Millions of people around the world use Facebook every day to share photos, videos and stories from their lives, and to keep in touch with friends and family. Online scammers use Facebook as a means to target these people and trick them into giving out of their personal information and money. Facebook scams are adaptable to the growing trends of the social media platform and are constantly changing.
In recent years, Facebook has also become a popular place for businesses to create their own Facebook pages to share updates and increase their online brand presence. Business Facebook pages often have a large following of people and because of this, they have become the target of one of the latest Facebook scams – stealing admin access to these pages.
How Does The Scam Work?
The way that the scam seems to work is that someone creates a fake account posing to be someone important, or from a legitimate brand or business. They will reach out to your business page offering payment to include posts on your page so that they can reach your followers.
Once the scammer has enticed you with a promise of payment for every post they make on your page, they will convince you that in order for it to work, you need to give them admin access to your page. Once you have given them admin access, they will remove your access and change the login details. They will then completely take over your page by changing the name and all of the content in order to reach your followers with the content of their own.
How Can You Get Your Page Back?
Reporting the scam to Facebook and getting your page back can be an extremely challenging and lengthy process as Facebook does not have a direct place to report such a scam, nor do they have a smooth process in place to resolve the issue quickly. Facebook security is only concerned about the actual content that gets shared on their site, and so the only way to get your page back is to report the page to Facebook and explain the situation. Simply reporting the page can be risky as you do not want the entire page to be deleted and risk having to start your page up from scratch.
Once you have managed to get in contact with someone from Facebook and explained the situation you will then need to prove that you own the business in order to get the page back. During this time, you could be losing existing followers due to the content that is being posted, which could also be hurting your reputation.
How To Avoid Falling For The Scam
Do Your Research
The first step in preparing yourself from falling for a scam like this is to be able to spot a fake Facebook account. There are so many people that use the internet to pretend to be someone they’re not so it is important to be able to identify who is fake and who is not. If someone has reached out to you on social media regarding a business deal that interests you, search their name in Google and see what comes up. You can also suggest having a conversation via Skype so that you can verify who it is you’re actually speaking to.
It is simply never a good idea to share your password or login details with ANYONE let alone a stranger on the internet. Making sure you use different or randomized passwords for all of your online accounts is also important in case someone does gain access to your password. You can make use of a safe password manager which encrypts and remembers all of your passwords for you, for extra security.
Be Cautious
Since Facebook has become an increasingly popular place for scammers, it is a good idea to be cautious and vigilant. “Get rich quick,” schemes are scams 99.9% of the time, and so it is best to always be cautious of someone reaching out to you via social media offering you money.
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Facebook and other forms of social media can be a great place to boost your business, however, there will always be internet trolls with bad intentions. Stay vigilant and continue to check our page to keep yourself informed of any new scams on the horizon.