astolarz

Lately I've been seeing a bunch of posts from compromised accounts on Facebook composed of an inner and outer post, with the outer post stating something like "I can't believe he's gone <emoji><emoji>" and the inner post being a link to what is obviously a scam site with an image made to look like a YouTube screenshot for a local news report about a tragic vehicle accident.

This simple pattern alone should be simple enough for Facebook to shut down immediately, yet not only does it continue but every time I report it Facebook claims it does not violate their community standards (usually a week or two after the initial report). Until recently, where the posts are deleted before Facebook's slow process gets around to actually looking at it.

Because of Facebook's complete inaction in this case, I've mostly just resigned to commenting "DO NOT CLICK" on these posts. On one such occasion, I got a response from one of the account owner's friends that mentioned that it doesn't show up on their timeline. That didn't immediately register with me as being any more suspicious than the rest of the post, but eventually I realized that all these posts are marked as public. So I went to this person's public profile (of whom I am not a friend) and was not able to find this recent "public" post. Both the inner and outer posts are marked as worldly public, posted March 14, 2024, yet the most recent public post on their profile is from October 2017 (logged into my own account, in a private window I can't even view their account).

This is either a security flaw or exploit that is being used to attack Facebook users and needs to be addressed ASAP.

Ive seen these obvious fraud/phishing attacks posted on Facebook so much in the past few weeks. I report them every time. Every time Facebook responds (presumably through some automated system) that it doesn't violate their community standards, so I request another review. I know it will be denied again, but I mostly do it out of spite. So I've taken to posting links to these posts in comments on posts on Facebook's company pages. My comments calling them out on their complete disregard for their users' safety then get removed because they're "spam" or "trying to get likes". It's absolutely ridiculous.

The posts in question are almost always the same format: User A sharing post X to User B with the comment "I can't believe he is gone, i'm gonna miss him so much " (sometimes the emoji will be different). This post tags a bunch of other users. Post X is a link to a shady URL with a fake thumbnail that looks like a YouTube thumbnail for a news report of a fatal car accident. I assume that clicking the link will compromise your own account and spread the message further, along with who knows what other malicious actions.