I was targeted by this scam the other day by a scam, and I noticed that several other writers I know almost fell for it.
Part of the reason it seemed real was that it popped up as a Facebook notification. When I clicked on the notification, I got this.
These scammers are trying to convince me they have some connection with Facebook or another cloud storage service and that I must immediately click on their sketchy link. There are other versions of the fake post, too.
These crooks tagged me and a bunch of other people in a post, so it would pop us as a notification.
I did a little investigating and found out that these scammers had hacked into an existing page and taken it over. They put in fake details saying they were authorized by Facebook’s parent company.
The page they hijacked started out as a thrift shop page I followed many years ago. I discovered this by checking the Page transparency. I clicked the three-dot icon at the top of the page for more info.
Then I selected Page transparency.
That’s where I discovered the page name had been changed.
As I searched for posts by these scammers, I discovered they had taken over dozens of inactive pages and merged them.
As always, be very cautious about any type of notification and think long and hard before you click.