Sunday, March 10, 2013

Beware of Fake Facebook Emails

Lately, I've been receiving an inordinate amount of phishing emails that look like they are coming from Facebook. I have 'new Facebook messages', my Facebook account 'has been suspended', I have a message from the 'Facebook IT department', Facebook 'Support' is emailing me, and I have Facebook 'notifications' waiting to check. I've already written a blog post about fake Facebook emails back in January but I've noticed a spike in how many I've been receiving lately.

All I can think is something must be working about these emails for scammers and a zillion of 'em have rushed into use this version of the phishing scam. I am actually getting probably 10-15 of these specific ones a day now. Geez.

My advice is to check your privacy settings and what you have enabled to be notified on and be VERY careful before you click on ANY button or link in ANY email notification, make sure it is not a phishing email. Better advice is to just never click on the links and button in these emails, but open a new browser window and log into Facebook yourself and see what messages you have there.

I'll paste an example below but there may be different variations. Just be wary of ALL of your Facebook notification emails.

(oh, and the buttons and links in this fake email actually take you to http://58.120.227.149/~hafis/dissenting.html?fbuserid=katiemoe   so notice how they are actually tracking me and my relationship to my facebook account if I DO click on anything - I'm guessing they will trick people into providing their password by presenting a fake 'log in again' page. But I'm NOT going to click on it to even find out for you. And you shouldn't try it either - who knows what terrible things can download in the background unbeknownst to you while you are staring at their fake page)

From: Facebook IT Department [hedquist@abraminterstate.com]
Subject: You have a new direct message from Facebook IT Department


facebook
You have a new message from Facebook IT Department.

Your profile is not configured.
View Notifications
Go to Facebook
This message was sent to katiemoe@xxxxx.xxx. If you don't want to receive these emails from Facebook in the future, please click: unsubscribe.
Facebook, Inc. Attention: Department 415 P.O Box 10005 Palo Alto CA 94303

Here's another one (the links and buttons this time go to:http://km.ur.ru/relics.html?fbuserid=katiemoe (do NOT click on this link!!!)

From: Facebook Technical Support [ablfm@stockpoint.com]
Subject: You have a new direct message from Facebook Technical Support

 facebook
You have a new message from Facebook Technical Support.

Your profile has been successfully updated.
View Notifications
Go to Facebook
This message was sent to katiemoe@xxxxx.xxx. If you don't want to receive these emails from Facebook in the future, please click: unsubscribe.
Facebook, Inc. Attention: Department 415 P.O Box 10005 Palo Alto CA 94303

2 comments:

  1. I have lots of these emails in an account that is not linked with facebook... be careful

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have been talking to a guy online, he is NOT a friend of mine on facebook. I noticed that part of our conversations were filtering through to my email address, with the PO Box 415 address underneath our conversation. I have clicked on the email BUT NOT clicked on the unsubscribe. I am aware I may lose my facebook page if I do. Does anyone know if this guy may be directly linked to this address.

    ReplyDelete