actually is? The scam is coming from a mention in a post from a page, just like the one we manage. So again without clicking anything in the email, or the post, let’s use Facebook to check out this page.
The scamming page is a hacked page
The page “Support Compaints Page” generated the same scam post dozens of times in a matter of minutes, tagging 5-6 business pages at a time.
The page is or was a real estate page before getting hacked, and you can see all the images are of real estate-related things, except for the one image the hackers added the Facebook logo to use as their profile picture in an effort to seem legit.
This is just a hacked real estate page turned spam central until it gets caught and banned by Facebook and the original owners of that page have a battle ahead of them getting their page back.
NEVER CLICK A LINK THAT YOU DON’T RECOGNIZE!
Be careful with your logins
Making sure your logins are unique on every account is massively important. We recommend writing a short sentence for passwords, like:
#IsentMydogtothestoretoday! (Don’t use this one!)
According to a friend who works in corporate cyber-security, having a sentence as a password with a capital letter, number, and a special character, that is a short sentence makes a password almost impossible to break. They can also be easy to remember because you can make it a silly sentence.
Here is a chart that shows the difficulty of passwords to break for a brute force program.
Conclusion
So we have taken a look at a very common Facebook scam that is trying to get you to click on their link in a phishing scam, in order to gain access to your login information. We have learned a few different ways you can confirm a scam without clicking any of their links. In addition, we can see how effective good passwords are against brute force programs!
The moral of the story is don’t click strange links, and make strong passwords!
Stay safe out there on the internet!
-Nate
