Cybersecurity Awareness Month is probably a good time to remind people of all the shifty ways scammers try to steal money and information.
A good example is a spam email received recently at ConsumerAffairs. Daniel McConnell, information/cybersecurity engineer at ConsumerAffairs, distributed a copy of the email among the staff to help guard against infiltration. He highlighted the things that show this message, which claimed to be from the “Facebook Team,” was bogus.
The message warned the recipient that their Facebook page had been accused of posting copyrighted material and that it might be removed. Someone who doesn’t have a Facebook account would simply ignore the message.
But there are more than 1 billion Facebook account holders around the world so the scammer’s odds are pretty strong that a lot of account holders would receive the message. Take a look at the message below. Can you spot the telltale signs of a scam?
Here are the clues
One of the biggest clues is in the email header. The message says it is from Facebook Manager. But the message was sent from a Gmail account, not Facebook.com or Meta.com.
Now, skip down to the greeting. The recipient is not being addressed by their name but by “User 652387.” Pretty generic, which is what scammers like because they are sending the same message to millions of people.
The message says Facebook has learned that “content you posted” is problematic because it infringes on someone’s copyright. But what content? The message doesn’t say.
However, that information would be helpful because the recipient is informed that if they want to contest that charge, all they have to do is click on the link below.
That’s the final giveaway – clicking on that link would either download malware or take the recipient to a fake Facebook page where they would be instructed to provide their account login and perhaps other sensitive information.