Spotting A Facebook Fake In Under A Minute

I woke up last Sunday morning to see this Facebook post had been shared by several of my friends. It claimed to be a post by David Schwimmer, a star of the series “Friends,” that announced that the show was coming back for another season after being off the air for more than a decade.

friends-fake

In these days of TV reunions, it’s not completely improbable, right? Let’s use our fraud-detector skills for vetting Facebook posts. Has it been reported by any other news outlets? No. And it would be a pretty big story. Let’s check out this page for “David Schwimmer.”  Lots of red flags. Only two photos. And all 55,000 page likes happened within the last week. These are sure signs of a fake page.

https://i0.wp.com/imgsrv.worldstart.com/images/ct-images/2017/05/facebook-fake-signs.jpg?w=648

So, why make this up? It could be a practical joke. More likely it’s intended to get you to like the page so the owners can flood you with spam links and fraud. And I’d watch out for those links, because they’ll probably take you to malware-invested sites. Which is why I’m always on fake post patrol.

~ Cynthia

 

0 thoughts on “Spotting A Facebook Fake In Under A Minute

  1. Another big red flag on that story is that, on the page that offers it, David Schwimmer’s name is spelled “SCHWIMER”.

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