A phishing scam claiming “Your Post Goes Against Our Community Standards So Only You Can See”, tags Irish political parties, media, businesses and others, to make them click on a phishing link.
An insidious scam, which leads users to believe something on their Facebook page goes against community standards is tagging various Irish Facebook pages including,
Political parties – Fianna Fáil, Éirígí or Senator Fiona O’Loughlin
Media – Eir Sport, Entertainment.ie, Dublin Inquirer, Galway Bay FM or Cork’s Echo Live
Business – Ford Ireland, Gala Retail, Estrella Galicia Ireland
Other pages to be targeted – Embassy & Consulates of Ireland USA, Embassy of Mexico in Ireland, Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Epilepsy Ireland, Fingal County Council, Dublin Horse Show, Galway Comedy Festival, and many others.
The scam tricks users or page admins by appearing in the Facebook notifications, because their pages were tagged, mimicking an alert from Facebook regarding a breach of community standards, which can restrict visibility of a page.
Clicking the alert opens a full message, which claims that the page is breaking Facebook’s terms and conditions by “uploading 18+ content, using copyrighted video or music, or abusing and insulting” which resulted in “the page being restricted from others to see”.
The page then offers the users to submit the page for review with a sentence in bad English “If you think we restricted by mistakenly you can submit the request for review” by clicking a (malicious) link.
The scam tries to motivate victims to act without thinking by using an appeal to urgency, claiming if the user doesn’t “request a review” in 48 hours, their page will be permanently deleted.
Scams like these have been around for a while and the link usually leads to a phishing page which asks the user to complete a form, which requires them to enter their Facebook login details, password, email, telephone number and other details, which the scammers can then use to hijack the victims’ pages or use for other scams.
What to do if you are targeted by a Phishing scam?
- Look for obvious signs of scams, such as bad spelling, unusual fonts, appeals to urgency.
- Do not click the link!
- If you’ve already clicked the link, do not fill out any forms and close the page.
- If you’ve filled out the forms, but realised your mistake quickly enough and your page has not been hijacked immediately, change all your passwords and make sure you enable two factor authentication for an extra layer of safety
- Report the phishing scam to Facebook and warn others about it.
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Source: ESET
