Fake Facebook alerts hit social media accounts

Central Florida woman receives bogus warning

Dee Lucas spent hundreds of hours as an IT specialist handling malware and other computer viruses in the U.K., but the Facebook alert she received on Jan. 2 nearly fooled her.

“It just popped up at the bottom like a chat message, ” Lucas told WKMG News 6.

Lucas, who now lives in the Central Florida area with her family, said the message opened with a three-word sentence: “Warning disabled account.”

While the first line was specific, the rest of the message was vague at best, reading in part:  “Our system has received a report about something that is against our community standards.”

"I thought, 'Oh no, what have I done?' because I spend a lot of time on Facebook and I thought I had done something to cross the line,” Lucas said.

Facebook’s community standards are real, but the alert wasn’t.

When she checked the message and the links attached to it, Lucas realized something wasn’t right.

“I spotted these mistakes,” she said.

The mistakes included missing words, grammatical errors and a URL address for Google that took her to what appeared to be a Facebook page complete with logo.

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The message on that page was brief and to the point: "Your account will be disabled. Please verify your account.”

She didn’t go any further, convinced she would be opening the door to a computer virus or old-fashioned identity theft.

Lucas discovered two friends still living in the U.K. received an identical message and that one of them was hacked.

“So many people are being scammed for their money or they’re losing all of their data. It just has to stop,” she said.

For more information about Facebook community standards and scams, visit:

www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2015/03/17/facebook-community-standards
http://facecrooks.com/Scam-Watch/beware-of-socially-engineered-phishing-attacks-on-facebook.html


About the Author:

News 6’s Emmy Award-winning Investigative Reporter Mike Holfeld has made Central Florida history with major investigations that have led to new policies, legislative proposals and even -- state and national laws. If you have an issue or story idea, call Mike's office at 407-521-1322.