If you manage a Facebook page, then there’s a good chance that you’ve received messages from what might appear to be from Facebook saying that your page has some sort of violation. In the past week or two the amount of messages that are being sent appears to have increased–so much so that some who manage Facebook pages are getting dozens of these messages every single day. Here’s an example of one of the messages, from some account named “Guest 8568”:
! Meta Business Support Center: You need to confirm that this page belongs to you and is being used normally. Because a third party has reported that you offer goods and/or advertise sales violates they trademark rights:
Please confirm your account here: XXXXX (redacted)
After 24 hours of not receiving a response, we will temporarily lock this page.
Meta Support (c)2024
Automatic notification __ Please contact immediately)
I’ve been reviewing a lot of these messages that have graciously been sent to me by various Facebook contacts that I have, and all of these messages appear to be some sort of phishing attempt to “confirm your account” or get the receiver to click on a link.
These messages should be ignored and deleted. The increase in the amount of these messages being sent to pages has been rather annoying, and as Bryan Eisenberg (https://www.bryaneisenberg.com/) told me, “it’s so obnoxious that they can’t resolve this.” I, like many others who manage Facebook pages for clients, are getting questions from clients asking if the messages are real and or if it’s some sort of spam. It’s 100 percent spam and phishing attempts–and it’s gotten to be a very big problem. For example, some are receiving dozens of these messages a day.
I reached out on Facebook to see if anyone else has been getting these phishing and spam messages, and it seems that I’m not the only one:
Pierre Zarokian told me, “This issue has been going on for months for some of the pages I manage. Just got 3 today on this account. Yesterday I deleted a bunch…” He also said that “I manage over a dozen company pages and 30+ groups. Not everyone is getting these. I have 3 non-profit organizations, and they are all getting the messages almost daily.”
Navah Hopkins from Optmyzr provided me with this screen capture of a message that was sent:
Even the DFWSEM organization that I co-founded back in 2004 is getting hit with a lot of this phishing spam:
Scott Fish, from 32digital.com told me, “We manage it of pages for non profit organizations and many organizations have their social media managed by members, Board members or volunteers. Since many of those helping the non profit are not primarily social media mangers, these phishing scams can be exceedingly dangerous. There is often a high level of concern when these messages come in and they can alarm many in the non profit unnecessarily.”
Leo Kobes told me that “It is going worldwide. Germany, Holland, Austria, Italien and so on”.
Chris Boggs said, “The next stage after this is they give the page a bad review, which causes you to go have to block them manually.”
Steve Gerencser said, “my clients are getting hammered with these, especially on Messenger. Fortunately they called me first and I told them to just report every post they get like this. I think that it’s funny that they stopped using names and just use Guest now.”
Andrew Girdwood told me that “They’re driving me up the wall – I have so many FB pages (either my own or clients).
Liam Lally told me that it’s an “absolute nightmare”.
It’s clear, after seeing so many of these messages that have been sent to me today, that some inboxes are being flooded with these messages. Here are a few examples:
Tory Smith said, “I manage two pages for cover bands (80sGadgets.com and 90proofcountry.com) and I am getting at least a doze, per page, every day now!!”
One of the issues is that this Facebook messenger spam has been going for at least 4 years, according to Joe Youngblood: Someone is Messaging Facebook Pages Claiming They Have Violated Facebook’s Content Policy – It Is A Scam
I’ve seen several different domain names being used for this spam, such as:
help-desk-information.com
fyp.bio
vercel.app
push.fm
take.app
ltx.bio
meta-11-2024.com
socialbuzz.com
take.app
c8ke.com
rebrand.ly (a url shortener website)
bio.to
me-qr.com (this is a qr code generator website)
affiliatemanagerhelp.com
pages.net.br
linkbio.co
That’s one of the “big red flags” here–if there are links to OTHER domain names, other websites, you should not click on those links. Keep in mind that some of the messages (see the bottom of this post for examples) are actually linking to a Facebook post, so you need to be careful about clicking on links in Facebook posts as well.
At this point, the only thing you can do, if you receive these messages, is to report them as spam and delete them. I’d like to thank everyone who has sent me examples of these messages that they’ve received in the past 24 hours or so:
Lisa Stauber – MarketingRefresh.com
Iulian Ghi?oiu – TargetWeb.Ro
Jim Boykin – InternetMarketingNinjas.com
Shawn Shepard – flowerfieldsflorist.com
Malcom Chakery – Chakery.com
Liam Lally – https://www.facebook.com/do.lally1
Andrew Molz – MonsterAgency.com
Jon Lee Clark – jon-lee-clark.com
Guerin Green – NorthDenverNews.com
Jason Hennessey – Hennessey.com
Bill Berniece – HighPayingAffiliatePrograms.com
Casey Watkins – DFWSEM
Ben Maden – MatterSolutions.com.au
Here’s just a sample of the screen captures I’ve received today that show how large a problem this really is currently: