Fake Alert: Beware of Hoax Messages Asking for Your Details in Facebook’s Name

There are plenty of online hoaxes spreading through social media platforms and often these fake news peddlers identify themselves to be part of Facebook or WhatsApp. In the past we have debunked a few such posts which can be read here and here.

Recently we noticed a number of posts, which had tagged mostly verified Sri Lankan Facebook pages, requesting individual login details, citing security concerns. However, our investigation revealed that this was yet another hoax to get user details and had nothing to do with Facebook Inc.

Social Media Posts:

A Facebook paged called Pσlice service page Vèrificatiσn tagged a number of verified Sri Lankan Facebook pages, individually requesting them to verify their Facebook accounts for security concerns. Factcrescendo – Sri Lanka also was also tagged in one such post as seen below.

“Your Page Factcrescendo – Sri Lanka has been detected for activity that violates Facebook's Page Policy regarding copyright infringement. For security reasons, verify your account by clicking the link below.

⇨ https://sites.google.com/view/1ilki9vjpsoluq7ne6bncpzyyornaq

If you do not confirm, you will not be able to manage your Pages and your account will be disabled. Thank you for helping us improve the way we keep Facebook safe.

Facebook Security Team”

Below is a screenshot of the tagged message published on 25^th of December 2020 (25.12.2020)

Facebook Link | Archived Link

We noticed several other verified pages had been tagged with same message as seen below.

Fact Check

First, we noticed that the website link provided along with the Facebook page post that does not belong to Facebook.

We inspected the link they had provided, requesting to verify Facebook accounts, and noticed that it was a free website builder provided by Google, that allows anyone to create free web pages using sites.google.com .

When we clicked on the link, and it was redirected to an external website as seen below.

We proceeded further clicking the continue button. A login form appeared which was developed similar to the Facebook’s official login along with a banner, which read “Confirmation Your Account to Avoid Blocking” as seen below.

The URL for the above is https://police-improvement.my.id, which is not part of official Facebook domain. Official Facebook subdomains should end with facebook.com, which is a clear indication that this is a hoax.

We urge our readers not to proceed further and enter your details on such unverified sites, which are probably data collection websites, which would store your private details and eventually use this data against you.

For verification purposes only, we proceeded, entering bogus details and landed with the below screen which requested full name and date of birth.

After we filling these detail and submitting a message popped up saying, “You have met the security requirements and we will direct you to the main page”

After this step page, there is an automatic redirect to official Facebook’s Terms of Service ; trying to give the impression to users, they were following the official Facebook workflow.

We would like to reiterate users not to fall for such frauds, and to never provide personal information for such causes.

Below is the link to Facebook Page Quality and how it works, notifying authorized personnel of each page if there are any violations related to Facebook's Community Standards.

What is Facebook Page Quality and how does it work?

Conclusion:

From our more investigation, we can confirm that Facebook will notify each page individually if there are any violations and not in public page posts or via email as in the case of these hoax messages.