I'm embarrassed to admit this, but for a while today I was taken in by this (now) obvious Facebook scam.
My excuse is that I did indeed purchase a Facebook ad/promotion last weekend to support a petition asking the Salem City Council to include in an upcoming $300 million bond measure the Salem Bike Vision proposal for spending $10 million to build a network of protected bike lanes.
(Sign the petition! If you're reading this before August 2022.)
So my eye was caught by "your ad has been reported," since some commenters on my Facebook post are crazily anti-bicycle, and it wasn't absurd to think that someone could have made up a copyright violation just to irritate me.
Somehow I missed several obvious signs in the email below: (1) Facebook wouldn't start off with a "Hello Dear," since Facebook and I aren't that intimate; (2) It isn't "Menlos Park," its "Menlo Park"; and (3) The nine-digit zip code is all run together, rather than having a hyphen.
But I clicked the link anyway unthinkingly, which led me to this scam'y language.The so-called Copyright Feedback Form didn't ask for anything very confidential. I supplied my email address, which is on my three blogs and, I believe, on my three Facebook pages. It was the next scam link I was led to that, thankfully, raised my inner alarm bell to full alert.
It asked for my Facebook password. Sometimes Facebook does this, but only when I'm trying to make a change to my privacy/security settings, or something like that.
I belatedly Googled "Facebook copyright scam" and was met with a bunch of warnings about this. Here's an example.
When I went back to the scam link to get another screenshot for this cautionary blog post, I was stopped by a warning that must have come from the Safari web browser that I use. So good for Apple, though I wish the warning had appeared earlier.
Bottom line: though this should be obvious, I'll say it anyway, since in this case I didn't follow my own advice. Never click on a link in an email from Facebook, even if the message seems genuine. Log in to your Facebook account and check that way to see if there's a problem.
Comments