Facebook hack scams

Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Follow Us. So what happens when a person you think is a Facebook "friend" turns out to be someone else? For Shellie Drummond, it started when she found the Facebook profile for a friend from years back, named Deborah Boyd.

Soon "Boyd" was telling her about a so-called government grant she'd gotten through an agent on Facebook. Sure enough, the agent then told Drummond she could get financial assistance from the government. And when Drummond tracked down her friend by phone, Deborah Boyd told her, "It wasn't me. You got scammed. Turns out, Boyd's Facebook account had been hacked by scammers who locked her out, then quickly reached out to try to con her family and friends, who she then had to warn: "Please do not send them anything, and delete yourself off that page.

Because it's not me. Werner showed Fletcher the conversation that progressed. Unfortunately, if you fall for this common scam, cybercriminals have all the information they need to wreak havoc in your life.

Depending on the information you provide, they can take over your Facebook account and con your friends , pretending to be you. They might also be able to access and drain your bank account or use your credit card to rack up fraudulent purchases. More and more often, cybercriminals are using Facebook Messenger to send the same kind of links.

One of the oldest scams involves fraudsters posing as love interests to target unsuspecting Facebook users. A romance scam is designed to play on your emotions and gain your trust. Chats build up over the course of weeks and months before the con-man makes their pitch. But it always ends the same way — they eventually ask you to send money.

They can use a variety of reasons. Another popular tactic is to say they need help covering their daily living expenses until they can eventually join you. In all cases, the affection is not real.

The excitement of winning a prize is hard to resist. The problem is that scammers know this and use that excitement against you. Sometimes they pose as celebrities, other times as big brands you trust. In all cases, the prize is irresistible. All you have to do to claim your prize is to send a small fee to cover shipping or other processing costs. The goal is to get you to divulge your personal information and bank or credit card information.

Once you do, you never hear from the scammer again, and your only prize is identity theft or an empty bank account. The allure of a high-paying job opportunity might be hard to resist, especially when it comes without having to do anything yourself. But before you say yes to any unexpected offer, understand this is a common technique used by cybercriminals to extract personally identifying information from you. Unfortunately, this is all a clever criminal needs to steal your identity.

Instead of a job, you get a financial mess to clean up. Facebook has grown from a simple social network app to a robust e-commerce platform.

Businesses of all sizes maintain a page and regularly promote their goods and services via sponsored posts. Unfortunately, cybercriminals capitalize on the popularity of Facebook shopping, too, particularly with scam ads.

Scammers create fake brand accounts to push counterfeit goods. Instead, they take your money and disappear. When disaster strikes, it is human nature to want to help. For many, this means donating money. Fraudsters know this, and use crises to reap a quick payday. Usually, they ask you to pay via a PayPal account. Before you give a dime to any charity, take a few minutes to do a little research.

There are sites specifically designed for this purpose, including Charity Navigator , Guidestar , and Charity Watch. But these scams are anything but innocent. They are all designed to extract the kind of personal information many people use to create passwords or answer security questions for their online accounts.

From there, they can do a lot of different damage beyond simply taking over your Facebook account. You get a Facebook friend request from someone you swear you are already friends with. This is a favorite tactic by scammers, who replicate entire Facebook accounts to mimic a legitimate person.

When you accept a fake request, you give the scammer insider access to you, even if you have your Facebook account locked down.

They engage with you and use your trust to coax you into falling for their other scams, like a bogus link that installs malicious software on your device. Anyone on Facebook knows the sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you open a Facebook private message that claims to have a video of you. Is this you? The purpose? To get you to click on the video or link. Once it infects your computer, tablet, or smartphone, scammers have control and can spread malware to your friends and family.

Using this, one can find all the campaigns attached to the ad account connected to the pixel. For example, the Facebook pixel tells us that one of the other websites they were advertising is an ecommerce shop called "joynesse. Using the Facebook pixel, we can see that the scammers were still running ads on Facebook to their ecommerce stores as of the night of Oct. But, the most revealing information came from a crucial mistake that the scammers made while changing the settings around on Loni Mayse's Facebook Pages.

Not long after taking over Mayse's accounts, it appears as if the scammers were attempting to add their fake Loni Mayse profile as an editor to a different Facebook Page they ran. Instead, they mistakenly added Loni Mayse's real Facebook profile, revealing the other profiles that were running the page. The scammers appear to be based out of Vietnam.

When Mayse posted some information to her Facebook profile, one of her followers reached out. Nguyen Luan, a computer engineer based in Vietnam who is familiar with the scam says he's aware of the scam tactics because he runs legit ecommerce shops that have all but gone out of business as an effect of the grift.

Luan says he does not know these individuals personally. In a conversation with Mashable, Luan explained how these scammers often track what legit ecommerce shops are selling to see what's popular and then clone the websites and its products. Next, they target ad agency owners and use their hacked ad accounts and stolen funds attached to them to run high-priced Facebook ads.

The legit ecommerce shops cannot compete because the scammers are outbidding them on ads with this "free money. Are the scammers at least sending the unsuspecting buyers the product listed on their ecommerce site? That part is unclear. However, if they are, they are most likely selling cheap, scammy knockoff versions from dropshipping websites of the actual advertised item, a common tactic used in other Facebook scams.

The trend is going up and more people are doing this. They can't be caught or go to jail because they live outside the U.